Lyric Opera 2022-2023 Issue 4- Don Carlos

35 | Lyric Opera of Chicago Rodrigue (at right) implores Don Carlos to take action. Monika Rittershaus/Oper Frankfurt Schiller’s play ends abruptly, as Philippe, turning Carlos over to the Inquisitor, says, “Cardinal, I have done my part. Now do yours.” Verdi’s ending is far more mysterious: A monk who may or may not be Charles V (who is supposed to have died years earlier) appears and apparently saves Carlos from the Inquisition—but only by drawing him into the monastery. This ending does incorporate some of the spectacle that Verdi so loved, but it has been found deeply unsatisfactory by many: Is it darker or less dark? What really becomes of Carlos and his cause? The audience is invited to ponder this puzzle. I myself nd Verdi’s invitation to ponder liberating rather than unsatisfactory. In one way, Verdi’s ending is darker than Schiller’s: The playwright repeatedly signposts the Enlightenment to come, telling his audience that they can look back on these grim events from the position of victors in the struggle for republican freedom. In the opera, Carlos does make a desperate guess that the power of the Inquisition will be broken by God, but the murky ending undermines the authority of his prediction. Here, I think, Verdi sees more deeply than Schiller: The struggle for free speech and freedom is perpetual, and it must be fought in the heart and mind of every person who loves self-government, in every generation—as love of liberty contends with superstition and fear of power. We cannot wait for God, or even history, to deal with our tyrants. Italy’s future was precarious in the 1860’s—with Pius IX lurching from liberalism to dark anti-rationalism—just as ours is today, with threats against democracy from the forces of anti- truth, and with a public culture tainted by fear of other groups and people. The ending of Don Carlos is as dark or “light” as we make it in our lives. There is, still, one aspect of the opera that gives us reason for optimism about the world, and republican projects in it—the personality of its creator, which suffuses the entire work with his zeal for liberty, his compassion, his unquenchable joy. “To the world, as to the nation he helped to found, he left an enduring legacy of music, charity, patriotism, honour, grace, and reason,” concludes Verdi biographer Mary Jane Phillips-Matz. “He was and remains a mighty force for continuing good.” Martha C. Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, appointed in the Law School and the Philosophy Department. She is the author, among other books, of The Monarchy of Fear (2018) and Political Emotions (2013).