They Work Hard to Keep It Light

In opera, as in all of the dramatic arts, being funny is serious business. Although the star-crossed fates and tragic diva deaths of opera seria may loom larger in the public consciousness, comedic opera forms an important part of the standard repertory. What’s more, for all its froth, the comic opera, or opera buffa, is no less demanding than its dour and dire sibling.

Some consider Gaetano Donizetti’s “Don Pasquale” among the best of the buffas. A revival of the Jean-Pierre Ponnelle production of the 1843 work, directed by Stephen Lawless, opens Wednesday at Los Angeles Opera. It is the tale of the Don, a wealthy, aging and increasingly foolish bachelor who attempts to derail his nephew’s infatuation with the lively widow Norina by marrying her himself. Only when the wily physician Dr. Malatesta intervenes to help the young lovers is Pasquale taught a lesson.

American soprano Ruth Ann Swenson (Norina) and English baritone Thomas Allen (Dr. Malatesta), last seen together here in the 1999-2000 revival of Donizetti’s “The Elixir of Love,” in which Swenson made her company debut, join forces again in “Don Pasquale.” Swenson sings regularly with the Metropolitan Opera, San Francisco Opera and many others. She is associated with both dramatic and lyric roles, including the title character in Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor,” Gilda in “Rigoletto” and Anne Trulove in “The Rake’s Progress.”

Allen, who has made the Royal Opera House Covent Garden his home company for three decades now, is widely regarded as one of the preeminent singing actors of his generation. Particularly associated with the title roles in “Billy Budd,” ’Eugene Onegin” and especially “Don Giovanni,” he made his Los Angeles Opera debut in 199O singing Count Almaviva in “The Marriage of Figaro” and has returned here more than half a dozen times.

The singers spoke with The Times on a recent weekend morning, in Los Angeles Opera artistic director Placido Domingo’s office at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

*

Question: “Don Pasquale” is a fun, lighthearted piece. But is it an easy one?

Swenson: Some people think it’s a comedy, we’ll just toss it off. Wrong. It takes technique.

You have to remember, it was written for some of the greatest singers that ever were. We’re talking 1843-the height of bel canto technique. I think you need five really primo players-not only singers but actors.

Allen: The operatic world, the musical world, has different kinds of requirements and needs. This is an ethereal thing. It must be fun, therefore it’s easy, blah, blah, blah. It’s not.

*

Q: What place does this hold in your repertory?

Allen: It’s a rarity. I sang it at Covent Garden. I’ve sung it in Munich and I’ve recorded it, and that’s it. There are some [bass baritones] who have made their mark with it, whereas my range is from early music all the way up to yesterday or tomorrow.

Swenson: I’m considered a lyric coloratura, which is what this role requires. You need to have flexibility. You just can’t have a tiny little voice, because it demands more. I covered this role when I was a young artist in San Francisco. I did it in Geneva, Portland, Chicago and Dallas.

But, as we do have broad repertoires, this doesn’t fall in the category of one that you do as often as, say, “Lucia.”

*

Q: What impact does having a broad repertory have on your technique and artistry?

Allen: A concert career of singing songs and oratorios aids tremendously a career on the opera stage and vice versa. You learn control and discipline in certain stillnesses, so that as you become more developed, you realize the usefulness of them and the strength they have on a stage.

In a similar way, playing tragedy or comedy, you learn from comedy to play tragedy and from tragedy to play comedy. The lines are very, very close.

You find elements; you take a taste from this or that. I think the whole thing is a combination of many ideas.

Swenson: When I come to a role like this, I always think that I’m not going to change my technique just because of the repertoire. I keep my technique the same if I’m singing “Figaro” or I’m singing “Lucia.”

*

Q: What are the particular challenges, and the particular pleasures, of “Don Pasquale’?

Swenson: It’s a freshness that you have to bring to it-because it’s a comedy and it’s charming. Norina’s not particularly [an] ingenue, but I think the lightness she has in this piece is certainly something I’ve done before. I’ve always loved to play the lighter, comedic roles.

It’s fun. Like last year it was fun to work with Tom and not have to die or stab myself or be in a sack at the end. That’s always a relief, when I can live at the end.

Allen: This opera is very lean. It’s not full of frivolities and embroidery. It’s exactly what you need. It’s cut down to the actual bare essentials. It somehow represents Pasquale in his day. He’s reduced down in the very same way.

Swenson: This is Donizetti at his best in a way. It’s very precise musically and in the way the libretto fits with the music. The dramatic part is in the music. The story tells itself; it’s an old-fashioned kind of story, so it’s not something we have to dive deep into. In the realm of the Donizetti repertoire, this is one of the tighter pieces. And that makes it easier, because it’s right there and you don’t have to think, “OK, I’ve said that six times, how am I going to say it again?”

*

Q: What about the humor, though? In the theater, for instance, comedic timing and the text are essential components of what makes it funny or not. But in comic opera you don’t have these tools at your disposal in the same way, do you?

Allen: There’s timing in the music. It does dictate exactly what the timing has to be, but you have a lot less room for creating your own. That’s what I always hated about opera, because it tells you when you should do things, and I want to do things differently. You have to make it work in that way, so that’s the skill.

Swenson: That’s the challenge of this. A [laugh] hardly ever comes when the funny thing happens onstage. It’s always either three seconds before or after.

*

Q: Is the widespread use of supertitles the key variable here?

Allen: As a young lad, I went to Norway on a holiday, and I went to see an old James Stewart film. It was surtitled, and that made me realize at a very early age how different the reaction is. I was listening to it in American English and the Norwegians were reacting to reading the Norwegian text. And that’s the problem we have now.

Swenson: It has to be very precise and very well thought out so that everything makes sense to the audience, so that when it does come up on the titles, they’re not totally baffled by what they’re reading and what they’re seeing.

*

Q: When it comes to opera buffa, have supertitles changed things for the better?

Allen: There used to be an awful lot of bad operatic acting with big handkerchiefs and big hand gestures and arms flailing around. We almost had to illustrate what was going on. And I think we can pare that all down now because it’s got to a point where it’s more comprehensible for people. I think it’s changing the style of playing, and that’s no bad thing.

*

Q: Humor is so determined by cultural mores, time and place. How do you translate comedy over the centuries to make it accessible for a contemporary audience, or should you even try?

Allen: Some pieces lend themselves to updating and others less so. I think this is less so. I enjoy the skill of trying to maintain this feel, of representing a person who lived in the middle of the 19th century and what they looked like, how they behaved, what the costume or the clothes that they were wearing caused them to do, how they moved and what gestures were used. It just gives you an insight into a quite different kind of life, a different period.

Swenson: We have to be careful not to make it too modern and lose what Donizetti wanted in the piece. And that’s always a challenge too, to take what he wrote as opposed to putting on what might happen in 2001.

*

Q: And yet it’s common among directors today to feel a need to update or recontextualize an opera such as this.

Swenson: I think sometimes the problem is that directors look at this piece like, oh, it’s just fluff. They have a problem just creating a beautiful, funny story because they think they have to do something different. That’s a problem for me because I’m a dinosaur when it comes to traditional storytelling. Let’s just do it, let’s not put it on the beach in Nice.

Allen: I think some directors are afraid of dealing with the precise requirements of the period. I think of “Figaro,” which has been so badly dealt with over the last few years. The whole reason for “Figaro” is that [the French] Revolution is about to happen. When “Figaro” was written, it was a shocking piece. But if Figaro runs into the countess’ bedroom without knocking on the door, jumps on the bed and has a conversation with her, who needs a revolution? It’s already happened.

I don’t think it’s as funny. The fun and the drama come from observing the requirements of that 18th century period. Unfortunately quite often these days, [we] lose sight of the whole reason for it, why it was written when it was written and what was going on at that time.

And that’s a great pity. You can’t rewrite history. History is what it was. “Don Pasquale” isn’t brain surgery, but it is applicable to today’s world.

*

“DON PASQUALE,” Los Angeles Opera, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A. Dates: Wednesday and April 18, 24, 27 and 29, 7:30 p.m.; April 14 and 21, 1 p.m. Ends April 29. Prices: $28-$148. Phone: (213) 365-3500.