From Dr. Johnson to Un Ballo in Maschera

I’ve always liked works that dare to blend disparate elements and/or styles. It’s remotely possible that my interest in “discordia concors” grows out of some irregular childhood experience, but I rather think it dates back to my years in grad school when I fell in love with Metaphysical poetry. Samuel Johnson’s famous description of those works (“the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together”) was not meant kindly, but did capture a quality of the poetry. What Johnson failed to recognize was that, in the best of them, in the works, for example, of Donne, Marvell or Herbert, that violent yoking produced thrilling effects.

The danger, of course, is that a reckless heterogeneity, whether in poetry or prose, will result in an incoherent mess. But when the mix succeeds, it’s exciting. Take David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, a brilliant instance of “discordia concors.” Mitchell’s novel boldly combines six disparate narratives set in different historical periods, ranging from the nineteenth century to the post-apocalyptic future. The genre of each story is different, each has a unique voice, and each breaks off at a cliff-hanging point, only to be completed in reverse order in the novel’s second half. There are subtle links between tales-- a repeated name, a reference to a previous character. The novel’s ascending-descending structure is its major oddity, but that complicated structure is precisely what functions to unify the dissimilar elements.

 Recently, I saw David Alden’s surreal production of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera at the Metropolitan Opera. It was an eye-opening, if not entirely satisfactory, instance of operatic “discordia concors.” Alden describes the opera as a “bizarre combination of serious political material, high Italian melodrama based around the hackneyed stuff of marital infidelity, and an almost operetta-like lightness of being.” He thinks of it as “experimental and dislocated” and unlike Verdi’s other masterpieces.

The dislocations are built into the libretto. On the one hand, there's lyric romance involving a feckless, love-obsessed monarch, a guilty wife, a brazen fortune-teller and an irate cuckold. This story is awkwardly joined to an unrelated, long-simmering royal assassination plot. The tale’s sinister finale occurs not in deep darkness, but at a frivolous masked ball. And not only the story line is disjunctive. Verdi’s heterogeneous score is unsettled and unsettling. It combines haunting, grand-opera love-arias, duets and a superb quintet with stinging passages of coloratura mockery and frisky scenes of operetta-like farce.

In Alden’s production, Verdi’s musical discordances are underlined rather than glided over. They are made more salient by the production’s taut film noir ambience, its ambiguous and incongruous costumes, and a curious minimalist set-- the latter dominated by a huge reproduction of the Louvre's ceiling painting of Merry-Joseph Blondel’s The Fall of Icarus. All this “discordia” takes its toll. The night I saw the performance, much of the singing was good, some even splendid. Yet the emotional impact of Verdi’s magnificent music felt somewhat vitiated, as was the power of the opera’s tragic ending. At the end, I came away less than moved, though I was nevertheless delighted, amused, and pleased by Alden’s fresh approach.