Why is Arrigo Boito's opera about the Roman emperor Nero so seldom performed to this day?

Is it because it remained unfinished and was only launched in 1924 - six years after the composer's death?

After all, the

magnum opus,

begun in 1862, was

, on which Boito had worked over and over again throughout his life, in the end developed so far that the conductor Arturo Toscanini was able to set about creating a version suitable for performance together with Antonio Smareglia and Vincenzo Tommasini. Toscanini, who staged the play in Milan without the fifth act, also advocated it later. So why has it not been able to assert itself in the repertoire despite such prominent advocacy? At the Bregenz Festival, which has now opened with Boito's “Nerone”, one could think about these questions for almost three hours.

Boito wrestled obsessively with the material, but was unable to bring it into a final form even after more than half a century.

He spent years studying the libretto he wrote himself.

It was not about a historical ham in an opera robe.

This Nero reveals a lot about his inventor, comes along as a would-be Nietzsche who questions moral values.

Boito, born in 1842, already cultivated a citizen-frightened attitude as a young artist and intellectual, celebrated free love and tended to the libertarian transfiguration of "evil".

The often revised text combines traditional and fictional episodes from the life of the emperor, confronts traditional Roman religion and emerging early Christianity, thematizes the fire of Rome and, in the planned fifth act, the madness of Nero.

Sympathy with the devil

Boito also reworked the score many times and orchestrated three acts himself, but repeatedly withdrew planned premieres. Could it be that he couldn't cope with “Nerone” because he was unclean with his title character? Because he could not find a solution to the problem of their idealization? Because he felt that his subliminal "sympathy for the devil" was in his way? The other characters in the piece are ambivalent, strangely waxy creatures that leave you strangely cold. Boito packed a lot into the piece, wanted to "do everything right and perfect". At the Bregenz performance, the impression was increasingly felt that his dream of the perfect work of art paralyzed himself and ultimately overwhelmed himself. Musically, too, he was unable to resolve internal contradictions in his ambitious diagnosis of the times.Despite the brilliantly drawn registers in detail, some scenes appear artificial, others overstretched.

Dirk Kaftan puts a lot of effort into the finer points of the score, which lives harmoniously and melodically on the contrast of the chromatically drawn pagan-ancient world and diatonic, clearly structured sounds for the new Christianity.

In addition, there are atmospherically magical moments in sharp contrast to the roaring wind and percussion attacks, pre-fascist-looking pathos in the glorification of brutal violence and blasphemous combinations of prayer kitsch and frivolous evocation of sensual love, which Boito did not want to resist.

On the other hand, there is little to be heard of quasi-oriental melos.

Overall, the piece lacks the musical theatrical clout of Boito's colleague Giuseppe Verdi.

Allusions to the Mussolini period

Olivier Tambosi's production draws parallels between the decadent times of upheaval in post-Augustus Rome and in Europe before the First World War. Gesine Völlm's imaginative costumes are smeared with blood everywhere, but occasionally also cite the early Mussolini period. Labyrinthine nested rooms rotate on Frank Philipp Schlössmann's stage. Mirror walls and red light surfaces create a confusing game of permanent illusions. Are we looking into the head of a megalomaniac narcissist who celebrates the eroticization of torture, sadism and death as aesthetic pleasure and value-free lust? Tambosi wants to develop an “overall view of being human”. After the catastrophes of the twentieth century at the latest, such flirtation arouses unease with a relativizing “beyond good and evil”.

Rafael Rojas wanders as smoothly singing Nero through all the chambers of his damaged soul and finds his way less and less. His conscience plagues him because of the murder of his mother Agrippina. Full of self-pity, he stylizes himself as Orestes, the victim of a fateful doom. Brett Polegato as the prophet Fanuèl promotes unselfish love with a beguiling baritone. When it comes to top notes, it reaches its limits in places. Tambosi denounces him as a bearded, long-haired substitute Jesus with a crown of thorns, wrapped in an unctuous almost sweet E flat major. Lucio Gallo embodies his opponent as the pagan magician Simon Mago.

Demonically he fights his vocal fight to the death with huge black wings that obey only ingeniously hidden technology. With flaming soprano cascades, Svetlana Aksenova indulges her perverse predilection for Nero's cruelty as a masochistic asteria. The fact that Mago, of all people, puts her whip on the dictator as the dominatrix goddess goes horribly wrong. Alessandra Volpe as Rubria in the dichotomy between the old cult and the new Nazarene, the rest of the soloist ensemble and the Prague Philharmonic Choir contribute to a musically impressive, but in the scenic context, on the whole, unsavory performance.