Love, scandal, great tunes, and death by tuberculosis. Name that show!
It’s La Traviata, by Giuseppe Verdi, and The Atlanta Opera is bringing it to the stage of the Cobb Energy Centre from Nov. 8 through Nov. 16. GPB’s Sarah Zaslaw recently sat down with guest conductor Evan Rogister.
TRANSCRIPT
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Sarah Zaslaw: Welcome!
Evan Rogister: Thank you so much, Sarah.
Sarah Zaslaw: You grew up not too far from here, right? In Raleigh, N.C.
Evan Rogister: That’s absolutely right. I grew up going to the North Carolina Symphony.
Sarah Zaslaw: And you studied trombone and voice before conducting. Was piano in there too?
Evan Rogister: It was. My grandmother was a German opera singer, had studied in the 1930s in Berlin, and she — through a long series of reasons why one might move away from 1930s Berlin — got to Raleigh, N.C., where she was teaching voice. And she was my first music teacher, both piano and voice. She put me in a boy choir when I was very young, and when my voice broke, I thought the trombone was the coolest instrument I’d ever seen. Picked that up. I started at Indiana University as a trombone and political science major —
Sarah Zaslaw: Classic combination.
Evan Rogister: Yeah! And I saw their tremendous opera facility. At that time, they produced eight operas a year, and I decided, well, I’ve got to be a part of that too, so I started singing again. Started studying with a distinguished bass, Giorgio Tozzi, and the rest is kind of history. Although my mom says I saw a video of [Leonard] Bernstein when I was 4 and said, “That’s what I want to do.” So I’ve been in the fortunate position of knowing what I wanted to do my entire life. It’s just not the easiest thing to transition from a civilian into a conductor.
Sarah Zaslaw: You’re coming off a long stint as conductor of Washington National Opera and the Kennedy Center Opera Orchestra in D.C. Where are you and your family based now?
Evan Rogister: We are in Copenhagen. My wife, Synne, is Danish, which means we have two little half-Dane, half-Americans. Synne is a diplomat, and so every four to five years it makes sense for us to go back to Copenhagen for her to be in the ministry. And I work so much in Europe that it’s almost even more convenient for me to be able to come home on the weekends and see the kids, rather than be on the other side of the Atlantic for four weeks.
Sarah Zaslaw: And now you’re making your Atlanta Opera debut — on this side of the Atlantic for four weeks — with La Traviata by Giuseppe Verdi. This is an opera that premiered in Venice in 1853. Here it will be sung in the original Italian with English translations projected in supertitles. But the title La Traviata seems to never be translated. We always just call it La Traviata. What does it mean?
Evan Rogister: It is a woman who is, uh — You have to imagine that back then it was not accepted to even really talk about the art of, if we should call it the art, of escorts or —
Sarah Zaslaw: Courtesans —
Evan Rogister: Yes, exactly. And so this entire subject was kind of loaded, and they chose this word which suggests a courtesan. And it stuck. But I mean, you imagine back then it was something, when the Catholic Church was so powerful in Italy you couldn’t even speak about this type of thing, that Verdi took the giant step of putting it on the stage.
Sarah Zaslaw: Making a “fallen woman” his heroine.
Evan Rogister: Exactly.
Sarah Zaslaw: The story of La Traviata is based on the novel Lady of the Camellias by Alexandre Dumas. Dumas’s book also inspired the musical Moulin Rouge, I believe, and then La Traviata, this opera, in turn, was the basis for the film Pretty Woman. What is the story, in a nutshell?
Evan Rogister: This woman who lives a life of pleasure is deathly ill. Verdi starts his opera with a flashback. The Prelude to Act I is the demise of Violetta: it starts with this ethereal, sickly sound. Every next move is a sort of mask for her. She’s at a masquerade. She — the party that starts out Act I is drug-infused. It’s delirious. It’s out of control. A young man walks into her party and takes her by storm. They are smitten with each other. She’s not sure; she thinks, well, maybe this is a great distraction and maybe it is true love. They decide to move in together.
Cut to Act II, they go to her country estate. She’s very wealthy — she’s clearly a very successful courtesan. And they are visited by his father. His father has picked up on the scandal, and says to Violetta that you are ruining my family. If you go through this relationship with my son, Alfredo, you’ll bring shame upon the marriage of my daughter. And he is a master manipulator. He has this wonderful aria, “Di Provenza il Mar, il Suol,” which is a manipulation of her emotions. He convinces her to leave his son.
His son comes back, reads this in a letter, is shocked and then — flash forward to a new scene, another party. He walks in, essentially says, “I renounce you.” A classic Verdi public confrontation scene which causes grief for everyone. Flash forward to her deathbed. Son rushes in: “Oh, I love you.” Father rushes in: “Oh, I messed up.” And she dies.
Sarah Zaslaw: You mentioned a couple of highlights. Anything else that people would recognize, maybe?
Evan Rogister: Well, her “Sempre Libera” is a hit that makes its way into our pop culture, essentially, successfully taken on by sopranos of many different walks of life. While it’s so well-known, it’s just a surefire success, it is still a terrifying role for a soprano because it involves extreme range and remarkable virtuosity, both lyricism and coloratura.
Sarah Zaslaw: Who are the stars of the Atlanta opera production?
Evan Rogister: Mané Galoyan, Anthony [Clark] Evans and Long Long are singing the three principal roles, Violetta, Germont and Alfredo. They are international stars at the top of their game. To have a successful Traviata, you have to have three virtuosos in these roles, and we have them.
Sarah Zaslaw: This production is by director Francesca Zambello, acclaimed director of Washington National Opera at the Kennedy Center, so you must have worked together before.
Evan Rogister: Of course, many times. Francesca has staged a very classic interpretation. She tells the story, which I, at the end of the day, find is the most important job of a director. This production has traveled to many, many different theaters successfully. You are in this Parisian environment. You can smell the society, also the decay, and also I think there are some beautifully shocking scenes of Violetta’s demise, without giving too much away.
Sarah Zaslaw: There’s sort of a canon of operas that get performed very frequently: lots of Verdi, Puccini, Wagner, Mozart. And I guess every opera company has to balance what’s old and familiar with what’s new and maybe risky. I’m wondering if the proportions are the same in the U.S. and Europe.
Evan Rogister: Oh, that’s a terrific question. I’d say that Europe is more, what you might say, risky. They take bigger risks. Because opera is more pervasive, what we might call classical music is more pervasive in Europe — it comes from there — people take more risks. Because it doesn’t even seem risky, it’s just what we do.
Sarah Zaslaw: You’ve conducted both symphony orchestras and operas. What’s different about where your attention goes when you’re conducting an opera?
Evan Rogister: Well, I will say opera is simply almost twice as hard as doing symphonic work. Opera requires extreme flexibility. For all of the technical demands of symphonic playing, the orchestra has music in front of them at all times. But if you consider that that’s only half of the contingent in opera, the other contingent is all memorized. To have memorization in our flawed human machinery, of course things are going to go off, and the job of conductor is to eventually have internalized the music so much so that one is calm at all times — or at least projects calm — and can be sort of a center of “It’s okay, you’re off, but now you’re back on.” You have to always keep the orchestra on the track that they expect, which they see, visually, and to get the people who are off to be back on. But I’ll tell you that it still feels to me — I still feel like that 4-year-old, getting to do his dream job; it’s like playing in a candy shop.
Sarah Zaslaw: What are some aspects of your job that you find meaningful in a bigger sense?
Evan Rogister: Oh, that’s a beautiful question. Well, I was talking to a friend today about the art of singing. All musical instruments are imitating, ultimately, the voice, which is the original human instrument. And singing is communicating. Birds communicate through songs. Animals sing. The best singing happens when a person is relaxed and in harmony with the world. So excuse me for saying maybe a little bit almost New Agey, but I think singing, the study of singing and the art of singing, is about beautiful communication in the world. What do we need more than anything right now? Beautiful communication in world.
And then when you add that to all these masters who have come before us — I said this, actually, to the orchestra today: Verdi was the ultimate moralist. He existed in time in Italy when there were factions who wanted to be royalist, or if you can even imagine that that was a country that later became fascist so there were undercurrents of everything in Italy at that moment. And Verdi said, no, we need a republic. And he became a hero to his people. “Va Pensiero,” the famous choral number from Nabucco, became the Italian hymn of brotherhood, of resistance. So I think that if Giuseppe Verdi was with us today, he would be at the forefront of just speaking up against what is wrong in the world. And we need him more than ever.
Sarah Zaslaw: La Traviata opens at the Cobb Energy Centre on Nov. 8 and runs through the 16th. For details and tickets, you can visit atlantaopera.org. Evan Rogister, what a pleasure to meet you. Thank you so much for coming in.
Evan Rogister: Ditto. See you at the opera, Sarah.