A Ball with Many Masks

Verdi had to disguise his Ballo in maschera to get it on stage

Verdi's Un ballo in maschera is an opera of many faces. It is, of course, an Italian opera, first performed in Rome, but it's set in the court of Sweden. So far, so good. But when it was originally written in the late 1850s, Europe was very nervous of political assassinations, because several well-planned attempts and successes had made a stir in the news at that time. Therefore Verdi was forced by the Italian censors to transpose the plot (based on the real-life murder of Sweden's King Gustav III), to an imaginary Boston, where Creoles, gypsies and sailors rub shoulders in an odd cross between European high society and an early America that never existed.
"There's still constantly debate about how you're going to mount it," comments soprano Shannon Mercer, who plays the page Oskar in the Canadian Opera Company's upcoming staging of Un ballo in maschera. In this edition, a remount of a 20-year-old production with lavish costumes and scenery, the COC is making the common choice to revert to Verdi's original Swedish setting.
However, says Mercer, "there's always problems with the characters, so I'm having to make some changes with the text." Names, for example, change from Riccardo to Gustavus, from Ulrica to Arvidson and from Renato to Anckarstroem, which causes some understandable difficulty in the translation.
At least Mercer's role only changes by one letter: from Oscar to Oskar, but this character also exists in several cultures at once. In the Italian opera tradition, Mercer explains, "Mezzos were usually given the 'pants' roles, but for some reason Verdi borrowed from the French tradition and used a soprano. And they had some trouble with that," she adds.
Mercer is most often seen in early and Baroque opera; she has recently appeared in Opera Atelier's Medée and the COC's Giulio Cesare in Egitto. In fact, she usually prefers this repertoire. "I feel I'm able to express myself better and more clearly because you don't have a full orchestra and you're not backed up by a full chorus. There's less, but less is more," she says.
However, she is enjoying the role of Oskar, which, "because it's borrowed from the French style, is the most rhythmically and stylistically different from the other characters," she continues. "All the others are lyrical and legatto, and I'm more tripping. Vocally, I'm the lightest sound. Ulrica, the fortuneteller, is the darkest. They also say that my character is the King's character." [Like Leporello with Don Giovanni in Mozart's famous opera, Oskar mirrors and complements the actions of the king. In fact, Mercer says, "There are lots of books that mention that this is Verdi's Don Giovanni.")
The Canadian Opera Company presents Verdi's Un ballo in maschera in Italian with English surtitles from January 24 to February 8. It runs in repertory with Leos Janacek's Jenufa at the Hummingbird Centre. For tickets, call 416.872.2262 or visit www.coc.ca. On January 19, the COC's Face to Face series presents music scholar Philip Gossett in a discussion about Un ballo in maschera. (Tickets $15, or free for students with valid photo ID.)

Publication Date: 2003-01-26
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