Stefano Landi: Il Sant' Alessio
by Benjamin Lazar, François Roussillon
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Actor: Alain Buet, Max Emanuel Cencic, Philippe Jaroussky, William Christie, Xavier SabataDirector: Benjamin Lazar, François Roussillon
Producer: Les Arts Florissants
Writer: Stefano Landi
Writer: Giulio Rospigliosi
DVD: Region Code 0
Audio: English (Unknown); German (Subtitled); English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); Italian (Subtitled); Italian (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, NTSC, Surround Sound
Picture Format: 1.78:1
Running Time: 162 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2008-06-24
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Virgin Classics
DVD Reviews of Stefano Landi: Il Sant' Alessio
DVD Review: A Squalid Saint, and the Birth of the Baroque
Summary: 5 Stars
Saint Alexis (Alessio) was a Roman patrician of the 4th C AD, the only son of a Christian family served by 500 slaves. On the evening of his properly arranged marriage, he informed his new bride that "consummation" wasn't in the plan, that in fact he was departing on a pilgrimage and had no return date in mind. Then he set off, with a retinue of slaves and a bag of money, for Ephesus and other points east. He soon gave away his wealth and settled into the life of a holy beggar for seventeen years, during which time he never communicated with his Roman home. His father sent a party of servants to search for him; they saw the beggar, and he recognized them, but no contact was made. After seventeen years, Alexis was carried to Rome by a storm at sea. In the street, he encountered his own father, who didn't recognize him, and pleaded for alms. The father let the "beggar" occupy a tiny space under the stairs in the family home. Alexis lived in sanctified austerity in that crawl space for another seventeen years, daily watching his parents and his wife mourn his mysterious absence. The servants of the household mocked and abused the squalid beggar behind the householders' backs. Finally, an angel announced to Alexis that his penitence was adequate and that he would be allowed to die. Alexis wrote a letter describing his 34-year "adventure" and was found clutching the letter in his dead hand. The Pope and the Co-Emperors of Rome all came to observe the corpse and to acclaim the profound sanctity of Alexis's abnegation of sinful ordinary life. Miracles began to occur.
That's basically the story, from the Legenda Aurea, and the plot of Stefano Landi's dramatized oratorio. The plot would have been completely familiar to everyone who heard the oratorio, since Alexis was a widely venerated saint. For people of this awkward 21st Century, the sanctity of Alexis's behavior isn't so easily credited. In the booklet accompanying this DVD, Dominique Fernandez writes: "...it seems incredible that someone who comes across as the most self-centered, misogynistic and sadistic of holy men should have been canonize... Did he not deceive his wife by offering her a happiness that he had already decided to deny her? ... Why wasn't SHE canonized for her self-abnegation and sacrifice? And what about Alexis's mother? She too was sacrificed for the sake of someone who doomed an entire family to despair in order to seek salvation through humility and chastity." These questions are not evaded in the libretto of Landi's drama. Much of the music is devoted to the lamentations of the abandoned family members, and all three victims of Alexis's penitence chide his corpse for such cruelty, yet the message of the oratorio is clearly that Alexis's actions were acceptable to God. In the end, Alexis is seen in the company of angels, ascending to heaven.
The libretto was no ordinary hack work. It was written with theological and political acuity by Giulio Rospigliosi, later to be Pope Clement. It's loaded with messages, not only about the nature of sanctity but also about the unique holiness of the City of Rome. Both the libretto and the musical score were published and disseminated widely; numerous copies have survived, making the authentic production of this "opera" relatively achievable. The score even includes precise instrumentation, and the libretto includes stage directions. First-hand descriptions of the performances, by people of the audience, have survived as well.
Although the instruments are specified in the score, precise parts for them are not. Only the chords of the continuo are written out in detail; all the instrumentalists would have been expected to improvise according to well-known rules and patterns. That is, astonishingly, what Les Arts Florissants does so artfully in this recording; every ornamental flourish you hear has been improvised by the individual musician.
Mr. Fernandez in the notes, and William Christie in the video interview that comes as an interesting bonus on DVD disk 2, propose a startling hypothesis: the Baroque in art, architecture, and music was a deliberate response to Lutheranism and Calvinism, orchestrated by the Jesuit Order and particularly by Maffeo Barberini (Pope Urban VIII) and his artistic henchman Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The modus operandi was to seek the opposite pole from the puritanical austerity and individualism of Protestantism by saturating the public sphere of life with opulence and drama, to seduce the consciences of catholics through their senses. Anyone who has toured the Bernini buildings and fountains of Rome might find this "conspiracy' rather credible. I'm predisposed to think the "stage-managed Birth of the Baroque" is not the whole story, but it's an awfully good story. And how ironic, how very odd, it is that one of the outstanding works of this Counter-Reformation extravagance should have been an opera about Saint Alexis, the epitome of the denial of pomp and pleasure!
Landi's Il Sant'Alessio was commissioned by Urban VIII and performed in 1632, with maximum opulence, in the Barberini palace in Rome, a building designed by Bernini. Secular opera was prohibited in the Papal States, though thriving elsewhere in Italy, and no women were allowed to sing or act on stage in Rome, neither in palaces nor especially in churches. Thus was born the special Roman genre of operatic oratorios (orare is Latin for 'pray') using religious texts and performed 'at the altar.' Since women were excluded, the roles of women were sung by boys and especially by "castrati"... and how peculiar is it that castrati were of such special utility to the Catholic Church well until the end of the 19th Century! In Landi's opera, only the roles of the father and the devil are written for bass voices. Alexis, his wife, mother, nurse, neighbor, and the two comic servants are all role originally sung by castrati.
William Christie has conscientiously attempted to recreate Il San'Alessio with maximum historical authenticity. Above all, there are no women in this production. Look closely at the dancers! They are all men. Modern opera companies have a severe shortage of castrati (and I suspect some impresarios regret it), so Christie has assembled a cast of six extremely skillful "falsettists" - countertenors - and he is certain, he says, that their artistry has to be as fine as that of the castrati, something that has only been possible in the last twenty years of the Early Music revival. The role of Alessio is sung by Philippe Jaroussky, whose soprano voice is as rich and flexible as that of any diva singing today. Musically, this is a sublime performance. It's hard to imagine a better. The choir of boys - La Maitrise de Caen - sound as boyishly angelic as they look. One boy in particular must have been reincarnated from a painting by Raffaelo, with his adorable curls and cherubic beauty.
Get ready for that, my friends! There is an affect of androgeny and gender-ambiguity about this production that may make some modern viewers edgy. Is it the inevitable quality of the original or is it something that appeals to these wonderful performers personally? Once again, there's an irony perhaps in this subtle portrayal of a saint who lived in a closet for seventeen years.
Stage director Benjamin Lazar must have spent hours studying Caravaggio and other mannerist painters in order to copy the "chiaroscuro" lighting and costume-coloring of this production, all candle-warm and woody. Likewise, the dramatic postures and gestures of the singers are lifted straight from Baroque paintings and statues. Jaroussky might easily have posed for a painting of Saint Alexis by El Greco. A modern viewer will possibly feel uneasy with such affectations for the first scene or two, but as the opera soars musically, the whole atmosphere becomes entrancing.
What sort of music did Landi write for us? The idiom is that of the operatic madrigal -- recitativo blending into aria and ritornello, with all resources devoted to making the text emotionally expressive. The obvious comparison is to the secular operas of Claudio Monteverdi, Landi's contemporary. Stefano Landi was not as great a composer as Monteverdi - not even close - but his music is powerful and subtle, and the singing and playing of Les Arts Florissants could make the Caen telephone directory sound sublime. Taken as a whole, this DVD is a complex and satisfying experience of music, stagecraft, and history all at once.
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