hold my hand
by Douglas Messerli
Joseph
Méry and Camille du Locle (libretto, based on Friedrich Schiller's Don Carlos, Infant von Spanien), Giuseppe Verdi (music), Nicholas Hytner
(stage director), Gary Halvorson (director) Don Carlo / 2010 [The
Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]
Giuseppe
Verdi's great opera Don Carlo premiered in Paris in March
1867, the year Sigmund Freud turned eleven while attending Leopoldstädter
Kommunal-Realgymnasium in Vienna. It would be years before Freud would propound
his psychological theories gleaned primarily from ancient literary texts; but
Verdi's opera might as well be described as a template for many of Freud's
ideas about human relationships, in particular those concerning various
obstacles to love.
Their marriage is to be announced as soon as their fathers sign
the peace treaty between the Houses of Habsburg and Valois, but when the
messengers arrive to tell her the news that the treaty has been signed, she is
made to understand that she shall not be married to the infante,
but to the King, Philip, himself! Knowing that the marriage is necessary for
her country, Elisabeth has no choice but to painfully accept the proposal. Don
Carlo is devastated:
The
fatal hour has sounded!
Cruel
destiny
shatters
this beautiful dream!
And
my soul is filled with regrets;
we
shall drag along our chains
until
we rest in our tomb.
Seldom
has a first scene in any opera transformed its characters' worlds so suddenly.
Don Carlo is now in the painful position of being in love with the woman who is
soon be become his mother. Like anyone suffering from the Oedipal complex from
here on he will come to hate his father. We recognize that the opera that
follows will be centered, in part, on the struggle between the two.
Yet,
in the very next scene Verdi introduces a further sexual wrinkle in Don Carlo's
life. Having returned to Spain, he secretly visits the monastery of San Yuste,
where, after his abdication in 1516, Carlo' grandfather, Charles V, came to
live out the rest of his life before dying of malaria. There he encounters his
dear friend Rodrigo, who has obviously come to meet him. Carlo reveals his love
of Elisabeth, a fact that shocks Rodrigo, who immediately demands that Carlo join
him in saving Protestant Flanders—the birthplace of Charles V—by freeing it
from the Spanish rule.
Rodrigo
is a pure idealist, a believer in justice and evidently a fine soldier. As he
pleads with Philip a short while later for Flanders cause, he reveals what he
sees as the people's condition there:
RODRIGO
O
King! I have come from Flanders,
that
country which was once so lovely!
It
is now but an ashen desert,
a
place of horror, a tomb!
There
the orphan, begging
and
weeping on the streets,
falls,
as he flees the flames,
on
human remains!
Blood
reddens the water in the rivers,
they
roll on, full of dead bodies …
The
air is filled with the cries of widows
over
their butchered husbands! …
Ah!
Blessed be the hand of God,
which
through me brings
the
passing-bell of this agony
to
the notice of the righteous King!
Philip,
the king of a country where at the very moment the trials of the Inquisition
are taking place, cannot possibly support the reformers, nor intervene in the
French domination of that region, and rejects Rodrigo's and Don Carlo's
pleas to travel to Flanders out of hand.
Their
relationship, despite Don Carlo's inability to join him in Flanders, remains
one of committed love up until Rodrigo's last act-death. Not only in life do
they pledge to remain together, but even in death, at least from Rodrigo's
point of view:
RODRIGO
We
must take our leave!
Don
Carlos freezes, looking aghast at Rodrigo.
Yes,
Carlos! This is for me the supreme day,
let
us say a solemn farewell;
God
permits us still to love one another
near
him, when we are in heaven.
We can only wonder what
Elisabeth, had she been able to consummate her love with Don Carlo, might say
to Rodrigo's dying desire.
We
perceive that, like Hamlet, Don Carlo is a confused psychological being, not a
man of action like his friend. As Paul Robinson has written in an excellent
essay on Don Carlo (in Opera & Ideas: From Mozart to Strauss):
“In all of opera there
can be no more improbable friendship
than that between
Rodrigo and Don Carlo. Just as Rodrigo
is the quintessentially
political animal, Carlo is one of those
people who seem
incapable of a coherent political thought.
In the course of the
opera, admittedly, he gets deeply involved
in affairs of state,
beginning with the friendship duet... But
we are never in doubt
that it is all pretend politics, and that
he understands nothing
of the Flemish cause or the ideological
principles that all but
define Rodrigo's existence.”
It is also clear that Philip would have wished a
son more like Rodrigo than the one he has. For that reason alone, one suspects,
the King confides in Rodrigo and takes him on almost as an advisor. In a world
where his rule is threatened by the church, and in which he feels he can trust
no one, not even his beloved wife, Philip has no choice but to turn to the
handsome man of action, his weakling's son dear friend.
The
tension between Rodrigo's commitment to the political and his love for Don
Carlo comes to a head when the Inquisition prepares to torture Flemish rebels.
When Philip rejects the pleas of Flemish representatives to free them, Don
Carlo rushes in, a ridiculous hero, sword in hand insisting that he will be
their savior. Philip demands that his son be disarmed, and Rodrigo has no
choice but to disarm him. Don Carlo, appalled by his actions, sees it as a
betrayal of their love, but Rodrigo clearly recognizes it is the only way to
save his friend from death.
So
too is Philip made to choose between his role as a ruler and his love of his
surrogate son. In the horrifying verbal battle between the bassos, Philip and
the Grand Inquisitor, the blind man of the church insists that the King hand
over Rodrigo. Once again, the choice is a terrible one, but as a conciliator he
knows he must give in to the demand.
So
too is Philip made to choose between his role as a ruler and his love of his
surrogate son. In the horrifying verbal battle between the bassos, Philip and
the Grand Inquisitor, the blind man of the church insists that the King hand
over Rodrigo. Once again, the choice is a terrible one, but as a conciliator he
knows he must give in to the demand.
Finally, even the pure and suffering
Elisabeth, who has already been forced into the awful choice of marrying Philip
or his son, is tortured by the oppositions between the personal and the
political. Betrayed by Princess Eboli, jealous of Don Carlo's love for the
Queen, Elisabeth is asked to proclaim her innocence before her King/husband,
who is convinced that she has been carrying on an affair with his son. The
overwhelming tension between these two forces, the domestic and the State,
results in her collapse.
Throughout Don
Carlo, accordingly, the characters' attempts at love are perverted, torn as
they are between their psychological states of being and the State, the
political and religious machinations that work against their love for one
another. At opera's end all have fallen from any possibility of grace, as
Don Carlo, who finally seems to recognize Rodrigo's righteous view of the world
whereupon he renounces his heterosexual lover/mother, is quite literally
dragged into the past—and, of course, death—by the ghost of his own
Grandfather, Charles V, in what is perhaps also a metaphor of where his
political actions would surely have taken him had he attempted to save
Flanders. We can only pray that, despite the Church's proclamation, all of his
forbidden loves will be permitted into heaven.
Los
Angeles, January 30, 2011
Reprinted from Green
Integer Blog (January 2011).
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