Last week, the Secret
Victorianist, along with some student friends, attended MetStudents’
#LuciaMadness event before a production of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor at the Metropolitan Opera.
The Secret Victorianist at the Metropolitan Opera |
Mary Zimmerman’s production has a
mid-nineteenth-century setting, although Donizetti’s opera premiered in 1835,
and Walter Scott’s The Bride of
Lammermoor (the historical novel on which Salvadore Cammarano’s libretto
was based) was published in 1819 and set in the seventeenth century.
Mara Blumenfeld’s sumptuous
costumes are instrumental in suggesting this period in the production (with
Daniel Ostling’s striking sets more focussed on creating a Romantic Scottish
landscape), so it was apt for the drinks event to encourage young operagoers to
don Victorian dress of their own. There was even the opportunity to pose in
Lucia’s blood-drenched gloves and veil and brandish her knife (check out
#LuciaMadness on Twitter for more photos).
The Secret Victorianist as Lucia Ashton |
The emphasis on Lucia’s madness isn’t
just a marketing ploy. The plot (familial feuds, love, betrayal) and the music
move towards the climatic scene where Albina Shagimuratova’s blood-splattered
bride loses her mind and hits the high notes in the beautiful aria ‘Il Dolce
Suono’.
That Lucia’s madness is
especially important to this production in particular is suggested from Act
One, where Zimmerman chooses to stage the ghost during Lucia’s ‘Regnava Nel
Silenzio’. Madness seems the natural result of a young girl living out her life
on these misty moors, surrounded by ghosts, and torn between the passions of
her brother and lover.
The Secret Victorianist brings nineteenth-century dress to the streets of New York |
Joseph Calleja sang Edgardo with
strength and passion, producing a second climactic moment after Lucia’s mad
scene, but the scenes between the siblings (Shagimuratova with Luca Salsi’s
Enrico) perhaps showed more connection between the performers.
Other highlights included the
injection of humour during the wedding scene. The cast pose for photographs as
Lucia turns away from her groom and the camera, raising some titters from the
audience just prior to the tragic and murderous turn of events.
Lucia di Lammermoor is an
opera with a timeless plot of love and betrayal, but a nineteenth-century
setting seemed an ideal one, given how Victorianism can at times be a sort of
shorthand in popular culture for the repression of women in marriage and their
resulting madness.
Do you know of any other
nineteenth-century-based plays or productions the Secret Victorianist should
attend in New York? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting
@SVictorianist!