West Bay Opera

Director's Notes on Don Pasquale

I'm excited about the unusual approach we have found for Don Pasquale. It all started when it struck me that the conversation between Don Pasquale and his nephew is so incredibly contemporary. If you watch daytime TV, you will see all these talk shows. You see parents and children talking, and they speak different languages. They don't understand each other, and there's no communication. So here is Don Pasquale saying to his nephew, "Remember how I told you this, and this, and this...," and Ernesto says "Yeah, yeah...," and he's completely bored, and there is nothing happening between the two of them. I think it's significant to show people how contemporary it feels - how eternal it is - this relationship between parents and children.

So the first impulse was to make it very modern - in our own day. The second idea came from Ernesto's big aria in the second act, which is introduced by a long trumpet solo. I just imagined that he's the one who plays the trumpet - Ernesto himself - and I saw him sitting alone in his room `playing his blues' (as our set designer put it). I thought, too, of the movies - of Fellini's La Strada, when Gelsomina plays the trumpet, and it is like the cry of her heart - it is an incredibly beautiful image. It connected with other images, too. There's a picture of James Dean sitting in his study playing his wooden flute... something about solitude, sadness, and isolation - about the rebellion of the post-war rock 'n roll generation - and it was suddenly clear that the opera had to be set in the 1950's.

Also, it is very important that the opera takes place in Rome. Americans have strong images of Rome in the 1950's, because so many movies were made there: Fellini's great films from that time and American movies like Roman Holiday. It was in the 50's that Americans rediscovered Europe after the war, and part of the world we want to create is that grand, architectural, historic, romantic look of Rome as the American tourist expected to see it. The young lovers - Norina and Ernesto - belong to this alluring, romantic environment, and they experience it in all its richness and passion. They are the ones who run in the street and kiss. Don Pasquale's world is another Rome - enclosed, sterile, limited. Pasquale is ridiculous to us, but we treat him with sympathy. We see that he is just off track, and we need to put him back where he belongs. It is a comedy, after all!

10 October, 1997