Lyric Opera 2023-2024 Issue 5 - Cinderella

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 26 When Ponnelle returned to San Francisco Opera in 1969, the Cinderella he premiered there embodied his evolved sensibilities. He determined that his own earlier works had relied too much on raucous amalgams of color. (His 1967 production of Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia for the Salzburg Festival revealed his new moderation and focused discipline.) Critics came to describe the approach as “anti-color”; he would counter by articulating color’s critical importance. “Onstage everything is a symbol,” he said. “Color takes on a dramaturgical significance… I use color to enhance the drama of a piece.” His embrace of an achromatic mise- en-scène spoke to his desire that the characters and their music—the essence of the world evoked by the full orchestral score—be experienced by the audience first and not explicitly through visual extravaganzas. Of his initial conception for La Cenerentola , Ponnelle declared that it ought to conjure “the naïve quality of some Italian sketches from the Biedermeier period, 1820-30— that kind of milieu—a picture postcard out of the past.” Such a setting departs from the world of the fairy tale and its numerous early iterations, placing it closer to the era of its composer, Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868). His detailed conceptions of the composer’s comic characters’ attire and overstated gestures position them, as the German press concluded with the 1981 Munich production, within the “brilliant commedia dell’arte ” tradition. The balance achieved between bleakness and humor is a hallmark of Ponnelle’s concept of La Cenerentola . When Alidoro—the opera’s surrogate for the Fairy Godmother—enters the stage as narrator and enchants the theater’s curtain to rise, this two-dimensional world is magically revealed. The set designs recall 18th-century tunnel books, predecessors to contemporary three- dimensional pop-up books, a view into which the audience has the perfect perspective. The façade of Don Magnifico’s once-great home appears as a sequence of cut-outs and engravings with a central hallway and dilapidated staircases between two adjacent rooms upstairs and alongside the hall. The reference to postcards is also met out in the layered effects of multiple proscenium arches in Don Ramiro’s palace. The first downstage arch is the most visible to the audience and is decorated in rich rococo imagery, while those receding further upstage evince pen and ink sketches of the 18th century. The characters’ costumes in Magnifico’s home are in no way a reflection of the high society to which they aspire, subsumed instead in dull tones with hints of the garish but tattered pink and pale blues worn by Clorinda and Tisbe. When vivid colors break Ponnelle’s otherwise fixed, selective color palette—a directorial theory he described more than once in interviews—the contrast renders a staggering effect. The brilliant red hunting jackets of Prince Ramiro’s courtiers, arriving with the invitation to the palace ball, provide counterpoint to the monotony of Magnifico’s residence. The drab taupes and browns of Angelina’s attire in her father’s home disappear at once from our mind when she enters the Prince’s palace in a long black and silver-trimmed ball gown, galvanizing a connection with Don Ramiro’s regal evening attire. In their beribboned Biedermeier excess, the stepsisters are a clear foil to Angelina and the Prince. In the opera’s finale, Ponnelle reintroduces the stepsisters and their father dressed in grey attire, suggesting an air of repentance, an appropriate binary to the dazzling white wedding dress worn by Angelina, which evokes the ballgown in which the Prince previously beheld her. Ponnelle did not stop with the fusion of the scenery and costumes in representing Rossini’s masterpiece. The elegant, stylized grace and romance between Angelina and Prince Ramiro stands in stark relief to the exaggerated comedic roles in the opera—Don Magnifico and his daughters—whose obvious (albeit thoughtfully choreographed) physical humor derives from the music itself. It is evident that while Angelina’s stepsisters and Ugo Benelli as Don Ramiro and Frederica von Stade as Angelina in San Francisco Opera’s 1974 production. Carolyn Mason Jones