Watermarked: Reflections on Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra
At intermission, before I had worked out what all the images meant, I wrote:
This is certainly a memory play.
That was my first understanding of it.
What stayed with me immediately was the mirroring.
There were, in a sense, two Simon Boccanegras: the singer inhabiting the events of his life and another Simon who watched, remembered and sometimes mirrored him. Behind what looked at different moments like a mirror, window or transparent wall, another world existed. People walked through it. The dead appeared there. Sometimes someone would be present in the same theatrical space as the person speaking about them but would remain unseen.
In my notes I called it a two-way window:
Ghosts float between realms. It’s interesting being in the in-between. I like this kind of thing.
It reminded me of walking meditation.
Recently, at a Black women’s meditation retreat, we practiced mindful walking while studying the Seven Factors of Awakening. During walking meditation, people often cast their eyes slightly downward. The gaze itself communicates: I am present, but I am practicing; please do not interrupt me.
I am accustomed to making eye contact when I pass someone, sometimes putting my hand over my heart as a silent acknowledgment: I see you.
The people in Simon Boccanegra did something different. Their eyes were not lowered. They looked straight ahead, almost like zombies—but they were not zombies. They walked past each other while occupying entirely different realities.
At one point Gabriele Adorno, Amelia’s beloved, was speaking about her while Amelia was right there beside him, her face covered by a black veil. He could talk about her but could not see her. Then she walked away.
Maria, Amelia’s dead mother and Simon’s beloved, did the same thing throughout the opera. She could cross through the room while other people spoke of her. She was present to us and absent to them.
It was presence without encounter.
At intermission, I wrote another sentence that now seems to me one of the keys to the entire production:
The only time folks were engaged was when they were trying to harm each other.
That is startling when I think about it.
Tenderness was restrained. Recognition was restrained. People passed one another without touching. Yet violence broke through the distance. When someone wanted to attack, abduct, accuse, poison or overthrow someone else, suddenly there was engagement.
Simon’s plea for peace therefore becomes more than a political speech. He is asking these people to discover a way of being in relationship that does not require violence to bring them into contact.
The absence of touch made the few moments of touch even more important.
When Simon discovered that Amelia was his long-lost daughter, he did touch her. That mattered because so much of the evening had withheld physical contact.
But at the end, when Simon was dying and wanted his daughter’s embrace, Amelia walked in the opposite direction.
Only after Simon was dead, stretched out on the floor, did Amelia and Gabriele touch his body.
By then I understood that this production was making separation visible. The characters could remember one another, long for one another and move through the same space, yet still be unable to meet.
And then came the final image.
Simon’s dead body remained on the stage, but behind the mirror we saw Simon and Maria walking toward each other.
After an entire opera of people walking past one another, these two finally walked toward one another.
They could finally be together in death in the way they had not been allowed to be together in life.
That is important because the tragedy begins with patriarchy. Maria’s father, Jacopo Fiesco, refuses to allow his daughter to marry Simon. He has authority; he exercises it. Maria is confined in the family home. She and Simon already have a child, but the baby is elsewhere with a nurse. Maria dies. The child disappears. Simon loses both the woman he loves and the daughter he does not know how to find.
Twenty-five years pass.
The opera does not stop and explain all of this neatly. I was glad I had read the story beforehand because events just keep moving. The lost daughter has another name and another family. Pieces of information surface years later: the woman who cared for her, a sailor who visited, the circumstances of her childhood.
Then Simon meets Amelia.
He has actually come regarding Paolo, who wants Amelia, but that plan disappears as Simon listens to her. Amelia tells him she is not really a Grimaldi. She takes out a tiny locket containing an image of her mother. Simon does not get up and inspect the picture; the locket is too small for that. Recognition happens through story and memory—the names Amelia gives him, the woman who cared for her, the details of her childhood.
And while father and daughter are sitting facing one another, putting together the broken pieces of their lives, Maria is there.
Watching.
That was one of the loveliest moments in the opera for me. Maria’s image is in the locket, Maria’s child is sitting with her father, and Maria’s spirit is looking in on them.
For a moment, the three of them are together.
She gets to witness what she could not live to see: her beloved and her child finding one another.
The mirror, the glass and even the shattered glass scattered across the floor began to mean more to me as the opera continued. Memory is reflective, but memory can also be broken. A family story can be shattered and reconstructed from names, objects, fragments and witnesses.
In my notes I wrote simply:
The glass is back.
Later:
Shards of glass form a centerpiece on the floor.
The broken glass kept returning, as though the production would not allow us to forget that remembering is never a perfectly smooth surface.
There is another element throughout the production: stone.
During the tremendous scene in which the patricians and plebeians are ready to fight one another, people are holding chunks that look almost like pieces of asphalt ripped from a street. Simon tells them to stop. Their ancestors handed them these hatreds, but they do not have to keep practicing them. He calls for peace. He calls for love.
And they put the rocks down.
That scene moved me deeply.
My notes from the evening say:
The Doge is a man of peace. He pardons his foes and tells his people they were raised on bloodshed.
And then:
Slowly the townspeople, plebeians and the others put down their rocks. It’s not a beloved community, but certainly not the reign of a tyrant.
I still like that distinction.
Simon is not creating utopia. These people remain deeply divided. They remain capable of cruelty and betrayal. His achievement is more modest and perhaps more difficult: he keeps interrupting the movement toward bloodshed.
Must we continue killing one another because the people before us did?
Must inherited grievance become destiny?
Apparently not, Simon says.
Put down the weapons.
Then later an enormous dark object hangs above the stage. When I first saw it, I thought it was a cloud.
I wrote:
What’s cool is the huge cloud that hangs like a mobile at the center—large, black and gloomy.
Only later did I realize it was not a cloud but a massive piece of rock—a meteorite. It cast shadows over the people below. Eventually it descended to the ground, looking to me like a mound of wet gray clay, with broken glass encircling it.
That first mistake—seeing a cloud before seeing the rock—now feels almost perfect.
At first the burden appears atmospheric: a darkness hanging over everyone.
Then it becomes matter.
Weight.
History.
The production identifies the meteorite with the accumulating burden Simon carries as leader and father. For me, it also became the weight of inheritance itself: violence, grievance, power, patriarchy, history.
The people can put their individual rocks down, yet this enormous rock still hangs over everybody.
In the Opera House lobby there was another huge meteorite on which audience members could write about the burdens they carried and leave some of that weight behind.
So the rocks onstage were no joke.
But against all that stone, there is water.
Simon was a seafarer before he became Doge. As an older man and political leader, he remembers the sea. He misses it. Things made sense to him there. He knew peace there.
I am not convinced Simon particularly enjoyed being a ruler. He knew how to lead, but leadership seemed to burden him. The council chamber is all rigid lines, doors, officials, wall-to-wall red carpet, factions and schemes.
The sea moves.
The political world hardens.
And then there is Amelia.
Paolo knows that Amelia walks along the shore in the evening. It is part of her routine, and he uses that knowledge in the plot to abduct her.
But what caught me was that she chooses the water, too.
She grew up without knowing Simon was her father, yet father and daughter are both drawn to the sea. Simon longs for it. Amelia walks beside it. Her mother is named Maria, a name with long poetic associations with the sea, including Stella Maris, Star of the Sea. I later looked up Amelia and found its Germanic root, amal, associated with work, striving and activity.
I would not claim that Verdi intended all that etymological symbolism, but poetically it delighted me.
Maria: memory, love, sea.
Amelia: work, striving, action.
And Amelia was born Maria before living as Amelia.
She carries both.
As I talked through all of this afterward with ChatGPT, it offered a phrase that stopped me:
The whole family is almost watermarked.
I loved that.
Watermarked: marked by water, certainly, but also carrying a pattern that is hidden until something reveals it.
Simon, Maria and Amelia are watermarked.
And Amelia is a kind of merwoman.
She is also the peacemaker.
That realization became one of the most important things I took away from the opera. Amelia is the person through whom the men finally stop killing one another.
And her peacemaking is not passive.
She speaks.
She tells Simon the truth about herself. She asks him to pardon the men she loves. She defends Gabriele. She asks her father to forgive a political enemy who has been prepared to kill him.
Simon listens to his daughter.
That matters enormously because Simon does not repeat what Fiesco did to Maria.
Fiesco’s daughter loved a man he opposed, so he exercised patriarchal authority and separated them. Tragedy followed.
A generation later, Simon’s daughter loves a man who is Simon’s political enemy—a man who, overcome by jealousy and suspicion, is actually prepared to kill Simon.
The patriarchal language of the opera is difficult to miss. At one point in my notes I wrote:
The girl is a bargaining chip. Who cares if she agrees.
Women are spoken of as daughters, brides, treasures, rewards. Amelia exists inside that world.
Yet she does not remain merely an object being exchanged among men.
She speaks herself into the story.
She changes its outcome.
Gabriele is almost comical in his emotional extremity. One moment he is essentially, I should kill her! I should kill him! Then he learns that the mysterious man with Amelia is her father and swings toward, I don’t deserve to live!
Dude. Really?
Joshua Guerrero made those moments both believable and funny.
But Simon does something his daughter’s grandfather could not do.
He listens.
Amelia tells him whom she loves, asks for mercy, and changes what he does.
Fiesco tried to control his daughter’s love.
Simon allows his daughter’s love to transform him.
In that sense, Simon practices personally what he has been asking Genoa to practice politically:
You do not have to continue what you inherited.
Amelia becomes the place where that lesson becomes flesh.
She is Simon’s daughter, Fiesco’s granddaughter, Gabriele’s beloved and a Grimaldi by upbringing. She stands at the intersection of worlds that have defined themselves as enemies. Through her, those boundaries become porous.
She does not become another rock.
She changes the current.
And by the end Simon has very little time to enjoy what has been restored to him. He finds his daughter only to lose his life. Paolo poisons him. Simon feels fire moving through his veins before Fiesco tells him what has happened.
Yet Simon’s last actions are acts of generosity.
He reconciles with Fiesco. He blesses Amelia. He forgives Gabriele, the man who was prepared to kill him. He entrusts his beloved daughter—his great treasure—to the future she has chosen. And he names Gabriele as his successor.
He dies practicing the peace he preached.
The irony and hope of the ending are that Gabriele, the hotheaded young man, will become Doge. I found myself hoping he has learned something. I hope he seeks Amelia’s counsel. I hope Genoa and Venice find a way out of their rivalry. I hope the new generation learns not to pick the rocks back up.
Because Simon Boccanegra felt remarkably contemporary to me.
I could not listen to Simon plead with people to put down their weapons, stop inheriting hatred and choose peace and love without thinking about the world we are living in now: wars, intolerance of difference, political violence and leaders unable or unwilling to imagine another way.
The opera asks whether history must keep repeating itself.
Simon’s answer is no.
Amelia’s life is an answer, too.
I was also watching the opera differently because I have been studying audio description.
I found myself wondering: How would I describe this room? How would I describe those three doors opening onto the red-carpeted chamber? How would I describe Maria moving silently through a space where the living do not acknowledge her? How would I communicate that Simon’s double is mirroring him? How do I describe an enormous dark object suspended above the characters without interpreting it too quickly?
Those questions made me aware of how much of this production existed beyond the music and translated words.
San Francisco Opera provides supertitles, but this production’s visual language carries an enormous amount of meaning. A listener could hear Verdi’s beautiful music and follow the words while still missing the bodies moving through separate realities, the absence of touch, the veiled Amelia standing beside the man talking about her, the ghosts behind glass, the shattered surfaces, the rocks being lowered to the ground, the meteorite hovering above everyone, and the final image of Simon walking toward Maria while his dead body remains below.
The staging is not decoration.
It is telling another story.
As someone learning audio description, I kept thinking about what a blind or low-vision person would need in order to enter that story too. Not every movement needs to be described. The music needs room to breathe. But some images are essential. Without them, a significant layer of this Simon Boccanegra disappears.
Perhaps that is another reason I remember the production so physically: who stood where, who crossed whose path, who looked, who did not look, who touched, who did not.
I was watching and, at the same time, imagining how to make what I saw visible in words.
The music itself was extraordinary, and Amartuvshin Enkhbat as Simon Boccanegra was magnificent. In my notes I wrote:
The Doge is well done. The singer carries his character in his voice.
That is still the best way I know to say it.
His voice held authority, weariness, tenderness and sorrow. Eleonora Buratto’s Amelia gave the production its living center. Aleksey Bogdanov’s Paolo was wonderfully sinister; sometimes his face alone told you exactly how poisonous the man was. And Guerrero’s Gabriele brought youthful passion, jealousy and, thankfully, some humor into this very serious world.
I also found myself looking around the Opera House with pleasure. Some people were dressed fancy; plenty of people were dressed comfortably, like me. I could see the orchestra. The conductor was a woman. I liked my seat.
And at intermission I wrote something wonderfully simple:
I am so happy to have become a subscriber.
But what I carried home was not simply the singing or the plot.
I carried the walking.
The absence of touch.
The shattered glass.
The little locket.
The people who were present but could not see one another.
The rocks people finally put down.
The great dark stone hanging over everybody.
The sea.
A daughter who becomes a peacemaker.
And finally, the body of Simon Boccanegra lying on the ground while, in another realm behind the glass, the sailor walks toward Maria.
At last, they see each other.
At last, they are walking in the same direction.
When I got home, I discovered that somewhere during the evening I had lost a heart-shaped rose quartz pendant.
I don’t know when it slipped away from me.
But I like imagining that while everyone onstage was being asked to put down their stones, I was unknowingly putting down one of mine.
I hope someone who needs encouragement finds it.
Author’s Note: I wrote notes throughout Simon Boccanegra at San Francisco Opera, including during intermission. When I got home, I continued thinking aloud about the performance in an extended conversation with ChatGPT. I used it as a thinking partner—to research questions that arose, test interpretations, make connections among things I had noticed, and help shape these reflections. I was also watching through my developing practice as an audio describer, paying particular attention to the set, bodies in space, movement, gesture, touch and the visual language of the production. Some language that emerged in the conversation, including the image of this family as “watermarked,” became part of the reflection.
posted by Interchange @ 2:45 AM
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