In Review > North America
Il Caso Mortara
NEW YORK CITY
Dicapo Opera Theatre
2/25/10
Perhaps the most significant of the innovations that have occurred at Dicapo Opera Theatre during Tobias Picker’s term as the company’s artistic advisor has been the initiation of a commissioning program. On February 25, Dicapo presented the world premiere of its first commission,
Il Caso Mortara, by the young Italian composer, Francesco Cilluffo, who celebrated his thirty-first birthday in January of this year.
Il Caso Mortara (The Mortara Case) deals with the life of Edgardo Mortara (1851–1940). Mortara was born in what was then the Papal States, that section of pre-unification Italy that was ruled by the Papacy. Although Jewish by birth, Edgardo was secretly baptized in infancy by a Catholic housekeeper. At age six, this baptism was revealed. Since Canon Law of the time prohibited the rearing of Catholic children by non-Catholics, Edgardo was taken from his parents at the express command of Pope Pius IX (1792–1878). Edgardo’s parents unsuccessfully fought for the return of their son. The incident took on international importance. Calls for an end to the theocracy increasingly gained international voice, and ultimately the Mortara case played a significant role in the dissolution of the Papal States. Edgardo Mortara ultimately become an Augustinian priest and missionary and devoted a significant amount of effort to preaching for the conversion of Jews. He died in a Belgian monastery in 1940, shortly after the Nazi occupation of that country. The Mortara case remains a stumbling block in relations between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people. In 2000, when the Vatican beatified Pius IX — a step in the effort to eventually name him a saint — several Jewish groups, including members of the Mortara family, protested.
Cilluffo’s opera covers the entirety of Mortara’s life, from baptism to death. The primary focal points are the suffering of Mortara’s family and Mortara’s split identity as a Jewish person and a Catholic priest. Unfortunately, the treatment tends toward the heavy-handed. The family scenes are unrelievedly maudlin, and the male Church figures uniformly are presented as stern, unloving pietists. The mood of the opera fluctuates between tragedy and unresolved conflict. This limited range of emotional expression becomes tedious over the opera’s two-hour duration, leaving the listener longing for greater variety. The problem is compounded by the lack of originality in Cilluffo’s music. Generally, he favors a chromatically infused tonality reminiscent of Hollywood films scores of the 1930s and ’40s. The opera sounds less like an inspired personal utterance than an opera written in the style of Franz Waxman or Alfred Newman. The singers are given some highly moving melodic lines, but these are only infrequently presented in full arias. Thus, character development remains incomplete. We get a sense of how Cilluffo interprets his characters, but it is rarely enough to make us empathize fully with them. The two exceptions are Edgardo’s father, Salamone, who gets a fine lamentation in Act II and the protagonist’s brother Riccardo, who in the most poignant scene of the opera confronts Edgardo with the news of their father’s death. The opera’s torpor was increased by Michael Capasso’s uninspired stage direction. Although Capasso’s set made good use of the stage, his deployment of the characters was predictable and unimaginative.
Despite these numerous handicaps, the cast delivered strong performances. Iulia Merca offered passion inconsolable as Marianna, Edgardo’s mother. Peter Furlong, as Salamone, seemed too distant in his early scenes but ultimately allowed us to share in the character’s grief. Chad Armstrong gave a stentorian performance as Pius IX, bringing the pontiff fully to life. Christopher DeVage warmly portrayed Edgardo as a conflicted, compassionate man, but he was hampered by the limitations imposed by the script and music. Of the secondary characters, two were outstanding — Christina Rohm, as Edgardo’s sister Rachele, and Ubaldo Feliciano-Hernandez, as Riccardo.
It is always sad when a new work fails to reward the dreams and energy that its creators have invested in it. Perhaps with revisions
Il Caso Mortara will achieve greater cohesion and success.
ARLO MCKINNON
