Verdi was sick — genuinely, frighteningly sick — when he began to think seriously about I Masnadieri, and that exhaustion of body and the strange creative fever that accompanied it may explain something essential about the opera’s character: its rawness, its sudden lurching intensities, the way it can feel simultaneously overheated and provisional.
The story of how it got written is almost novelistic. Five days after the premiere of Attila in March 1846, Verdi collapsed. His doctors ordered six months of complete rest. No composing. No future commitments. He was tended by his devoted young pupil Emmanuele Muzio — a touching, slightly melancholy figure in the Verdi story — and gradually he allowed himself to recover at Recoaro, taking the waters, doing essentially nothing. Then his friend Andrea Maffei appeared. A man of real literary cultivation, a translator of both Shakespeare and Schiller, Maffei was exactly the wrong person to visit a composer trying not to think about opera. He set Verdi’s imagination running in two directions at once: toward Schiller’s Die Räuber on one hand, toward Macbeth on the other. That Verdi managed to sustain both projects more or less simultaneously — eventually giving Florence the Shakespeare and reserving the Schiller for London — is proof of the almost frightening productivity that his contemporaries Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti had exhausted themselves trying to match.
London. The impresario Benjamin Lumley. Her Majesty’s Theatre. None of the great Italian predecessors had written an opera specifically for the English capital, which gave the commission a certain historical weight even before a note was composed. Verdi traveled via Paris, vocal score in hand. The premiere in July 1847 was an event — Jenny Lind was in the cast, which alone would have guaranteed a sensation — but the opera never really caught on, and for most of the century and a half since, it has remained in a curious limbo: too flawed for the repertoire, too interesting to ignore entirely.
This new production, presented as a semi-staged performance at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples — the first time the work had been heard in that house since 1849 — arrives as part of C Major’s ambitious Tutto Verdi series, undertaken in association with Unitel and the Teatro Regio in Parma’s Verdi Festival. The series has been proceeding more or less sequentially through all twenty-six operas, and the earlier installments, fully staged, set expectations high. A semi-staging is a compromise, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. The imagination does extra work; the drama loses the specific pressure that bodies in defined space can create.
And yet I Masnadieri is an opera that almost dares you to stage it convincingly. Schiller’s Die Räuber is a sprawling, youthful, magnificent mess — the work of a twenty-one-year-old who hadn’t yet learned to be economical — and Maffei’s compression of it into four acts strips away so much psychological scaffolding that the characters can seem to behave like figures in a fever dream, lurching from crisis to crisis without the connective tissue that makes motivation legible. Amalia’s devotion, Carlo’s anguish, the treachery of Francesco — these need performing of considerable intelligence to register as human rather than operatic convention.
What the San Carlo performance offers, and it is not nothing, is the sheer physical excitement of Verdi’s writing for voices heard in a warm acoustic. The baritone writing for Francesco — that darkly scheming villain who belongs to the same fraternity as Iago and the Miller of Luisa Miller, though he lacks their ultimate refinement — has a slashing energy that is distinctly Verdian in its directness. There is a quality to early Verdi that later Verdi sometimes trades away: a kind of ungoverned forward drive, almost reckless, the musical equivalent of a man who doesn’t yet know his own strength.
Semi-staged or not, the claim to world premiere video recording status is major. I Masnadieri has been poorly served on disc; the Philips recording with Bergonzi, Caballé, Raimondi, and Ghiaurov under Gardelli from 1974 remains the essential studio version, a performance of real musical intelligence even if it never quite makes the opera feel inevitable. Having a video document of a live reading — with all the unpredictability and immediacy that entails — fills a genuine gap.
Whether this particular performance fills it triumphantly is another question, and one the evidence of the semi-staging makes harder to answer with full confidence. The opera’s strengths — its melodic generosity, its moments of genuine dramatic compression, the extraordinary prelude for solo cello — emerge clearly enough. Its weaknesses are harder to paper over. But then Verdi at his most imperfect is still Verdi: the pulse is there, the instinct for the human voice is there, and the sense of a composer still discovering the dimensions of his own talent gives I Masnadieri a quality of charged incompleteness that more polished works sometimes lack. This album captures that much, at least — and for students of the early Verdi, that is reason enough to pay attention.
