Opera: Sermons and Satan

The library shelves, opera lovers like to think, are stuffed with forgotten masterpieces. They need only to be kissed into life by princely producers, displayed on the operatic stage, and their somnolent glimmer will instantly flame into theatrical brilliance. Alas, when such pieces are actually performed, they often seem rather dusty. Admirers argue weakly and the public packs the first performances. Then everybody goes home, resolved to save money for future investment in another round of Traviatas and Bohèmes.

Arrigo Boito’s Mefistofele may be an exception. Toscanini admired it. Great bassos love to strip to the waist and storm through it. Famous prima donnas long to play at being beautiful and abandoned in it. The Metropolitan Opera has hinted at doing it for decades, but when the New York City Opera presented it last week, it was the first time that New Yorkers were able to see the opera performed with full stage trappings in 43 years.

Grappling with Goethe. What they saw was a flawed masterpiece. Composers from Berlioz to Richard Adler and Jerry Ross have grappled with the Faust legend—the extent of their genius measurable by the magnitude of their failure. Boito, at least, approaches Goethe as an equal, his Prologue and Epilogue conjuring up infinities of space, time and the magnitude of Heaven.

The New York City Opera’s production reflected the music in a swirling fantasy of galaxies, bursting stars and mythic clouds. If the production dragged, it is partly because Boito’s talent for invoking the superhuman exceeded his skill at projecting the merely mortal.

Goethe lifted the Faust legend into the realm of cosmic philosophizing. Philosophy, though, is a literary rather than a musical exercise. Music can, on occasion, state a case, but it cannot argue the point. In the end, Boito simply tried to present more Goethe than any composer could hope to cope with.

By purely scenic means, the City Opera helped raise Boito to the realm of the abstract. Set Designer David Mitchell and Stage Director Tito Capobianco placed the Prologue not in Heaven but in space. The Epilogue suggests Earth as a dying planet illuminated by the corpse of a setting sun. The production was strongly cast in other major roles. Carol Neblett, a vocally arresting but inexperienced soprano, did both Margherita and Helen of Troy. As Faust, Tenor Robert Nagy sang powerfully but with obvious effort. Julius Rudel’s conducting rose successfully to the peaks but tended to coast through the occasional deserts of Boito’s score.

Whatever the opera’s qualities, there could hardly be a better incarnation of Satan than Basso Norman Treigle, 42. Small, skinny, seemingly naked, Treigle flashed through the role like a black-voiced cobra. Plunging from profundo depths to baritonal heights, his voice remained huge and perfectly focused through one of the crudest bass roles ever written. “I can’t say I really like this Mefisto,” Treigle said afterward. “I think of myself as an actor, not a singer, and it isn’t an interesting role. I just keep dashing out and gutting.”

Boy Soprano. Offstage, Treigle is a tightly wound man with a gaunt face and the physique of a working bantamweight. His voice is deep, with a tough accent curiously compounded of New Orleans (where he lives) and Brooklyn (where he has never lived). “I started out as a boy soprano,” he says. “I could outSills Beverly Sills, but then I turned into a bass. I dunno what kind of voice I got now. Call it a dramatic bass.”

Treigle trained under Baritone Robert Weede, and joined the New York City Opera in 1953, where he has sung an astonishing variety of roles and is now the undisputed male star. He has never sung at the Metropolitan Opera (“They never asked me,” he shrugs. “So who cares?”) or in Europe.

Treigle’s great acting vitality, lithe movements and granitic voice make him supremely good at dramatizing evil. In Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah he sang Reverend Blitch, a man of God who fell through lust into destruction; his Mephistopheles in Gounod’s Faust is demon masquerading as man; to round off his demonic repertory, New York City Opera General Director Julius Rudel is toying with the idea of producing Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust (in which Treigle would play yet another Mephistopheles) and Busoni’s Doktor Faust (in which Treigle would switch roles and appear as Faust, leaving Mephisto to some diabolic tenor).

Treigle is an intensely religious man. “I was raised as a Baptist,” he says, “but my religion really is the Bible.” He takes a moralistic view of his evil doings in opera: “What better sermon could there be than the destruction of Satan?” His wife approves for another reason. “He’s so kind and gentle at home. That’s probably because he gets all the meanness out of his system on the stage.”