The Good, The Bad and La Forza

Verdi's opera meets (and inspires) the "spaghetti" Western.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

L.-R.: Il buono (Clint Eastwood), il brutto, (Eli Wallach) il cattivo (Lee Van Cleef)
© 1966 United Artists Pictures.

Last night, very late, I was watching The Good, the Bad and The Ugly, Sergio Leone's masterpiece and the third movie of the trilogy starring Clint Eastwood as "The Man With No Name." About an hour in, just as a random cannonball demolished the second story of the hotel where Tuco (Eli Wallach) had Clint at gunpoint, I started thinking about Verdi--specifically his 1862 opera La Forza del Destino.


Forza (as it's known to opera lovers) is the bastard child among Verdi's mature works, held as either the highest level of genius or a mishappen mess. It is frequently criticized for a total lack of Aristotelian unities, a plot held together by happenstance. A century later, Leone's so-called "spaghetti" Westerns faced the same criticism, mostly from American critics.

A quick recap: Don Alvaro, eloping with Leonora di Vargas when they are confronted by her dad. Alvaro surrenders his weapon. It goes off, killing Vargas. Carlo di Vargas (the son) swears vendetta. Leonora becomes a hermit. Alvaro enlists, only to find Carlo in his regiment. Returning to Spain, Alvaro becomes a priest. Carlo shows up. They duel. Alvaro mortally wounds Carlo. Leonora is killed by a dying Carlo and dies in Alvaro's arms.

Part of what makes Forza remarkable (if bewildering) to newcomers is its reliance on supporting characters in addition to the main trio. Part of that is because Verdi conflated two sources for the libretto: Rivas' play Don Alvaro and Schiller's Wallensteins Lager, which contributed the battle scenes in Act III. This is Verdi's war opera, and he fills its battlefields with memorable figures: the Mayor of Hornachuelos, the gypsy turned military recruiter Preziosilla, the muleteer Trabuco. This vast canvas of humanity serves as comic relief and much-needed contrast to the drama of the three leads.

James Bond Vs. The Philharmonic

Roger Moore as 007, getting ready to commute across the Piazza San Marco in an inflatable gondola.
Photo © 1979 EON Productions/DANJAQ S.A./MGM Studios/United Artists.

Moonraker (1979) is one of the more dated James Bond films, a high-flown science fiction extravaganza where the villain plans to use space shuttles (a new idea at the time) and nerve gas to wipe out humanity from an orbital platform. The movie was rushed out to put Bond in competition with the likes of Star Wars and Close Encounters. It is now remembered for its over-the-top plot and its now-dated special effects.

But it's also a movie that has a pretty good John Barry score, from the romantic opening theme (sung by Shirley Bassey but originally offered to Frank Sinatra and Johnny Mathis) to lush orchestrations of trademark Barry music like the "007" and the "Space March."

Bond movies occasionally toss in classical music references. But Moonraker is front-loaded with them:

• When Drax (the bad guy, played by Michael Lonsdale) first appears, he is seated at an enormous grand piano playing Fréderic Chopin's "Rain-drop" Prelude. Although the Chopin is written in D♭, Drax plays it in D for reasons known only to Mr. Barry.
• The hunting horn plays a rising C-E-G progression. Yep, it's the first three notes of "Dawn" from Richard Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra, also known as the "Theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey." And it's clearly being played on a trumpet.
• The chase through the Venetian canals ends when Bond reveals that his gondola has an inflatable rubber skirt, enabling the boat to climb stairs and go on land. He escapes across the Piazza di San Marco to the "Tritsch-Tratsch Polka" by Johann Strauss Jr.

The whole sequence is pretty tratsch-y, nein?

• "Vestia la giubba" (from Leoncavallo's I Pagliacci) also appears, being sung at an outdoor café in the Venice sequence. Meanwhile Bond is upstairs in the glass museum, brawling with Chang, one of Drax's less useful henchmen. The guy gets thrown through a (glass) clock face and crashes head-first through the piano, interrupting the tenor before he can do the "crying clown" bit.
• Tchaikovsky's Love Theme from Romeo & Juliet appears in the movie a few times. It represents the ongoing romance between steel-toothed 7'2" hitman Jaws (played by Richard Kiel) and Dolly, the petite, pigtailed blonde who becomes the big lug's love interest.

The Metropolitan Opera Live in HD Preview

Part II of the Metropolitan Opera User's Guide

Ernani (Roberto de Biasio, l.) and Elvira (Angela Meade)
in Act IV of Verdi's Ernani at the Met.
Photo by Marty Sohl © 2012 The Metropolitan Opera. 

Read Part I: Buying Tickets.

Although some of us old-fashioned types like seeing their operas in the big house at Lincoln Center, the Met has done very well with its Live in HD broadcasts. The schedule for the 2011-2012 season has been announced, and is presented below for your planning pleasure.

This year' offerings include the second half of Wagner's Ring, along with operatic appearances by Anna Netrebko, Natalie Dessay, and Mahatma Gandhi. (Well, sort of.) So getcha popcorn ready.

Oct. 15: Anna Bolena by Gaetano Donizetti
What's it about? Anna loses her head to King Henry VIII in the Italian version of The Tudors.
Why see it? Anna Netrebko sings the title role.

Oct. 29: Don Giovanni by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
What's it about? The greatest lover in history makes a fatal dinner invitation.
Why see it? To see if James Levine conducts after a five-month hiatus.

Nov. 5: Siegfried
by Richard Wagner
What's it about? The boisterous exploits of a sword-swinging doofus. Part III of The Ring.
Why see it? Fafner, (the dragon in Act II) is bound to be cooler than the dragon in Das Rheingold.

Nov. 19: Satyagraha
by Philip Glass
What's it about? Gandhi: The Early Years.
Why see it? To see if Mr. Glass finally allows subtitles for his opera. The libretto is in Sanskrit. And no, that wasn't a joke.

Dec. 3: Rodelinda by Georg Freidrich Handel
What's it about? Intrigue and jealousy in medieval Lombardy. With great singing.
Why see it? Because it stars the fabulous Renée Fleming.

Dec. 10: Faust by Charles Gounod
What's it about? Goethe's morality play reimagined as a 20th century parable of the atomic bomb.
Why see it? To determine if the bomb is more than just a metaphor.

Jan. 21, 2012:The Enchanted Island by Handel, Vivaldi, and some other people.
What's it about? The Met attempts a baroque pastiche. The plot? Episode I of Shakespeare's The Tempest.
Why see it? Because pairing David Daniels with Joyce DiDonato can save anything.

Feb. 11: Götterdämmerung by Richard Wagner
What's it about? Briefly: Boy loves girl. Boy forgets girl. Girl has boy killed. World ends. Part IV of the Ring.
Why see it? Because the Reverend Harold Camping has nothing on Richard Wagner's end-of-the-world scenario.

Feb. 25: Ernani by Giuseppe Verdi
What's it about? Verdi's well-traveled tale of a gentleman bandit with a weakness for horn calls.
Why see it? A star is born: Angela Meade comes into her own in the role of Elvira.

April 7: Manon by Jules Massenet
What's it about? A good girl goes very bad, goes to New Orleans, and dies.
Why see it? The same reason to see Anna Bolena: La Netrebko is singing the title role.

April 14: La Traviata by Giuseppe Verdi
What's it about? A good girl gone bad finds true love, moves back to Paris, and dies.
Why see it? Natalie Dessay takes her turn in the the Willy Decker "red dress" production.

Composers At The Movies

It's Oscar season. So today I decided to do something a little different. Here are five quotes from movies that involve composers. The kicker is, the movies themselves have NOTHING to do with classical music. One is a Bond film. One is Arnold Schwarzenegger. You get the idea.
Enjoy....

"You don't like Beethoven. You don't know what you're missing. Overtures like that get my...juices flowing. But sometimes he can be a little f__king boring. That's why I STOPPED!"

Beethoven, ready for his closeup.

Gary Oldman (who played Beethoven in Immortal Beloved) bursts into an apartment, kills three members of a family with a shotgun, and then goes up to the shaking father and rhapsodizes about the composer. These events start the plot of Luc Besson's film Léon, known to American audiences by its other title, The Professional.

"The bubbles...they tickle my...TCHAIKOVSKY!"
Russian agent Pola Ivanova (Fiona Fullerton) reacts to romantic music (in this case, Swan Lake) while sharing a San Francisco hot tub with 007 (Roger Moore) in A View To a Kill.

"You know that if Giuseppe Verdi had been born an Englishman, his name would have been...Joe Green."
Socialite (and murder suspect) Patrick Redfern (played by Nicholas Clay) translates the name of the famous composer for Hercule Poirot (Peter Ustinov) in the all-star 1982 Agatha Christie murder mystery Evil Under the Sun.

"We'll come in low, out of the rising sun and about a mile out. We'll put on music...I use Wagner! Scares the hell out of the (Vietnamese)! My boys love it!"
Col. Kilgore (Robert Duvall) setting out his helicopter battle plan (in which he blasts "Ride of the Valkyries" while dropping napalm) in Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam War epic, Apocalypse Now.

"Watch out, Jack. He killed Mozart!"
Danny Madigan (Austin O'Brien) warns Last Action Hero star Jack Slater (Arnold Schwarzenegger) that FBI agent John Practice may be more dangerous than he looks. Practice is played by F. Murray Abraham, who won an Oscar for his starring role in Amadeus.