Don Carlo (Vienna 2024)
Feb. 2nd, 2026 10:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnokay I had SO many feelings about this 2024 Vienna Don Carlo. Watching another whole Don Carlo in early 2026 was not actually in my plans (having watched lots of bits and pieces in late 2025), but uh I may have written a fic involving a fictional staging of this opera that doubled the role of Posa, and then ![[a03.org profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_other.png)
Ladybug_21 mentioned that they'd heard of a production with doubles of all the historical characters -- meaning not Posa but the other main characters -- and of course I had to go find it. I am here to report that it is this absolutely wild regie modern AU that I adored and found completely riveting. Those of you who dislike regie would greatly dislike it (although the singing is great, consider listening to the audio) and those of you who like regie would quite enjoy it, I think. The director is Kirill Serebrennikov, and now I want to see any opera he ever does. I found the staging (with a couple of exceptions) a rather coherent and fascinating concept.
(So as to put this outside of the cut: this is the 4-act version. Joshua Guerrero is Carlo, Étienne Dupuis is Rodrigo, Roberto Tagliavini is Filippo, Asmik Grigorian is Elisabetta, and Eve-Maud Hubeaux is Eboli. I had not heard or watched any of them except Dupuis, but I thought all of them were great, the singing was just gorgeous and their acting is wonderful too. I am really loving the modern trend of opera singers being great actors.)
The setting of the opera is supposed to evoke a (probably near-future) corporate laboratory-like workplace. (Actually, I guess it's supposed to be a Costume Research Institute, but I think it works a lot better with source canon and even with the internal logic to imagine it as a corporate for-profit entity.) Filippo is, of course, clearly the CEO/director of the company, with Elisabetta and Carlo also involved somehow in it, and Rodrigo and Eboli are also workers there; Filippo is in a suit, but the other three, as well as the Grand Inquisitor, have lockers and lab coats (and there are a number of other non-singing workers walking around in lab coats as well). The opera chorus is almost always onlookers who are taking tours of the company and/or observing the company.
The idea, I think, is that the company researches/produces historical textiles, with their star product being historical-cosplay-ish clothing -- and that's where the historical doubles come in; they are figures of King Philip, Elisabeth of Valois, Prince Carlos, and Princess Eboli that are dressed in the historical clothing in the first act, and undressed again in the third act after the "auto-da-fe" scene. These are real people, but mannequin-like; they don't speak or move very naturally, and mostly stand still or in various poses that may or may not mimic the opera action (if the opera scene were actually played as a period drama instead of modern AU). They may be clones of some sort? this is never spelled out explicitly. The singing characters regard them more as objects than people, and they don't really react to the singers, with a couple of notable exceptions that I'll talk about later. Their dressing-up comes with blurbs on a big screen with a couple of sentences about the historical character.
Carlo and Rodrigo are bros who have a satisfying amount of friendship chemistry, though it's deliberately modernized -- their friendship duet is sung with hands in pockets, for instance. They share a devotion to libertà -- we don't know what this means exactly in their duet (although I was charmed and amused when Rodrigo offers Carlo a T-shirt, matching his own, with that word displayed on it), but we find out in Rodrigo's stirring speech to Filippo: he shows Filippo, on his laptop, images of the consumer-mad world, with sweatshops as well as cheap textiles being trashed -- the current imper deserto immenso, orrendo -- this part is great, although I felt like there wasn't that much chemistry between Rodrigo and Filippo (honestly, Filippo is mostly visibly ignoring him talking aboutFlanders the sweatshops), which is fine within the scene itself, but as part of the larger arc, there kind of has to be chemistry within them in this scene to make the whole Filippo-Rodrigo-Carlo triangle work later on, as well as the Inquisitor scene, and I didn't think those worked nearly as well.
The auto-da-fe scene becomes much more of a central scene. In the base opera, it's basically a spectacle that just happens to be in the middle; there's no foreshadowing of "hey, btw, we're gonna be holding an auto-da-fe tomorrow!" or anything like that, as far as I'm aware. In this one, it turns out that such care is taken to prep the historical doubles because their costumes are the stars of the fashion demonstration the company is giving in the auto-da-fe scene, with Carlo coming in with (of course) protesters who wreck the whole spectacle of the demo, and it actually kind of makes the entire arc of the opera make more visceral sense to me?? Tebaldo (Ilia Staple), which here is not a trousers role -- okay, literally it's a trousers role, I guess, as she wears pants, but Tebaldo is unabashedly a cheerful cute woman lab worker -- anyway, Tebaldo is clearly just devastated by the whole thing, she is shocked and horrified that this demo that she was involved in has imploded in such a messy way -- it kind of updates the historical shock in the base opera that everyone feels when Carlo pulls a sword against the King. (The two of them actually do pull out the historical doubles' swords at the appropriate time, but there's much more of a vibe of everyone going "omg this is a PR nightmare in front of the demo spectators" than "are you actually going to kill each other??") The undressing of the historical doubles afterwards, in Act 3, now that the demo is over, also serves to underline that arc and add an elegiac tone (which is itself underlined by the big screen showing information about the historical characters' deaths).
The Elisabetta-Carlo-Filippo-Eboli love quadrangle here becomes a workplace/possibly-family-Succession-like drama, and I found this oddly satisfying. In particular, the modernization does away with some of the worst rape-culture-y parts of the opera. Carlo does not attempt to maul Elisabetta in his Act 1 duet or faint for love of her (my least favorite part of traditional stagings -- although at that point the historical doubles are arranged in the configuration where he is fainting-ish), and when Elisabetta comes in complaining her jewelry was stolen (Giustizia!) she is fighting mad during that whole scene, which I think is great -- she's not subservient to Filippo, she's just done with him. He does appear to slap her, which leads to the "Aita alla Regina!" and the quartet, but she doesn't faint or anything, she is just standing there almost unbelieving, like, "oh wow, you went there, did you? Now I'm REALLY done." (If you couldn't tell, I was SO rooting for this Elisabetta. Yeah!) This is one place where one of the historical doubles acts of her own volition: historical!Elisabeth looks at modern!Elisabetta and raises a hand to her cheek, and I just loved it.
I'd been wondering this whole time how they'd do death in this modern AU, and hoping it wouldn't really be death, because that would be too silly and break the immersion. And I shouldn't have worried. The revenge of the King, in this iteration, is that a set of lab-coated, stocking-masked-and-therefore-anonymized workers comes briskly in, and Rodrigo, having divested himself of his laptop and his revolutionary T-shirts, puts on the white coat and pants and gloves, and his very last words are cut off not by his death (as in a conventional production) but by them putting a stocking mask on him -- and now he is another anonymous lab-coated stocking-masked worker. It's chilling and very, very effective. (Carlo does not take his hand, but it's clear that he can't really do this.) What's not clear to me, at least, is whether Rodrigo in any way consented to this, whether this is him selling out -- is this a worse betrayal of Carlo? -- or is this a kind of dystopic future where this is something that Filippo can wholly force on him? Both really interesting interpretations!
The last act was riveting, which I don't usually say: the doubles come back in (they may be figments of Elisabetta and Carlo's imaginations at this point?) and some of their duet is sung to the doubles (Carlo singis to Elisabetta's double and Elisabetta sings to Carlo's double), which allows them to be intensely romantic and affectionate in a way that they can scarcely be with each other. The very end I'm not totally sure about; The Emperor's clothing crumbles away (that part was great), Elisabetta gets wrapped in plastic wrap (...okaaaaay), I actually don't know what happened to Carlo, he may have just left in a huff.
The part that absolutely did not work for me was the Grand Inquisitor. I was kind of half-expecting him to be a government regulator, but nah, he's just some dude who has been lurking around who I guess does in fact work for the same company, and who, when he has his big duet with Filippo, brandishes a light-up cross while various religious-themed pictures are thrown up as backdrop. So I guess maybe this is religion as opiate of the masses? It didn't really land for me -- in the original, it lands and lands hard because religion is such a big deal for them, complete with the auto-da-fe as an expression of their obsessive devotion to that religion -- but here I was like, okay, are the kinds of people who go to a fashion costume demo the kinds who would knuckle down to a religious Grand Inquisitor. Naaaaaah. So that part just really didn't work for me.
But tl;dr: I did feel like the updating of the setting did drive home what an opera of big themes and big emotions Don Carlo is, and how the relationships (except for Filippo-Rodrigo, in this production) drive the big emotions that drive the opera. (Interestingly, the singers don't touch very much; Rodrigo and Carlo do a little, and Elisabetta and Carlo touch hands very briefly in their last duet, and then of course embrace right before Filippo walks in -- but as opposed to that heartbreaking Bastille Don Carlos I saw, it still all works without the touching, and just highlights how our society is much less touchy-feely than it could be.
I really liked it, and I was both thinking about it days later and humming little bits of the score.
Ladybug_21 mentioned that they'd heard of a production with doubles of all the historical characters -- meaning not Posa but the other main characters -- and of course I had to go find it. I am here to report that it is this absolutely wild regie modern AU that I adored and found completely riveting. Those of you who dislike regie would greatly dislike it (although the singing is great, consider listening to the audio) and those of you who like regie would quite enjoy it, I think. The director is Kirill Serebrennikov, and now I want to see any opera he ever does. I found the staging (with a couple of exceptions) a rather coherent and fascinating concept.(So as to put this outside of the cut: this is the 4-act version. Joshua Guerrero is Carlo, Étienne Dupuis is Rodrigo, Roberto Tagliavini is Filippo, Asmik Grigorian is Elisabetta, and Eve-Maud Hubeaux is Eboli. I had not heard or watched any of them except Dupuis, but I thought all of them were great, the singing was just gorgeous and their acting is wonderful too. I am really loving the modern trend of opera singers being great actors.)
The setting of the opera is supposed to evoke a (probably near-future) corporate laboratory-like workplace. (Actually, I guess it's supposed to be a Costume Research Institute, but I think it works a lot better with source canon and even with the internal logic to imagine it as a corporate for-profit entity.) Filippo is, of course, clearly the CEO/director of the company, with Elisabetta and Carlo also involved somehow in it, and Rodrigo and Eboli are also workers there; Filippo is in a suit, but the other three, as well as the Grand Inquisitor, have lockers and lab coats (and there are a number of other non-singing workers walking around in lab coats as well). The opera chorus is almost always onlookers who are taking tours of the company and/or observing the company.
The idea, I think, is that the company researches/produces historical textiles, with their star product being historical-cosplay-ish clothing -- and that's where the historical doubles come in; they are figures of King Philip, Elisabeth of Valois, Prince Carlos, and Princess Eboli that are dressed in the historical clothing in the first act, and undressed again in the third act after the "auto-da-fe" scene. These are real people, but mannequin-like; they don't speak or move very naturally, and mostly stand still or in various poses that may or may not mimic the opera action (if the opera scene were actually played as a period drama instead of modern AU). They may be clones of some sort? this is never spelled out explicitly. The singing characters regard them more as objects than people, and they don't really react to the singers, with a couple of notable exceptions that I'll talk about later. Their dressing-up comes with blurbs on a big screen with a couple of sentences about the historical character.
Carlo and Rodrigo are bros who have a satisfying amount of friendship chemistry, though it's deliberately modernized -- their friendship duet is sung with hands in pockets, for instance. They share a devotion to libertà -- we don't know what this means exactly in their duet (although I was charmed and amused when Rodrigo offers Carlo a T-shirt, matching his own, with that word displayed on it), but we find out in Rodrigo's stirring speech to Filippo: he shows Filippo, on his laptop, images of the consumer-mad world, with sweatshops as well as cheap textiles being trashed -- the current imper deserto immenso, orrendo -- this part is great, although I felt like there wasn't that much chemistry between Rodrigo and Filippo (honestly, Filippo is mostly visibly ignoring him talking about
The auto-da-fe scene becomes much more of a central scene. In the base opera, it's basically a spectacle that just happens to be in the middle; there's no foreshadowing of "hey, btw, we're gonna be holding an auto-da-fe tomorrow!" or anything like that, as far as I'm aware. In this one, it turns out that such care is taken to prep the historical doubles because their costumes are the stars of the fashion demonstration the company is giving in the auto-da-fe scene, with Carlo coming in with (of course) protesters who wreck the whole spectacle of the demo, and it actually kind of makes the entire arc of the opera make more visceral sense to me?? Tebaldo (Ilia Staple), which here is not a trousers role -- okay, literally it's a trousers role, I guess, as she wears pants, but Tebaldo is unabashedly a cheerful cute woman lab worker -- anyway, Tebaldo is clearly just devastated by the whole thing, she is shocked and horrified that this demo that she was involved in has imploded in such a messy way -- it kind of updates the historical shock in the base opera that everyone feels when Carlo pulls a sword against the King. (The two of them actually do pull out the historical doubles' swords at the appropriate time, but there's much more of a vibe of everyone going "omg this is a PR nightmare in front of the demo spectators" than "are you actually going to kill each other??") The undressing of the historical doubles afterwards, in Act 3, now that the demo is over, also serves to underline that arc and add an elegiac tone (which is itself underlined by the big screen showing information about the historical characters' deaths).
The Elisabetta-Carlo-Filippo-Eboli love quadrangle here becomes a workplace/possibly-family-Succession-like drama, and I found this oddly satisfying. In particular, the modernization does away with some of the worst rape-culture-y parts of the opera. Carlo does not attempt to maul Elisabetta in his Act 1 duet or faint for love of her (my least favorite part of traditional stagings -- although at that point the historical doubles are arranged in the configuration where he is fainting-ish), and when Elisabetta comes in complaining her jewelry was stolen (Giustizia!) she is fighting mad during that whole scene, which I think is great -- she's not subservient to Filippo, she's just done with him. He does appear to slap her, which leads to the "Aita alla Regina!" and the quartet, but she doesn't faint or anything, she is just standing there almost unbelieving, like, "oh wow, you went there, did you? Now I'm REALLY done." (If you couldn't tell, I was SO rooting for this Elisabetta. Yeah!) This is one place where one of the historical doubles acts of her own volition: historical!Elisabeth looks at modern!Elisabetta and raises a hand to her cheek, and I just loved it.
I'd been wondering this whole time how they'd do death in this modern AU, and hoping it wouldn't really be death, because that would be too silly and break the immersion. And I shouldn't have worried. The revenge of the King, in this iteration, is that a set of lab-coated, stocking-masked-and-therefore-anonymized workers comes briskly in, and Rodrigo, having divested himself of his laptop and his revolutionary T-shirts, puts on the white coat and pants and gloves, and his very last words are cut off not by his death (as in a conventional production) but by them putting a stocking mask on him -- and now he is another anonymous lab-coated stocking-masked worker. It's chilling and very, very effective. (Carlo does not take his hand, but it's clear that he can't really do this.) What's not clear to me, at least, is whether Rodrigo in any way consented to this, whether this is him selling out -- is this a worse betrayal of Carlo? -- or is this a kind of dystopic future where this is something that Filippo can wholly force on him? Both really interesting interpretations!
The last act was riveting, which I don't usually say: the doubles come back in (they may be figments of Elisabetta and Carlo's imaginations at this point?) and some of their duet is sung to the doubles (Carlo singis to Elisabetta's double and Elisabetta sings to Carlo's double), which allows them to be intensely romantic and affectionate in a way that they can scarcely be with each other. The very end I'm not totally sure about; The Emperor's clothing crumbles away (that part was great), Elisabetta gets wrapped in plastic wrap (...okaaaaay), I actually don't know what happened to Carlo, he may have just left in a huff.
The part that absolutely did not work for me was the Grand Inquisitor. I was kind of half-expecting him to be a government regulator, but nah, he's just some dude who has been lurking around who I guess does in fact work for the same company, and who, when he has his big duet with Filippo, brandishes a light-up cross while various religious-themed pictures are thrown up as backdrop. So I guess maybe this is religion as opiate of the masses? It didn't really land for me -- in the original, it lands and lands hard because religion is such a big deal for them, complete with the auto-da-fe as an expression of their obsessive devotion to that religion -- but here I was like, okay, are the kinds of people who go to a fashion costume demo the kinds who would knuckle down to a religious Grand Inquisitor. Naaaaaah. So that part just really didn't work for me.
But tl;dr: I did feel like the updating of the setting did drive home what an opera of big themes and big emotions Don Carlo is, and how the relationships (except for Filippo-Rodrigo, in this production) drive the big emotions that drive the opera. (Interestingly, the singers don't touch very much; Rodrigo and Carlo do a little, and Elisabetta and Carlo touch hands very briefly in their last duet, and then of course embrace right before Filippo walks in -- but as opposed to that heartbreaking Bastille Don Carlos I saw, it still all works without the touching, and just highlights how our society is much less touchy-feely than it could be.
I really liked it, and I was both thinking about it days later and humming little bits of the score.
