Why imperfect operas like Don Carlo are more interesting than perfect ones

In the 62 years since I first heard and saw Don Carlo, in the famous and long-lasting production by Visconti at the Royal Opera, my feelings about it have grown ever stronger, both in passionate attachment and in critique. Imperfect operas, like other imperfect phenomena, can be more interesting than perfect ones, because they’re more thought-provoking, more enticing.

The libretto, very freely based on Schiller’s play, was by two Frenchmen, and Verdi, eager to make a bigger splash than he had so far in Paris, made too much of one. The first performance, in 1867, ran so late that the members who lived outside central Paris missed their last trains, which were at 12.35 a.m. (Royal Opera and ENO: please take note).

Verdi returned to Italy, and the opera seems to have been ignored — apart from oddly cut performances — until 1884. Given how great much of it is, and how much effort had gone into it, that is astounding. In 1884 Verdi revised it, cut the whole of Act I and lots more besides, and it was successfully staged at La Scala.

The cast is strong, though Thomas Hampson as Rodrigo seems to have borrowed a wig from Susan Sontag

That was by no means the end of his messing around, and so there are four versions, though each is still subject to extensive tinkering. Perhaps the most remarkable thing in its tortured history is that in 1970 Andrew Porter, the great English critic, discovered in the library of the Opéra the score of the first performance, with many pages stuck together. Porter slowly and painfully unglued them, and copied out what he found, which was a great deal. What had always been a problematic work became radically unwieldy, though he found some marvellous music, some of which is now regularly included.