Why I Love ‘Don Carlos’
Perhaps the one aria I have been singing longer than any other is “Ella giammai m’amo” (She never loved me) from Giuseppe Verdi’s great opera, ‘Don Carlos’. I sang it to win the Moonie Memorial Singing Prize at George Watson’s College in Edinburgh in 1971, and then sang it at my first singing lesson with Joan Busby in 1972. I sang it in concerts in St Andrews University, and to pass my audition to the Guildhall School of Music in 1978. I sang it to gain my contract as a company bass with Scottish Opera in 1982, and 10 years later, in French (“Elle ne m’aime pas”) to get a role at the Opéra de Paris at the Bastille. I have sung it to get roles in the 21st century and have continued to sing it in concerts ever since. However, and you knew there would be a “however”, I have never sung the role of King Philip on stage, much to my regret. I must say, also, that I am somewhat ashamed that I actually sang it all those years ago, because it must have been pretty awful! One of the great arias of the operatic canon, arguably the finest bass aria ever written, sung by a fifteen year old boy with limited Italian; it cannot have been much good. It was matched at the time only by my decision to sing Iago’s Credo, from Verdi’s ‘Otello’, at a Shakespeare Evening, organised by George Watson’s Ladies College Literary Club, in 1972. This is a baritone aria, very powerful and dramatic, rising to a big top F sharp towards the end, a note I was not sure I possessed! However, and this is a better however, I know of several now mature ladies who still remember that night in George Square, Edinburgh, and it was an evening to savour, as I realised that my singing gave me a certain appeal to girls, a power of which I had hitherto been entirely unaware!
I wrote, previously, about my love for Wagner’s ‘Parsifal’, and now I would like to examine in more depth, ‘Don Carlos’, this work of Verdi’s maturity, arguably his finest before ‘Aida’, ‘Otello’ and ‘Falstaff’. Premiered in Paris in March 1867, in a five act version in French, it underwent multiple changes and variations, and there is still no consensus on the definitive version of the opera. What is unarguable is that it contains some of Verdi’s greatest music, and is a hugely satisfying piece of theatre, mixing history with romance, love with hate, and cruelty with compassion. Several of the roles are psychologically challenging and require seriously good singing actors to bring these characters to life. All the major voice types are catered for (indeed there are three bass roles – a rare luxury), and each one has an aria or two which define that particular voice. I just love it!
As I mentioned in my EMR article about Verdi, it is fascinating to see where Verdi premieres took place, as he was often commissioned to write for slightly obscure venues: ‘Aida’ in Cairo, ‘La Forza del Destino’ in St Petersburg and ‘Rigoletto’ in La Fenice, Venice (not one of the Italian powerhouse theatres at the time) are but three of the more unusual places for Verdi opening nights. ‘Don Carlos’ was commissioned and produced by the Théatre Impérial de l’Opéra in Paris, and was played in the Salle le Peletier, which had been opened in 1821 and was the home of the Paris Opera at that time. Like many contemporary theatres, it was destroyed by fire in 1873 but construction had already begun on a new theatre, designed by Charles Garnier, which opened in 1875 as the Palais Garnier, home to the Opéra de Paris for a hundred years.
Originally conceived as a five act opera, with a libretto by Joseph Méry and Camille du Locle, it was based on the 1787 play, ‘Don Karlos, Infant von Spanien’ by the great Friedrich Schiller, premiered in Hamburg. Schiller’s genius was to write a historical drama, based on real characters from history, plagued by jealousy and megalomania, and bound up neatly by religion and politics.
Verdi loved the challenge of turning this deeply complex drama into an opera, even if, following the French convention of the time, he had to insert a grand ballet into the middle of it! This ballet, with no connection to the story, involves a fisherman who defies a goddess to capture a rare pearl, la Peregrina. This was an actual pearl, originally owned by Phillip II, then by Emperor Napoleon III and eventually by Elisabeth Taylor!
It must have been agonising for Verdi, that great man of the theatre, to have to hold up the action to allow the French audience to have their ballet, and indeed, right from the beginning, it was clear that the opera was far too long. Another stipulation, as well as a ballet, was that the opera must be finished by midnight, to allow the Parisians time to get their trains home to the suburbs. This problem of having too much material plagued Verdi for the rest of his career and resulted in the existence of four separate versions of the opera, in two languages, French and Italian. The first act of the five act work, the so-called ‘Fontainebleau Act’, contains some lovely music, including the only actual aria for the tenor, Don Carlos, but I find it unnecessary, and I am not alone. My personal preference is for the four act version in Italian that Verdi made for La Scala, Milan in 1884. It involves doing your homework before the opera begins, and working out who loves whom, but I find it more satisfying. For me, Verdi wrote best in Italian and I feel his music sounds more idiomatic in that language.
Bizarrely, the only time I sang in ‘Don Carlos’, it was in English translation at the London Coliseum with ENO, in the production by David Pountney, conducted by Mark Elder. It doesn’t sound great in English, but, as I have written elsewhere, in my article about opera in translation, we did have the benefit of working with Mark Elder, who is the best in the business in getting singers to sing clearly and idiomatically in our language. It is something that is far too rarely discussed, and I would welcome a push by the music colleges in Britain to teach this skill. There are classes in various foreign languages, classes in art songs in French and German, and classes in baroque style, but, in my experience, nothing much about singing in English. It’s a very difficult language to sing in, with its many diphthongs, and unstressed or overstressed syllables, and its plethora of unwritten rules. Non-English speaking singers regularly come to grief trying to sing Britten or Purcell, and when it comes to English translations of standard operas by French, German, Italian and Russian composers, it can be embarrassing. When I sang at ENO back in the late 80s and early 90s, all the singers were native speakers, but still had to work hard with Mark on diction, particularly in that huge theatre, the Coliseum. Nowadays, with many non-native speakers, the diction is often shockingly bad, and no one seems to care. In the early and middle years of the 20th century, English diction was as stilted and unnatural as the voices we heard on the BBC. People were expected to pronounce as if in Italian, with rolled Rs and overstressed syllables everywhere. Nowadays, it all sounds far too vague and slovenly, often Americanised with a drawl or with stresses on the wrong syllables. This may well be the ranting of an older white male, but, damn it, I’m right! We need to think clearly and precisely about our diction in every language, and not assume that the sung language is the same as the spoken language. This applies in equal measure when singing in Scots. It’s not good enough, as some singers do, just to sing in English with a bit of “och aye” here and there, or with a sprinkling of Scotty from Star Trek. Every language deserves to be treated equally and seriously.
Singing ‘Don Carlos’ in English was a challenge, but we all worked hard at it. I was cast as one of the Flemish deputies, who plead with King Philip to spare their countrymen from the wrath of the Spanish Inquisition and colonial rule. This is in the great scene of the auto da fe (an addition to Schiller’s play from a contemporary French play by Eugène Cormon in 1846), one of Verdi’s most brilliant scenes. Set against a grand spectacle of the public burning of heretics, private lives and revolutionary politics come to the fore among the main characters. Verdi was a genius at revealing the conflicts at the heart of the human experience, often in the context of a public event, and this scene, with its grizzly end when the bonfire of heretics is lit to the acclaim of the crowd, is a fabulous example.
We were lucky in that show to have the wonderful Gwynne Howell singing Philip, one of the finest singers Wales has produced, possessed of one of the most beautiful, mellifluous bass voices I have heard. I was lucky enough to sing frequently with Gwynne, and to learn from him. On a couple of occasions, however, he lost his voice, and so several singers moved up a role in the opera. Richard van Allan, who had been singing the Inquisitor, stepped up to sing Philip, and I moved from the Flemish deputy to the Inquisitor. Thus, I was able to sing, in London’s West End, at the Coliseum, one of the greatest scenes in all opera, the confrontation between King Philip and the Grand Inquisitor. Philip has just sung the great aria I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, “Ella giammai m’amo”, in which he laments how he has lost the love of his wife to his own son (don’t ask – long story), and, as if things couldn’t get much worse, the ancient, blind Inquisitor arrives, claiming the life of the radical Marquis of Posa (the baritone), and warning the king against his own son, Don Carlos. With music of enormous power, starting in the depths of the double basses, Verdi has written a scene which lays bare all the intrigues of state and religion which tore Europe apart in the 16th century. Two bass singers in a vocal and intellectual combat unparalleled in opera go at each other for 10 minutes of magnificent drama. I enjoyed working with Richard van Allan enormously. He was a stalwart of both Covent Garden and ENO, singing numerous roles, always with a keen sense of theatre, and was also famous as a 30 a day smoker of untipped cigarettes!
‘Don Carlos’ has superb roles for mezzo (Princess Eboli) and baritone (Posa). Her aria, “O don fatale” (Oh fatal gift of beauty) is, in the right hands, a show-stopper. I remember the brilliant American mezzo, Shirley Verrett singing the role at Covent Garden in the 70s – utterly brilliant. Posa is a wonderful role for a lyric baritone, with an especially poignant dying aria, in which the cadence at the end is finished by the orchestra, after he dies on the penultimate note! Elisabeth de Valois (soprano) is a daunting role, but hugely satisfying, and Don Carlos himself is a superb tenor role, with some moments of sublime beauty in the orchestration. Even the third bass has a nice little cameo at the beginning and the end, as the ghostly monk, who may be Philip’s father, Charles V (don’t ask?)
As well as being on stage with both Gwynne and Richard at ENO, I was lucky enough to see the great Bulgarian bass, Boris Christoff, singing Philip at Covent Garden, in a famous old production, accompanied by two Irish wolfhounds. He was magnificent, haughty, power-mad but lost in love, terrifying in his scenes with Posa and the Inquisitor, racked with sorrow and guilt in his solo scenes. It was old school acting, but utterly convincing.
Since there are so many versions, there is a staggering choice of recordings, but in my opinion no clear winner. I think you need to have two or three. Now, I know that this seems terribly old fashioned, that you can use Spotify or something similar just to listen to any recording you want, at any time. However, I do really believe that you need to own/possess a recording, handle it, look at the booklet, change discs etc, to get a real feel for that version. For me, just adding it to a playlist with no extra information, and no commitment to that recording, short-changes you. I do feel that you have to commit to listening over and over again, especially if you are going to have several versions. I own three recordings of ‘Don Carlos’ and dip into them from time to time. I have the Karajan recording of the 4 Act Opera in Italian from 1978 – a young virile Carreras, a slightly over parted but gorgeous Mirella Freni, a splendid Eboli from Agnes Baltsa, a wonderful Posa from Piero Cappucilli, and simply the best Philip from Nicolai Ghiaurov (with Raimondi a powerful Inquisistor). Next comes the Five act French (ish) version from Giulini with Domingo, Caballe, Verrett, Milnes and Raimondi, great conducting, fine if unidiomatic singing. Finally, the live Covent Garden set from 1958, with Giulini again conducting, with Vickers, Brouwenstijn, Barbieri, Gobbi and Christoff, old school but magnificent. This was the production by Visconti that I saw at Covent Garden 20 years later, with the wolfhounds!
I do hope that this article has whetted your appetite to see, or at least hear, ‘Don Carlos’, one of the greatest operas of all.
