Music: Call to Vespers

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I Vespri Siciliani is the kind of work with which grand opera has frequently made a spectacle of itself, in more ways than one. Written by Giuseppe Verdi for the Paris Opera in 1855, it had something to please every vagary of the self-indulgent French musical taste of the time—five acts, a lengthy ballet, historical fireworks, huge choruses, soulful solos. The story is set in 13th-century Palermo, where the French colonists are oppressing the Sicilian natives. Arrigo, one of the principal revolutionaries, discovers to his horror that he is the illegitimate son of the chief oppressor, Montforte. Not only does this news test his divided loyalties, but it ruins his romance with the fair Elena, who is sympathetic to the Sicilians. With loud cries of "Vendetta!" the Sicilians overthrow Montforte at the final curtain.

The libretto was a piece of hack work from a Parisian scenario factory run by an enterprising auteur of sorts named Eugene Scribe. Having just successfully completed Rigoletto and La Traviata with Italian Librettist Francesco Maria Piave, Verdi despised the messy French text with the passion he brought to everything.

Why, then, even bother with Vespri? Why should the Metropolitan Opera, currently some $3,000,000 in debt, go to the time, trouble and expense of mounting the opera for the first time in its 90-year history? Fair questions, which were not entirely answered by the premiere performance at Lincoln Center last week. Yet the Met's brief for Vespri contains any number of good points. Conductor James Levine and Stage Director John Dexter eliminated a half-hour's worth of ballet (wisely, considering the Met's declivity for dance) and edited the work down to three acts, running a relatively tidy 3½ hours. Then there were the principal singers: Sopra no Montserrat Caballe, Tenor Nicolai Gedda, Baritone Sherrill Milnes, Bass Justino Diaz. They constituted the kind of front-rank cast that the company does not regularly assemble these days. Nor does the Met orchestra play every day with the snap and precision that it gave Conductor Levine.

Old Saw. Most important, Vespri contains a lot more good music than any but scholars would have deduced from its century or so of neglect. The over ture is more or less an orchestral favor ite. The first-act aria, "O tu, Palermo, " is a recital staple for basses. What a surprise, though, to discover the power of the quartet and chorus with which Verdi concludes the second act — a moment of grand confrontation in which every body perceives everybody else's seeming treachery. Or to find that Verdi has rarely written anything lovelier than Elena's farewell to Arrigo, "Ah, parli a un core." Spinning out its delicately chromatic cantilena like the mistress of cantabile that she is, Soprano Caballe stopped the show for a full two minutes and 45 seconds. The applause ceased only when Caballe held up a palm and signaled Levine to continue.