The Pope (and the Huns) Wore Prada

One of the highlights of the current season at New York’s Metropolitan Opera was the house’s first-ever production of Giuseppe Verdi’s rarely performed Attila . The cast featured Russian bass Ildar Abdrazakov as the Hun of the title and included veteran American bass Samuel Ramey in the small but crucial role of Leone—Pope Leo I.

With its costumes by Miuccia Prada (herself a Met debutante), the production inevitably inspired a few riffs, from critics and bloggers alike, on the theme of “The Hun / the Pope / the Hordes Wore Prada.” Some of the more waggish commentators reminded their readers that in 2005, Pope Benedict XVI was rumored to wear red Prada shoes. (The Met’s Prada-clad Pope Leo sported an impressive red miter and a visible-from-the-cheap-seats pectoral cross.)

Scott Cantrell, the critic for the Dallas Morning News , was not thrilled by the production’s ahistorical costumes (“Attila looked more like a bar bouncer than the scourge of Europe”). Cantrell did, however, have a few good words for the singers. As the Roman princess Odabella (in a towering wig that Cantrell called “a Marge Simpson beehive”), soprano Violeta Urmana “sang and acted with . . . passion and expressiveness.” And “when Samuel Ramey briefly appeared . . . even through a wide wobble one was reminded how thrilling a great bass voice can be.”

Among the many online comments to Cantrell’s review was a short post that read, in part, “It is unfortunate that for the Met’s first production of ATTILA they could not do a more ‘conventional’ production.” In a P.S. the poster added, “musically it was incredible.” The comment was signed “Samuel Ramey (I was the Pope).” A bit of checking confirmed that the message was, indeed, from the Met’s pope, the possessor of that “ great bass voice.”

And what, you may ask, of portrayals of other real-life popes in other historical operas? As it happens, in its 2003–2004 season, the Metropolitan Opera presented Hector Berlioz’ Benvenuto Cellini , an opera that features, again as a role for a bass, Pope Clement VII. (At the time, the critic for Variety noted that bass Robert Lloyd “boomed and growled with commendable precision as Pope Clement VII.”)

More fascinating, though, is the fact that one seventeenth-century pope, Pope Clement IX, actually wrote the libretti for not one, but two operas. In histories of music he is known by his baptismal name, Giulio Rospigliosi. The operas, still performed occasionally today, are La Vita Humana (1656; music by Marco Marazzoli) and La Comica del Cielo (also called La Baltasara ; 1668; music by Antonio Maria Abbatini). Rospigliosi wrote the first libretto while still a bishop; he wrote the second as pope.

As for me, all this talk of operas and popes and basses and such has given me an idea: When I get home tonight, I think I’ll listen to what may be my all-time favorite opera, Don Giovanni —written (of course) by our present pope’s favorite composer, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. And I think I’ll play the Sam Ramey version.