There was something poetic about watching Verdi’s opera of a fractured republic pleading for reconciliation just days after San Francisco Opera itself had made peace. The company’s 104th season was meant to open on September 12 with Simon Boccanegra and the glittering Opera Ball. Instead, a musicians’ strike emptied the pit, and patrons who hadn’t heard the news arrived to find players with instruments in their backpacks holding picket signs (Local News Matters). A new contract was ratified, the curtain finally rose on September 22, and the orchestra was cheered before, during and after the show (San Francisco Chronicle). By the time I took my seat, the War Memorial still hummed with that we-made-it energy.
This is Boccanegra’s first appearance here since 2008, and it arrives in the American premiere of Claus Guth’s production, created for the Hamburg State Opera in 2006 and restaged by Katherine M. Carter. It also makes three seasons in a row that Music Director Eun Sun Kim has opened with Verdi, after Un ballo in maschera in 2024 and Rigoletto last year (BroadwayWorld).
The company first staged the opera in 1941, with Lawrence Tibbett and Ezio Pinza, and this is only its eighth season here. One quick note: if your last big Verdi night was – like mine – a production like Stefano Poda’s dance-filled, giant-hand Aida at the Arena di Verona, this is its opposite. Boccanegra has no ballet, and this staging trades spectacle for memory.
Pirates, Patricians and a Long-Lost Daughter
History supplied the hero: Simone Boccanegra was a real 14th-century Genoese seafarer who became the city’s first Doge. Literature supplied the melodrama: Verdi and librettist Francesco Maria Piave adapted Antonio García Gutiérrez’s 1843 Spanish play Simón Bocanegra – the same playwright whose El trovador became Il trovatore.
Prologue. Genoa is split between patricians and plebeians. The schemer Paolo persuades the corsair Boccanegra to run for Doge, since power would force the aristocrat Fiesco to let Simon marry his daughter Maria, mother of Simon’s child. But Maria has just died; Fiesco mourns her in “Il lacerato spirito / The tormented spirit,” then offers forgiveness only in exchange for the granddaughter, who has vanished. Simon discovers Maria’s body just as the crowd hails him with “Viva Simon! / Long live Simon!”
Act I, Scene 1. Twenty-five years later, the orphan raised as Amelia Grimaldi greets the dawn sea in “Come in quest’ora bruna / How, in this dusky hour,” awaiting her lover Gabriele Adorno. The Doge visits, hears her story, and realizes she is his daughter – the rapturous duet “Figlia! A tal nome io palpito / Daughter! At that name my heart trembles.” Rebuffed, Paolo arranges her abduction.
Act I, Scene 2. In the Council Chamber, Simon pleads for peace with Venice in “Plebe! Patrizi! Popolo! / Plebeians! Patricians! People!” A riot erupts, Amelia hints at the kidnapper, and Simon forces Paolo to curse the culprit – himself.
Act II, Scene 1. Paolo poisons the Doge’s water. Gabriele, believing Amelia is Simon’s mistress, erupts in “Sento avvampar nell’anima / I feel my soul ablaze” before praying “Cielo pietoso, rendila / Merciful heaven, give her back to me.” He nearly stabs the sleeping Doge until the truth comes out, then swears loyalty.
Act II, Scene 2. The revolt fails and Paolo is condemned, but the poison works. Simon and Fiesco finally reconcile; Simon blesses the lovers in “Gran Dio, li benedici / Great God, bless them” and names Gabriele his successor (SF Opera synopsis).
Verdi’s Darkest Palette, Painted Twice
Simon Boccanegra flopped at its March 12, 1857 premiere at Venice’s La Fenice; Verdi himself called it a fiasco. After Rigoletto and La Traviata, audiences found it dense and somber. Two decades later, publisher Giulio Ricordi paired Verdi with the much younger Arrigo Boito, and the revision premiered at La Scala on March 24, 1881 – a trial run for Otello and Falstaff. Opera Rara’s 2024 recording of the 1857 original lets you compare (discography).
The big addition is the Council Chamber scene. Drawing on a real 1344 council of commoners and nobles, Simon pleads for peace with Venice and invokes Petrarch’s plea for peace and love. By then Italy had unified, and Verdi – a Risorgimento patriot elected to its first parliament – made the Doge his mouthpiece, as Rebecca Schmid explains in the program. The father-daughter story ran deep, too: by 26, Verdi had lost his wife and both young children.
Listen for the sea, which the revised orchestra turns into a character of its own, and for the sliding string motive that tracks the poison through the Doge’s veins. Low male voices dominate; Christian Van Horn now joins a Fiesco lineage here that includes Pinza, Christoff, Siepi and Ramey.
For me, the music was the evening’s glory. Eun Sun Kim’s direction was fantastic, and the orchestra, freshly back from the strike, played with conviction and color. Enkhbat’s dark, velvety Simon, Buratto’s radiant Amelia, Guerrero’s ardent Gabriele and Van Horn’s imposing Fiesco made a superb ensemble, with Bogdanov and Natal-Báez as convincing plotters and John Keene’s chorus nearly a lead character.
A Magic Frame, Body Doubles and a Descending Meteor
Guth turns the opera into a memory play, and I thought it was beautifully done. Before a note sounds, a silent tableau shows Simon at the point of death; then time rewinds and the Prologue begins. Everything we see is Simon’s life flashing before his eyes, as the pre-opera talk explains. That is why characters so often walk backwards out of scenes, like a film on rewind, and rarely meet each other’s eyes.
Body doubles mirror Simon’s gestures so he can watch his younger self. His lost love Maria, who has no music of her own, appears as a silent presence, first seen beside her top-hatted father Fiesco. Christian Schmidt’s bare, mirrored room and contemporary suits keep the focus on faces and voices.
My favorite device was the large frame, which reveals offstage events and the memories characters describe. In an opera where so much crucial action happens off stage or decades earlier, it is a genuinely clever solution. Then there is the meteor, sinking lower each scene until it crashes down: fate and the weight of power made visible (SF Examiner).
Not everything is spelled out, and that was part of the fun. During intermission and the short pauses between scenes, my neighbors and I were busy trading theories about the frame, the doubles and that rock. When did a staging last get strangers talking like that?
A House Divided – Just Like Genoa
Critics agreed on the music and split sharply over the staging. Steven Winn of the San Francisco Chronicle/SFCV was the production’s champion, calling it a “brilliant realization of Verdi’s masterwork” and hailing the flashback frame as an inspired innovation. Even he, though, found the descending meteor out of place, as if it had wandered in from a different opera.
Joshua Kosman, writing on On a Pacific Aisle, gave Kim and the cast full credit for rescuing a notoriously wobbly piece, but dismissed Guth’s ideas as needless complications. He singled out Simon longing to die in Amelia’s arms while standing across the stage from her, and reported audible giggles each time the boulder dropped another notch.
Caroline Crawford of Local News Matters called the evening engrossing and warmly sung, yet described the staging as about as un-Italian as a Boccanegra can get, arguing that the no-eye-contact blocking deflated both the reconciliation and the council scene. Seen and Heard International went further, saying heavy-handed direction undercut superb music and that the opening death pantomime was awkwardly executed.
The consensus: the pit and the voices won the night, while Guth’s concept is love-it-or-hate-it. On the staging, count me firmly on Winn’s side.
Go for the Voices, Stay for the Argument
Bottom line: San Francisco Opera’s Simon Boccanegra is a triumph – musically beyond question, and for me theatrically too. Eun Sun Kim and a newly reunited orchestra make Verdi’s darkest score glow, and Enkhbat, Buratto, Guerrero and Van Horn form a cast worthy of this rarely staged masterpiece. Guth’s ghostly memory play divided the critics, but I found it thoughtful and well executed, with the frame as its standout. Best of all, it got people talking at intermission, between scenes and on the way out. If you crave pageantry, look elsewhere; if you want to feel Verdi’s plea for peace and reconciliation, this is it. Go, listen, and argue about the meteor on the way home.