Lyric Opera 2019-2020 Issue 3 Luisa Miller

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 31 Luisa Miller is one of Verdi’s great heroines. She is not one of the subtle, complex women we find in his later operas. She is a simple girl, but a girl of enormous strength. Luisa Miller is considered a transitional piece for Verdi – it came before Rigoletto , Traviata and his other “greatest hits” – but the music has tremendous force and color. I’m always very happy to have a chance to revisit it. I find that the characters in earlier Verdi are very sharp and strong, which makes them exciting to play. Luisa’s feelings for Rodolfo will not be shaken, and her love for her father is even more fierce. Verdi was drawn over and over to these intense father-daughter relationships, but Luisa stands apart in her willingness to fight for her father, to make the ultimate sacrifice. Of course, Verdi and Cammarano, his librettist, did not invent Luisa out of whole cloth. The opera was based on a play, Kabale und Liebe (“Intrigue and Love”), by Friedrich von Schiller, who’s often called the German Shakespeare. His plays inspired so many operas, including Verdi’s Don Carlos and I masnadieri . Schiller was a playwright, poet and philosopher. He believed the theater had a vital role in shaping the world we live in, not by showing some kind of utopian dream of how we should live, but rather by forcing us to confront society’s problems. In his essay “On the Theater as a Moral Institution,” Schiller wrote, “Where the influence of civil law ends, that of the stage begins. Where venality and corruption blind and bias justice and judgement, and intimidation perverts its ends, the stage seizes the sword and scales and pronounces a terrible verdict on vice. The fields of fancy and of history are open to the stage; great criminals of the past live over again in the drama, and thus benefit an indignant posterity. They pass before us as empty shadows of their age, and we heap curses on their memory while we enjoy on the stage the very horror of their crimes. When morality is no more taught, religion no longer received, nor laws exist, Medea would still terrify us…Sight is always more powerful to man than description; hence the stage acts more powerfully than morality or law.” In Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe , we see vice and venality most clearly in the character of Wurm, but I believe the creators are also making a larger statement about class in our society, about the cavalier way in which Luisa is ultimately destroyed. Wurm, the villain, is interesting because he’s not really nobility – he’s a henchman, a climber. He has more power than Luisa and her father, and he dresses like he belongs to the upper classes, but he will never completely ascend the social ranks. In Luisa Miler , Verdi is painting with bold strokes, and I wanted to do the same thing with this production, contrasting the pastoral, idyllic world of Luisa and her father with the noble world. I think people move differently in these kinds of environments. In our production, the peasants are very real, but when we move into in the world of the Count, it’s a series of postures, as if everyone is always striking a pose. It is a world where Luisa is completely at sea. Luisa Miller is Verdi’s fifteenth opera, and people often talk about it as a transitional piece. I actually feel the transition happening over the course of the opera. It’s as if we see a talented young composer fully growing into his powers as we move from Act One, which is quite direct, to Act Two, where we begin to see more texture and complexity of character. And Act Three feels to me like an arrival – it is a truly great play wedded to great melodies. Although we no longer live in a literal world of princes and peasants, the class warfare at the heart of Luisa Miller feels very contemporary to me, which makes the opera’s tragic ending extraordinarily moving. I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to revisit the production here in Chicago with our terrific cast. Director’s note By Francesca Zambello