Search - Verdi - Giovanna d'Arco / Susan Dunn, Vincenzo La Scola, Renato Bruson, Pietro Spagnoli, Riccardo Chailly, Bologna Opera on DVD

Great music, bad libretto, oft-adequate production...

Scott Andrew Hutchins | Bronx, NY, USA | 07/31/2008

(4 out of 5 stars)

"As far as the opera, which was new to me, goes, I loved the music, as I

typically do with Verdi, as it's very much in his distinctive

alternately bouncy and dark style, but it's the epitome of bad libretti

(Temistocle Solfera) to the extent that Giacomo D'Arco does the

play-by-play of his daughter's battles, which we never see (which

doesn't work for exactly the same reason Violetta telling us about

Alfredo and Douphol's duel does), and rather than being burned (which

one especially expects, since she wears the underwear-looking garb that

Brunnhilde wears after the armor comes off to the finale of the Ring

cycle where she burns) she is killed in action, but of course, she

wakes up long enough to sing a final aria. It's pretty static, but it

gets better as it goes along. The story is not what we would really

expect it to be, although we have Giovanna and her voices, and we have

her father Giacomo who is convinced that he voices are evil, much of

what appears on stage is Charles V trying to romance Giovanna, and when

that fails, still singing her praises as a warrior and the greatest

hero of France.



It kind of surprises me that the quote on the box credits Werner Herzog

for the "success" of this production. It's only a couple of steps above

Jonathan Miller's Clemenza di Tito for being static and uneventful, and

for all Werner Herzog's criticisms about "inadequate images" in our

society (of which an Egg McMuffin advertisement seems to be his

favorite example), strong images are few and far between, though the

very last one is indeed amazing. Herzog comes out for the curtain call,

but evidently he didn't really want people to see him, since it cuts

away to a long shot as soon as he emerges, but I know well what he

looks like and recognized him instantly.



I think it's actually Susan Dunn as Giovanna who carries the

production,--she always seems to be in her situation, while Vincenzo de

Scola as Charles V is all about his glorious voice and isn't much of an

actor.



The costuming has the chorus in tall and colorful masks full of

pageantry but looking rather druidic, except for a whole mass of

choristers in yellow masks and green who look like homages to Iron

Fist, a lesser-known Marvel superhero. Although the removal of armor is

an important image in the opera, we never see Giovanna put on or take

off any armor, and she wears the nightgown-like costume and socks

throughout, and the armor involves other characters.



Herzog first involved opera in his films with _Fitzcarraldo_ (which is

about a guy who goes into the rubber business to build an opera house

in the Amazon and try to attract Caruso to it), and there he hired a

supposed expert to stage the opera at the beginning, and it is more

over the top than any opera I've ever seen either live or on video

(maybe because that's how they performed them in 1906, but he cast a

man in drag as Sarah Bernhardt and has characters complaining that she

is an actor not a singer cast in the opera for commercial reasons, even

though according to the credits, we're hearing actual recordings of her

singing, which sounds fine to me). I've been told that the Met wrote a

speaking part for Bea Arthur in _Daughter of the Regiment_ for

commercial reasons, by the way. I wouldn't think she would be that big

a draw, but whatever. Perhaps this paragraph is too much of a

digression, but Herzog fans may well be disappointed. While it doesn't

look ridiculous the way the operas at the beginning and end of

_Fitzcarraldo_ look, aside from a few frissons, particularly at the

end, and the stage littered with corpses even in romantic moments (one

blinks, while some look sculptural), there is little here that Herzog

fans will find particularly interesting. Indeed, _Invincible_ is more

characteristically Herzog than this.



The worst part of all is that I was constantly taken out of it by the

LPCM stereo, which is not in sync with the visuals--a Hollywood musical

with a canned soundtrack has better lip sync than this stage production

(and I watched Brigadoon last week, so I have a recent comparison--I

also saw the TV version of Gypsy 2 weeks ago and it looked and sounded

like the singing was done live on set). This is also a problem on the

Met's Ring Cycle DVD (particularly ludicrous at the beginning of

Siegfried when Mime hits the anvil and the sound is completely

dissociated), but that gives you a Dolby alternative that is in sync

with the visuals. With this one, you're stuck with it. I'm going to

post on my film lists to see if that's an equipment issue.



Despite the interest of Herzog as director, I think I'm going to go

with an audio-only recording next time I want to experience this opera.

While it seems to have potential for exciting staging (though given

Giacomo's big aria in Act III it might be somewhat redundant based on

the text), Herzog was probably just too new to opera (indeed, he

co-directed both the stage production and the video) to really

contribute as much to it as he may have liked, or at least as much as

his fans would have liked."