Lyric Opera 2022-2023 Issue 4- Don Carlos

33 | Lyric Opera of Chicago Republics sometimes die by conquest from without. But they also die by collapse from within. Unlike monarchies, which can maintain order simply through fear and obedience, republics need their citizens to be actively engaged, and this will not happen unless people love the institutions in which they live and are willing to sacri ce—sometimes only time, sometimes life itself—for the ideals that these institutions embody. Can this new headless form of government depend on people to do the job? Or will weak-willed human beings give way to fear and yield their freedom to an authoritarian leader—whether religious or secular? This question was much debated in the 18th century, when Friedrich Schiller made it central to his drama Don Carlos (1787), and it was still debated when Verdi— drawing on Schiller, but also on his own passionate involvement in the Risorgimento (a movement for Italian unity and republican self-government)—wrote his opera Don Carlos (1867). This same question stares us in the face today, as some nations ght to remain free republics and others give up their freedom to autocrats and zealots. Don Carlos is urgent for our time. What emotions does the republican cause need to inspire? And what does it need to beware of? In grappling with this question, opera has a major advantage over straight drama. (Consider, in Julius Caesar , how hard it is even for Shakespeare to depict the key role of the people, as they waver in their loyalties.) In opera, the chorus can be a key actor, and can be divided, plural, wavering, ecstatic—whatever the composer needs. Verdi is opera’s great master of choral writing. In Don Carlos he uses that mastery to represent political emotions that Schiller has no way of depicting— especially in the auto-da-fé scene where the mob, inspired by religious fear and hatred, ignores Carlos’s call for Flemish freedom, arrests Carlos and the Flemish deputies, and consigns a group of heretics to the ames. All in all, Don Carlos is among our most profound operas about political emotions. If republics are to survive, they also need to ponder the emotions of individuals and their relationship to the public cause—a problem as old as the civil wars depicted in Greek tragedy and one that opera, with its deep probing of the inner world, is also well equipped to depict. Sometimes personal relationships support the public cause, but often they are in tension with it. Schiller’s drama contains many long speeches on this theme, but Verdi’s opera, with its remarkable compression of ideas, gets to the heart of the issue; Carlos and Rodrigue share a passionate love of liberty that burns, they say, like a ame (in the duet “God, you sow in our spirits a ray of the same re”) and animates their friendship. But later, when Rodrigue, doing Philippe’s bidding, asks Carlos to surrender his sword, drawn for the sake of that same republican cause, we hear the liberty theme recurring ironically in the background. Every major character in the opera save one faces a tragic con ict between personal love and political duties, and Verdi illuminates these con icts with unparalleled subtlety, as Philippe (much more complicated and genuinely tragic than in Schiller) wavers between love of his wife and the needs of state, and between love of Rodrigue and the Inquisitor’s command to surrender him. Carlos, Rodrigue, Eboli, and Elisabeth all, similarly, grapple with con icts between public duty and private passion and between multiple loves. The only character who is free from con ict is the Inquisitor, who insists (in Schiller, though the same absence of human recognition is in the music Verdi writes for him) that people do not matter as individuals— “Mankind is numbers, Nothing but numbers”—and whose only goal is increasing the power of the Inquisition. Don Carlos is a long opera because of the number of complex characters it contains and whose con icts it probes, but where Schiller often feels tedious and wordy, the opera is always taut and throbbing with masterfully delineated passion. “This opera was born in re and ames,” wrote Verdi. And indeed its time was a dark one in Italian politics, in which the future of republican self-government was on the line and the menacing hand of church authority felt everywhere. Verdi had long been a central gure in the Risorgimento (not a radical republican like Garibaldi and Mazzini, but more of a pragmatist like Cavour, willing to accept a constitutional monarchy) and utterly devoted to Italian uni cation and self-determination. From early on, his operas allude to the liberation movement, especially in The Battle of Legnano (1849). Verdi was elected in 1859 as a member of the new provincial council, but declined the of ce. By this time he was openly identi ed with the nationalist cause, and “Viva Verdi” was used as an acronymic code for Viva Victor Emanuele Re D’Italia (the liberal king who sought a constitutional monarchy). In 1861, Verdi was nally convinced to stand for of ce in the Chamber of Deputies, agreeing on the condition that he would resign shortly after. Self-government had powerful enemies, in particular Pope Pius IX (1792-1878), who became pope in 1848, and