![]() Matthew Polenzani (left, Don Carlos) and Etienne Dupuis (Posa) in The Metropolitan Opera’s Don Carlos. The Met’s 1979 production at last offered the Fontainebleau act, augmented by its rediscovered prelude and introduction, surely the most regrettable of Verdi’s pre-premiere cuts-a happy addition that once more vanished with the Met’s next new staging, in 2010. ![]() I missed it badly in my first staged performances at the Met, good as they were and when, over the years, recordings exposed me to more of the Verdi-sanctioned excisions-the veil-and-mask exchange between Elisabeth and Eboli that opens the garden scene, for example, and the 16-minute ballet that ensues-I didn’t want to do without those, either. It was a Met broadcast of the truncated Don Carlo that introduced me to the opera but once I’d heard Solti’s 1965 Decca recording of all five acts, I found myself loath to forgo the masterfully constructed Act 1, where, in the wintry forest of Fontainebleau, Verdi’s Spanish prince and French princess meet and fall in ill-fated love. For that I blame Verdi, who over a two-decade span subjected his expansive Parisian grand opéra of 1866–67 to a series of cuts and revisions, until he finally retired his editorial pen with the four-act “Milan version,” premiered in 1884, and the largely identical “Modena version” of 1886, which restored the opera’s Milan-deleted first act. This Schiller-inspired melding of romantic and political intrigues at the court of Spain’s Philip II remains my most treasured Verdi score-but it’s also the one that, in performance, almost always leaves me longing for something more. Don Carlo, in Italian, not Don Carlos, in French-that’s how I, like nearly everyone who loves this noblest of operas, first made its acquaintance. ![]()
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