The Sicilian Vespers review – plot and theatrical panache collide in Verdi’s Parisian reinvention

Royal Opera House, London
Stefan Herheim’s production of this fascinating work battles with hollowness and ambiguities despite an impressive debut from Speranza Scappucci as principal guest conductor

The Giuseppe Verdi of 1855 was not unlike the Bob Dylan of 1965. Both had just produced, in rapid succession, three defining masterpieces which would ensure their immortality – in Verdi’s case Rigoletto, Il Trovatore and La Traviata, in Dylan’s the trilogy of albums starting with Bringing It All Back Home. The question that now loomed was – where to go from here?

For Verdi, as for Rossini and Donizetti before him, the answer was Paris, and the conquest (and financial rewards) of French opera. The outcome was The Sicilian Vespers, a five act grand opera in French, complete with ballet, depicting the Sicilian rising against French invaders in 1282. It is a work of uncommon musical fascination, in which Verdi subjects his art to a form of self-renewal in something of the manner that Dylan would also do more than a century later. The score, much admired by Berlioz, is full of new forms of declamation and controlled grandeur. But it has never held a position in the repertoire to compare with its predecessors.