Lucia da Nessuna Parte

(Nat Dessay, como protagonista de Lucia di Lammermoor - Met opera House, Fevereiro de 2011)

Em 2007, quando a fabulosa Nat Dessay estreou a Lucia concebida por Mary Zimmerman - a partir de Donizetti, evidentemente -, o mundo parou. Doravante, muitas das mais célebres spinto vestiram a pele desta mesma Lucia: a bela e lasciva Netrebko e a pueril Damrau foram, porventura, as mais destacadas.

Dessay será a mais lírica de todas. É uma comédienne impressionante e a sua coloratura - Rainha da Noite, Zerbinetta e Amina, por exemplo - ressuscitam os mortos...

Contudo, apesar de oleada nesta personagem suma do belcanto, nesta reprise, nem tudo foram rosas, particularmente no tocante à interpretação!

«Since Natalie Dessay, playing Lucia at the Metropolitan Opera on Thursday, had not up to that point in the opera appeared to weep, or indeed to look more than perturbed and a little put out, this heartbreaking moment made little sense, and passed unnoticed.

In this revival of Mary Zimmerman’s grayly atmospheric production, there is an empty space where Lucia ought to be. Not that there’s not a soprano onstage, and a redoubtable one, in Ms. Dessay, returning to the company after a two-year absence. Her cool voice has thinned a bit, but it still impresses in coloratura and rises to the score’s climactic moments. The issue is not the voice so much as what that voice should serve: the character.

Ms. Dessay and Ms. Zimmerman have clearly, carefully considered every motion (the soprano’s physical performance Thursday was essentially identical to the one she gave in 2007, when the production was new) and the result is a Lucia almost entirely blank. The main consideration seems to have been avoiding going over the top, being too “operatic.” But in this version, Lucia — that supremely expressive Romantic character, the one who weeps, swoons, trembles and is often, as the libretto describes, simply “beside herself with misery and fear” in a work dominated by passions and blood — is so internal that the audience perceives her only as indifferent and detached.

With an eye, perhaps, to its growing live simulcast audiences, the Met’s recent productions can seem directed at the camera rather than the audience in the theater. Ms. Dessay’s performance suggests as much. Her little fidgets, eye motions and twitches around the mouth register in the high definition of extreme movie theater close-ups, but they disappear in the opera house, along with our interest. By the time she delivers a fine, tensely eerie mad scene, the stakes of the drama — that queasy, distinctively operatic blend of empathy for and exhilaration over the heroine’s degradation — are almost entirely forfeit.»

Os génios também escorregam, estampando-se... Melhores dias virão!

Bon courrage, chère Nat !