Dulcamara (Thomas Florio) makes his pitch to Nemorino (Daniel Montenegro) (courtesy of the
Merola Opera Program)
The "secret sauce" in Gaetano Donizetti's 1832 comic opera L'Elisir d'Amore is its simplicity. Gone are the complications coming out of the woodwork at every turn in the comedies of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Gioachino Rossini; and there is only a hint of the topsy-turvy antics of circumstance that would become the stock-in-trade of the operettas of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. Ultimately, all we have is a boy, a girl, and a legend. The legend is the Arthurian tale of Tristan and Isolde and the power of a potion to inflame their forbidden love. The boy is Nemorino, as sincere as he is simple; and his unrequited love is Adina, whom he hopes to win by enchanting her with Isolde's potion. Neither of these characters has a back-story; and all other characters are there simply to move the plot line to its boy-gets-girl conclusion.
As a result the opera rises or falls on whether or not its simplicity is delivered with the light touch it deserves. This is particularly the case with Nemorino, since Adina gets more than her share of cloying bel canto turns. Nemorino is neither clever nor heroic. He is nothing more than honest about his feelings; and any tenor undertaking this role has to make that honesty believable by quarantining off any "distractions of reality" and letting this simple virtue be its own reward. This can be a real challenge for those more interested in being virtuoso tenors and determined that the soprano not get all of the spotlight. In last night's opening of L'Elisir d'Amore at the Cowell Theater in Fort Mason Center by the Merola Opera Program, "Merolino" Daniel Montenegro demonstrated that he had the stuff to be just the right tenor to sing Nemorino. His voice glided over all of Donizetti's musical demands with a sure sense of pitch, a clarity of diction, and acting technique that never broke character.
Montenegro was well partnered by Nadine Sierra as his Adina. She shared his lightness of vocal touch, never letting her bel canto style overwhelm; and her dramatic understanding of Adina's transition from flirtation to love was particularly effective. When it came to supporting these two stars, however, things were more problematic. There are two low male voices, each of which needs to be comically overblown in its own way. There is the baritone Belcore, an army sergeant so full of himself that he feels entitled to the prettiest girl in the village (who, of course, is Adina); and there is the bass Dulcamara, purveyor of the magic potion around which the entire plot revolves. Dulcamara knows he is a fraud; but he also sees the potion "work" for Nemorino and cannot resist crediting himself for his own medical genius. Baritone Benjamin Covey and bass Thomas Florio brought considerable personality to their respective roles; but neither had the vocal strength (or sometimes, alas, certainty of pitch) to realize that personality through music. Then there was Hye Jung Lee's Giannetta, who was originally conceived as the leader of a "Greek chorus" of village maidens and basically leads with her own bel canto virtuosity. Lee's musical performance was right on the money. Unfortunately, her dramatic role was undermined; and this brings us to the shortcomings of the staging by Nicola Bowie.
If simplicity is the essence of L'Elisir d'Amore, then this was a production that was unfairly overburdened with complications. The plot is too straightforward to contend with a shift from a small village to a theatre in San Francisco rehearsing a new show called The Elixir of Love. While there were many clever techniques for disclosing the characters in that plot, those techniques tended to get lost in the excess baggage intended to evoke San Francisco in 1942. The result was a production that ended up feeling far too long. Since the music in the score tends to follow repeated tried-and-true formulas, the staging has to carry the primary burden of keeping the pace; and this production tended to drag things out far longer than they deserved.
On the musical side the primary problem involved the chorus. Every member of the chorus was part of the current Merola Opera Program, which means that every voice was basically a soloist in training. As the result, the chorus sounded less like a chorus and more like a collection of polished voices, each trying to distinguish itself from the others. While there are places in the plot where it is nice for each of those voices to have a personality, as when all of the village girls are trying to get a piece of Nemorino, most of the time the chorus is supposed to be just a chorus. There also appeared to be some problems of balance and blend (along with some shaky intonation in the strings) in the pit orchestra conducted by Martin Katz; but this may have been a matter of the musicians adjusting to the space that will be overcome in the remaining three performances.
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