Dutch National Opera opens its new season with a powerful ‘Pagliacci / Cavalleria rusticana’

The National Opera opened its new season with “Pagliacci / Cavalleria rusticana,” a revival of Robert Carsen’s 2019 staging that promises real life but finds its sharpest force in exaggeration. The production unfolds both onstage and throughout the auditorium, immediately challenging the boundary between theater and reality.

Carsen reverses the usual order of the two operas. “Pagliacci” begins with its Prologue, in which the audience is addressed directly. Its story of adultery takes place inside a theater and reaches its climax onstage. Carsen then shifts the adultery story of “Cavalleria rusticana” from the church and village square to the wings and dressing rooms of an opera house.

The staging produces striking images. The full opera chorus changes clothes for a performance the audience never sees. At the end, a curtain keeps falling until it lies helplessly on the floor in front of the bare stage. The production repeatedly asks where the fourth wall really is.

The second act of “Pagliacci” is the high point. A commedia dell’arte troupe acts out a love triangle that has just been revealed backstage. When the clown Pagliaccio breaks out of character and kills his wife Nedda and her lover, the approach to the murders is both comic and breathless, with grotesquely enlarged costumes and exaggerated acting.

Roman Burdenko again sings Tonio and Alfio, while Dutch mezzo-soprano Maria Warenberg makes an excellent house debut as Lola. The chorus and orchestra are the true stars, led with warmth by Andrea Battistoni. The duet between Santuzza and Turiddu in “Cavalleria rusticana” is powerful but less refined, and lacks the provocative doubling that makes “Pagliacci” cut so deeply.