Le Siége de Corinthe (1826) was Rossini’s first opera written in French for Paris and therefore holds an important place in his output and in the development of opera generally, made all the more fascinating by contrast with his foregoing compositions written in his native Italy in that he revised his longer, Neapolitan opera Maometto II for the purpose. It was adapted to a more French musical-dramatic style with accompanied recitatives joining up more seamlessly with vocal numbers, and the latter tend to be less ornamented than in the Italian version. The insertion of a ballet and ceremonial pieces for the expected wedding of the Sultan, Mahomet, and Pamyra, the daughter of the Greek commander Cléomène, along with some prominent choral sections point the way forwards to grand opéra. Composed in the midst of Greece’s revolutionary struggles for independence from the Ottoman empire and the reassessment of Classical Greek republican values in the period of monarchical restoration after the Napoleonic period, the opera’s drama about the Ottomans’ conquest of Corinth shortly after the fall of Byzantium in 1453 was charged with political meaning, positive and negative.
Davide Livermore’s new production for the Rossini Opera Festival only intermittently picks up on those pregnant historical themes and dramatic possibilities. He removes it from the mid-15th century – thereby avoiding awkward questions as to how to frame the European confrontation with the Orient – and stages it as an encounter between Greece’s Classical heritage and our modern world. Corinth is depicted as a polluted wasteland in the present time, strewn with sculptural fragments from the Hellenic past such as the Venus de Milo, and ruined monuments in video projections. That plays out in dialogue with the embodiment of ancient Greece in its heyday in the Corinthian characters here in togas, and alternating video images showing lavish interiors and a throne room. Fairly static choreography for those characters and statuesque, mannerist gestures tellingly indicate a close connection between their actions in ancient history and those ruins, even if that leads to some dramatic inertia across the opera’s two and a half hours’ length.
The greater problem of this production is with the Ottoman side of the coin which, here, represents very little. Appearing in the modern theatrical cliché of men in slick suits with mobile phones to record the Greeks’ humiliation, they are too anonymous to represent any specific opposing force which generates the conflict – personal and social – at the centre of the drama. Without that, the opera’s scenario is fatally weakened – are the Greeks entirely the victims of an unidentified aggressive power, or have they brought destruction on themselves, led on by Cléomène and Néoclès’s blind insistence on war? The high priest Hiéros makes a prediction that in centuries to come the Greeks will be freed from slavery which had obvious resonance for Greece and its European supporters in the 1820s, as well as for the restoration of monarchical government in France. But no comment is made as to what, in this production, may be revived from the ancient Greek past in fulfilment of the prophecy, or exactly what the Ottoman forces now represent from which liberation is to be achieved, other than perhaps a generally modern bureaucratised, materialist society – if any revival is to be hoped for at all.
Curiously it’s the ballet – that tradition of French opera which usually frustratingly holds up the action – that is turned to better effect in staging Pamyra’s predicament as symbolic of the whole drama: caught up between the dancers, she is torn between rekindling her earlier love for the Sultan (when he was in disguise) such that he would enable her fellow Greeks to be spared, and acquiescing with her father’s plan that she marry Néoclès and bringing down the Sultan’s fury. Her dialogue with the latter in Act Two here is inconsequential, seemingly of no significance to the wider action around them. Contrastingly, in Calixto Bieito’s 2023 staging of the Italian original, Maometto II, at Naples it was conceived more astutely as a psychoanalytical tussle between them, a domestic spat played out on a couch, enacting in miniature the petty squabbles that have erupted in a full-blown but pointless war between their two peoples.
Having taken the equivalent role of Anna in Naples, Varduhi Abrahamyan as Pamyra projects a musically forceful, penetrating character, but also charms with a more nuanced ardour in one of the few extended and vocally ornate arias in this French version. Mahomet is solidly sung by Adrian Sâmpetrean if perhaps also somewhat dry, unwittingly adding to the effect of anonymity on the part of the Ottomans. Matteo Roma makes for a more urgent and compelling Greek leader as Cléomène, while Maxim Mironov’s Néoclès is in command of all the notes, particularly in a long and complicated aria at the beginning of Act Three, but the more open vowels of French make the tone of the higher passages somewhat stretched. There are also some vivid contributions from Simón Orfila as Hiéros, and Giuseppe de Luca as the Sultan’s confidant Omar.
In a generally broad, stable account of the score from Carlo Rizzi and the Orchestra of the Teatro Communale di Bologna, well-integrated sonorities characterise effectively what could be termed the more French orchestration of this opera by Rossini, with the darker colours of woodwind and brass in their lower ranges especially coming to the fore. Although the ballet is invested with suitable liveliness, it is brought steadily to an affirmative climax. The Chorus of the Teatro Ventidio Basso offer emphatic support, dividing between the female singers functioning as Pamyra’s fellow Greek women, and the males as the Ottoman soldiers.
If only the staging had the same clear focus as the musical performance, this would have been a notable production of one of Rossini’s underrated serious operas.
