As a statement of intentions, the new Vienna production of Un ballo in maschera does not paint a very fresh or enticing picture of what can be expected at the State Opera in the next few years. The appointment of the experienced West German intendant Claus Helmut Drese as the new director, and his imaginative and quick-witted invitation to Claudio Abbado to join him as music director, promised much - and still does. If they are to deliver the kind of artistic product that their reputations have led the world of opera to expect, however, they cannot afford to continue on the safe and overfamiliar artistic path that this first staging of the new era represents.
To be fair, it was wiser to play safe than to make any of the kind of large controversial statements that characterize the opening moves of most German-language theater regimes. The proud and conservative Viennese public is naturally critical and needs to be wooed. Over the years, they have seen too many directors arrive on the steps of their venerable operatic institution amid a flurry of promises and expectations only to find these same directors departing in an atmosphere of acrimony and anger before their contracts had expired. Gustav Mahler, Karl Bohm, and Herbert von Karajan all had reason to be bitter about Vienna and its reputation for intrigue, which claimed one further victim in Lorin Maazel just three years ago.
Drese, who came to Vienna after a ten-year period building up the international reputation of the Zurich Opera in Switzerland, was sensible enough not to repeat any of Maazel's opening claims about "a gala every night." By virtue of his skills as an administrator and planner rather than those of a conductor and director, Drese may be able to give the State Opera the stability it needs and deserves, and his enlistment of the modest, likable, and versatile Abbado gives the new era an automatic stamp of artistic authority.
Indeed, there is every indication that the Vienna State Opera may turn out to be a conductor's house over the next few years. Abbado will be conducting no opera outside Austria before 1991, and Vienna has furnished him with a long-term plan that will give him two new productions each season. For the 1987 Vienna festival, for example, there will be an Abbado Wozzeck, with an Italian-language Don Carlo, a new Nabucco production and some Rossini and Mussorgsky to follow in the next three seasons. Already, therefore, Abbado seems much more at home in Vienna, where he spent some of his formative years as a student, than in the rather chaotic surroundings of Milan, which has seen less and less of him in recent years and which exploited his abundant talent only fitfully.
Un ballo in maschera was, in fact, one of Abbado's early successes at La Scala. His ability to pierce the musico-dramatic heart of this middle-period Verdi work has been well documented since that Milan production of 1967. On this latest hearing, his impulses were all the more acute and dynamic for being interpreted with the supple strength of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, which brought immense dignity and force to the swiftly alternating passages of irony and doom-laden fantasy in Verdi's score.
The stage performance was dominated - almost embarrassingly so - by Luciano Pavarotti and Piero Cappuccilli, who, like Abbado, have large enough personalities to fill the house single-handedly. Cappuccilli's voice is maintaining its range and security
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