Stiffelio

Suddenly coming upon a new one—Stiffelio—makes you notice what odd things Verdi operas are. Maybe this is a special case—an opera that is odd only because it is new to us, and new to us only because it was judged odd in the past—but that is not the whole story. Certainly Stiffelio is strangely formed in ways that are particular to it: the central character engages directly with the audience hardly at all, being heard mostly in duets and ensembles; his wife's lover, who would be the clearcut villain of a more conventional tale, lives in the shadows; the orchestra is full of bizarre notions. But one could point to features just as outlandish in La Traviata. Verdi made an art out of dealing roughly with his material and with his chosen genre: trying the untried, not disguising the carpentry. This strikes us in Stiffelio because we are not prepared by familiarity.

Indeed, nobody at the opening of the Met's new production can have been entirely prepared for what we were hearing and seeing, since this was effectively the world premiere of the score Verdi wrote in the summer and fall of 1850. When that score was first produced, at Trieste, the libretto was stymied by censorship (unsurprisingly, given that it is set in Austria and puts clerics, albeit Protestant clerics, on the singing stage), and in revivals the minister Stiffelio became a German prime minister, necessitating the new title of Guglielmo Wellingrode.