I due Foscari

5 things to know about I due Foscari

1° Italy caught in Byronismo fever

Nowhere was the English poet Lord Byron (1788-1824) as esteemed as in Italy. This admiration was only mirrored by his own attachment to Italy, where he lived for seven years. A dazzling and provocative character, Byron sympathised with the Italian cause and wrote eloquently about their political plight. Settling in Venice in 1816 after many years of wanderlust, he engrossed himself in the city’s history.

Loosely based on historical events of the 1450s, he wrote his verse play The two Foscari in Ravenna, in less than a month of summer 1821. In Byron’s tragedy, the Doge Francesco Foscari is devastated at having to maintain Venetian law even as it sentences his son Jacopo to exile. The fact that the historical figure of Jacopo was a scoundrel and his verdict of exile an act of leniency and favour to his father finds no mention in the play.

2° From The two Foscari to I due Foscari

‘Beautiful drama, beautiful, archibelissimo!’ was Verdi’s excited response to his librettist Francesco Maria Piave work on The two Foscari’s adaptation. For his sixth opera, Verdi chose to set Byron’s melancholy drama to music, beautifully encapsulating its glum tone and intimations of Venetian secrecy and strictness. For the first time, Verdi would develop individual themes for each character, revealing their inner turmoil and foreshadowing future intimate works such as Luisa Miller or La traviata.

If Verdi was initially smitten by the topic, only four years after its premiere in November 1844, he would decree it a ‘funeral… too uniform an atmosphere and colour from beginning to end’. Later still, in a letter to Re Lear’s librettist Antonio Somma, he wrote ‘I should refuse to write on such subjects as Nabucco, Foscari, etc. They offer extremely dramatic situations, but they lack variety.’ Despite this literal monotone, the opera contains glorious music; with the Doge’s role being a dramatic tour de force, while Jacopo’s is often considered the most lyrical Verdi ever composed.

3° An unexpected father-daughter dynamic

Although the opera is named after a father and son, it can be argued that the relationship between the Doge and his daughter-in-law is the more decisive one. After their confrontation in front of the Council, they meet again in the Doge’s private chambers in act 1, scene 4. Finally alone, the Doge can unleash his true feelings: his old father’s heart weeps, as his eyes have no more tears to cry. When Lucrezia enters in a rage and Francesco, calling her ‘daughter’, tries to reason with her. His tears nonetheless offer a ray of hope to despondent Lucrezia. The scene is characterised by a variety of solos, asides and interjections, which - without compromising the musical unity - were to become the trademark Verdi format.

Psychologically, too, this scene is of interest. In its dreamlike fantasy, it could be said that each character on the opera stage embodies a different aspect of ourselves. One submissive voice could thus sound old and tired, while another active one could scream stridently. As the author William Berger suggests, these father-daughter dialectics represent the divided self in conflict.

4° Underlining that bleak, dark colour

‘If Verdi has chosen such a bleak, dark colour’, explains the production’s conductor Paolo Arrivabeni, ‘he has evidently done it with the intention of following the spirit of the subject. Every time I conduct this opera I feel how the dark colours are meant to evoke a setting, in some ways in some moments you can also feel the taste of the sea, as Verdi will then do with Simon Boccanegra. The conductor's task is precisely that of underlining that particular colour which it is no coincidence that Verdi wanted to maintain throughout the opera.

For example, Jacopo's solo scene in prison: at the beginning, there is an instrumental introduction of solo viola and cello - and the fact that Verdi writes ‘soli’ is not by chance, it is almost onomatopoeic as if he already wanted to emphasize the solitude in which Jacopo finds himself. The sense of sadness and desolation that this introduction conveys is already brilliant in itself. Here Verdi is truly futuristic, he has a twentieth-century composer's style. Faced with a situation of this kind it is simply necessary to go along with what Verdi wanted to suggest’.

5° A theatre in which lies are banned

‘When I started studying I due Foscari’, says the stage director Leo Muscato, ‘it created a discrepancy between music and history in my mind: on the one hand, there was a story set in mid-fifteenth century Renaissance Venice, with men wearing tunics as long as their feet; on the other a piece of strongly nineteenth-century music, with closed forms, heroic cabalettas and leitmotifs that characterize the characters. It almost instinctively occurred to me that if we had set this story in an era closer to Verdi, I would never have heard that discrepancy again.

So the aesthetic character of the scenes and costumes aims to return an abstraction. The visual is brought to the essence. To suggest different environments we use a single scenographic system that allows many and evident changes of image. Without ever stopping the action, you will move from one painting to another, without interruption, giving the action a very tight rhythm. And all this to feed an idea of theatre that I have always pursued: a theatre that puts the spectator in a position to imagine what is not there; a theatre in which lies are banned and fiction becomes the only means left to be able to shout out truths that someone can listen to’.