La Gioconda

Europe burns its vessels

Olivier Py, director of La Gioconda, finds evil and decay in Hugo's play and Ponchielli's operatic adaptation.

As La Gioconda relocates Victor Hugo’s play Angelo, tyran de Padoue from Padua to Venice, it deprives the plot of its political dimension. For Hugo, his play is an indictment against all abuses of power. Just as the fate of women is the first sign of tyranny for Aeschylus, Hugo believes in democratic and feminist progress where women weave the future in solidarity.

Gioconda and Laura are therefore the alpha and omega of an impossible claim to freedom and equality. Maybe because he was born in Padua, the librettist Arrigo Boito transposes Hugo's piece to the city of the Doges; it could not only have been for decorative reasons. In Padua, the frightening shadow of Venice heralds the worst; in Venice, religious and political violence is so intertwined with everything that the city cries in spiritual despair.

The beauty of Venice is death; the greatness of Venice is decadence; the power of Venice is evil. In romantic terms, that is how the dark city fascinates and invites us to meditate on evil. The sleight of hand from one city to another is coupled with a change of narrator. Angelo, a bloodthirsty tyrant fixated on pursuing jouissance, becomes Barnaba, an amplified rewriting of Homodei's character. While Homodei is only a cog in the original drama, Barnaba is the drama of the opera. Disfigured by his addiction to pleasure, sucked into a maelstrom of envy and revenge, he is the Shakespearean figure of evil incarnate. Boito was no fan of anti-Manichaeism: in one of his short stories, L’alfier nero, a fight between a black and a white chess player leaves no room for nuance or ambiguous symbolism.

Barnaba, in a kind of Dantean description of the Venice of the Inquisition, crowns himself, a spy king above all things, a necessary radical evil in times of metaphysical questions. Boito transforms the political plot of Hugo’s play into a metaphysical poem, in which the ‘terrible singer’, as La Gioconda calls Barnaba, is a spiritual argument.

The play tells the story of Barnaba's relentless corruption of all moral values, of which La Gioconda is an impotent counterweight. For the spy, violating La Gioconda and taking her into her bed of despair is not only the most priceless enjoyment but the fulfillment of her lesson in darkness. It is because La Gioconda is beautiful and fair that she must be destroyed. There is nothing but death in the canals of Venice, and the sky is definitively extinguished.

Not only is Barnaba so drunk with power and influence that he has psychologically destroyed his mentor, Alvise, but he to rule in a world of such darkness as to cancel out God - this God whom the blind man sees, whom La Gioconda calls, whom Laura respects, whom Enzo fears and whom Alvise is familiar with in his power. This God, a true skeleton like the Doge of Venice, is now nothing more than a theatre accessory lost in the collapse of the most beautiful city in the world. The Venice of Tintoretto is a city between sky and sea, which longs to prove the existence of God through its beauty. It is a horizontal cathedral. Barnaba wants to debase its beauty just as he wants to degrade La Gioconda's, who is a metaphor for the people. A great negator weaves his web, leading each character to sacrifice and murder in a deadly desire that ultimately ends in necrophilia.

The opera curtain falls on an unimaginably sadistic scene, a retinal deflagration of evil, where the body of the inert heroine lies in front of the evil victor’s desire. We can wonder about this need for degradation and darkness that in Boito's work calls for music without harmonic resolution. It is the end of an era; the Verdian drama, with its foolish hope for democracy, its confidence in the integrity of the street, its faith in history, is no longer of concern in a twilighting Europe.

From this, Boito exalts a perfume of nocturnal celebration and decomposition. There is probably no other work in the whole operatic repertoire that is more absolutely black; La Gioconda’s sacrifice and La Cieca’s sanctity are present only to be debased. The evil is not only a block of abyss abandoned in the guilty garden of our history, but a devouring machine that produces its own clean fuel. It originates in the very need for music.

That's when Amilcare Ponchielli dared the unimaginable, and that may be the key to the uniqueness of the work. His music is neither pre-verismo nor post-Verdian, it is without parallel, an attempt to rise to the level of an unsustainable libretto. Abjection needs a mask to conceal itself in order to then unmask the ultimate truth. ‘The Dance of the Hours’ is therefore less a daydream about the obsolescence of things and more a story of fear that points towards the annihilation of humanism.

What if everything is getting worse and worse because of man’s desire to be crowned above the mysteries of the Being? When did this changeover take place? Just yesterday, we believed in the spring of peoples, in a future that sings, in a society, in the triumph of human rights; in one decade, the historical perspective has been reversed so that we no longer believe in anything but the worst.

Ponchielli and Boito have written a kind of last opera of the 19th century, a monument comparable to the one that Barnaba celebrates in ‘La bocca dei leoni’. The whistleblower becomes the ultimate prophet, the lion's mouth devours every transcendental hope. And all this horror becomes neither laughable, nor Grand-Guignolesque, nor complacent, nor easy; on the contrary, it remains, shimmering, dynamic, musical, incandescent. It's a fact: with La Gioconda, you can to say that the Europe of the Enlightenment has burned its vessels. It was only the feeling of the beginning of the end…