|
Back story:
King Gustavus III of Sweden is a historical figure of legendary political and cultural importance. In addition to working political reforms and being remembered as an enlightened absolute monarch, he writes plays and drafts opera librettos based on Sweden’s history. He imports opera, ballet, and theater artists to elevate Stockholm to a cultural capital of Europe. He founds the Royal Swedish Academy of Music in 1771 and the Royal Opera and the Royal Opera Ballet School in 1773. In 1786 he establishes the Swedish Academy, modeled after the Académie française, to improve the Swedish language. (Today the Academy awards the Nobel Prize in literature.)
Gustavus’s assassination is for political reasons, though the conspirators closest to the actual shooting also have personal vendettas against the king. Captain Johan Jacob Anckarström develops a serious grudge against King Gustavus III because Anckarström incorrectly blames Gustavus III for charging him with sedition; Gustavus had actually reversed the charge. Anckarström recruits Count Clas Frederik Horn and Count Adolf L. Ribbing to his cause. Rejected by a Miss de Geer in favor of the king’s chief horseman, Baron Essen, Ribbing blames the king (rather than the Baron’s legendary handsomeness). Meanwhile, the king develops a chronic dread of the month of March, as most negative events in his career seemed to occur during that month. One of Gustavus’s unofficial advisors is a woman known as Mam’zelle Arvidson, who knows everyone’s secrets, uses coffee grounds to predict the king’s military campaigns, and warns him about the conspiracy.
January 1792: Anckarström carries his pistols to Gävle, where the Swedish Riksdag (Parliament) is meeting. Severe weather—Sweden in January—cancels the king’s daily walks, so Anckarström doesn’t get an opportunity to shoot the king.
March 2, 1792: Ribbing, Anckarström, and the king attend a masked ball in Stockholm. The party is sparsely attended. Needing a large crowd to enable their escape, Ribbing and Anckarström postpone the assassination again. Another masked ball is planned for March 6, but cancelled. The final masquerade of the season is set for March 16. Elaborate plans develop, covering everything from caring for Anckarström’s children to framing a new constitution.
March 16, 1792
Early morning: King Gustavus walks with his friend G. Löwenhjelm in Haga Park, admiring the beginning construction of a new palace.
Mid-morning: Anckarström meets with General Pechlin, who has already heard about the conspiracy from Baron Bjelke. The planned assassination fits into a plotted revolution.
Afternoon: All the leading conspirators except Horn and Anckarström meet at Pechlin’s home, finishing by 4:00. Anckarström loads his two pistols each with two bullets and fourteen pieces of lead (so that if the shot doesn’t kill Gustavus, the lead pieces will cause gangrene), and sharpens a large butcher knife, adding a barb to the point.
Löwenhjelm and the king dine at Haga, and attend Les folies amoureuses (“Love’s Follies”), a comedy by Jean-François Regnard.
 After 11:00pm: The king sups with several companions in his private apartment at the opera house. During the meal, a page named Tigerstedt delivers an anonymous letter written in pencil in large, round handwriting, warning the king of the long-term conspiracy and its planned culmination at the masquerade. As the others in the group leave for the party, the king shows the letter to Baron Essen, who urges him to avoid the event, or at least to protect himself with chainmail. Gustavus laughs at his fears, and selects a half-mask and Venetian silk cloak that do not disguise him.
Midnight: King Gustavus and Baron Essen observe the masquerade from the king’s private box at the side of the hall. The conspirators arrive at the same time. After fifteen minutes, the king decides that any opportunity to shoot him has passed. He and Essen join the party. Conspirators surround them, and Count Horn taps the king on the shoulder, exclaiming “Bonjour, beau masque!” (“Hello, fine masque!” in French, the official language of the Swedish court). That is Horn’s signal to Anckarström, who presses his gun into the king’s back and shoots him just above the left hip. In a hall crowded with masked conspirators, Gustavus and his men cannot tell who fired the shot.
Löwenhjelm and a guard reach the king and draw their swords to disperse the crowd. Surprised and trying to foment chaos, Anckarström drops his weapons and cries that the building is on fire. Captain Georg von Pollet orders the doors closed, and Lowenhjelm orders the gates of the city of Stockholm locked. Only Horn escapes. Meanwhile, the king insists that his assassin be seized but not hurt, and that the official word be that the king is merely scratched, not seriously injured.
News spreads in minutes, and members of the diplomatic corps arrive. Their stories include these quotes from Gustavus:
To the Prussian and Spanish ministers Brockhausen and de Corral: “How unfortunate that, after having braved in warfare the fire of the enemy, I should have been wounded in the back in the midst of my own people!”
To the Russian ambassador, Count Stackelberg, who expressed horror that the king had ignored warnings: “When a madman has made up his mind to sacrifice his own life to obtain yours, he must succeed in the long run.”
To his brother, Duke Charles, after insisting that Charles never tell Gustavus’s son the names of the assassins: “As he is destined to rule the people, I do not wish the seeds of hatred and vengeance to be sown in his youthful mind.”
After midnight, morning of March 17: Henrik Liljensparre, chief of police, allows all the partygoers to leave one at a time as he takes their names. Anckarström is last to leave, saying, “You won’t suspect me, I hope!” Liljensparre summons all the gunsmiths of Stockholm. One named Kaufmann identifies Anckarström’s pistols.
Daylight, March 17: Doctors examine Gustavus’s wounds at the palace. Afraid to risk surgery, they can remove only one nail.
Diplomats continue to visit. Gustavus tells Count Brahe, premier peer of Sweden: “’Tis indeed a happy accident which has enabled me to regain old friends so long estranged.”
March 25, 1792: Feverish, Gustavus orders and eats an ice. Some feel that this chill hastens his death.
March 29, 1792, 10:55am: Insisting to the end that his assassins should be pardoned, Gustavus dies after receiving the sacrament from Bishop Wallquist.
His port-mortem reveals broken vertebrae, severe kidney and liver injuries, and leather wadding from the charges embedded in his body.
A baker’s assistant tells Liljensparre that Lilliehorn, one of the conspiring nobles, had bribed him to deliver the anonymous letter.
Baron Bjelke destroys his papers and poisons himself to avoid cross-examination by Liljensparre.
Pechlin is arrested. He observes that he seems to be suspected of every conspiracy that ever arises in Sweden.
April 16, 1792: In spite of the king’s dying wish, Anckarström is sentenced to three days of flogging, amputation of his right hand, decapitation, and quartering.
April 27, 1792: Anckarström is guillotined. Bjelke’s corpse is hanged and buried beneath the gallows. Other conspirators are banished.
Later 1792: The Anckarström family changes its name to Löwenström and founds Löwenström Hospital.
1796: Pechlin dies in prison at Varberg.
1797: Count Sierakowski publishes Histoire de l’assassinat de Gustave III, roi de Suède, par un officier polonais, témoin oculaire (“Story of the assassination of Gustavus III, king of Sweden, by a Polish officer eyewitness”), in Paris. Much of this histoire is later refuted, including Sierakowski’s apocryphal claim that Anckarström was angry at Gustavus for preventing Anckarström’s relationship with an actress.
March 1798: King Gustav IV Adolf (1778-1837), son and successor of Gustav III, bans Sierakowski’s book in Stockholm.
1818: John Brown publishes Northern Courts, a memoir, in London, and Monsieur Cohen translates it into French.
February 27, 1833: Gustave III, ou Le bal masqué, a five-act opéra historique by Daniel-François-Esprit Auber to a libretto by Eugène Scribe, premieres in Paris. James Robinson Planché adapts Auber’s opera as an English melodrama. Scribe invents a love affair between Gustavus and Anckarström’s wife; Anckarström’s widow assures Planché that there was no such affair, and that the assassination had been purely political.
April 22, 1853: Verdi writes to his new friend and collaborator Antonio Somma, suggesting Somma develop a libretto based on King Lear.
1855-56: Verdi and Vicenzo Torelli of the San Carlo opera house, Naples, correspond about plans for Re Lear.
February 1857: Verdi signs a contract with San Carlo for Re Lear, contingent on finding appropriate singers, but he and Somma look for other stories too.
September 19, 1857: Verdi writes to Torelli about adapting Gustav III.
November 1857: The Neapolitan Censorship insists: (1) The central character must be a duke, not a king; (2) The setting must be pre-Christian (hence witchcraft); (3) Northern settings are acceptable, except for Norway and Sweden; (4) The duke’s love must be noble and remorseful; (5) Ribbing and Horn’s grudge must be based on a hereditary conflict, such as property rights; (6) While a masquerade was appropriate for Stockholm in 1792, the title event must match the new setting; (7) While Gustavus was truly shot, the opera must have no firearms.
January 14, 1858: En route to a performance of Rossini’s opera Guillaume Tell (“William Tell”) in Paris, Emperor Napoleon’s carriage is bombed. Eight people are killed and 142 wounded, including the would-be assassin Felice Orsini, but Napoleon and Empress Eugénie survive unharmed.
February 7, 1858: Verdi writes to Somma to complain of the following new restrictions, among others: (1) The hero’s beloved must be Anckarström’s sister, not wife; (2) No dancing; (3) No murder onstage; (4) No lottery to determine who should commit the (presumed offstage) murder.
February 17, 1859: Un ballo in maschera premieres at Teatro Apollo, Rome. Its setting is Boston, late seventeenth century, with colonial governors transplanted from the sophisticated English court of Charles II, and conspirators possibly named for current American characters Uncle Sam and Uncle Tom.
January 1861: Un ballo in maschera plays at the Théâtre Italien, Paris, with its setting changed to seventeenth-century Naples and Oscar renamed Edgardo.
Early 1861: Un ballo in maschera (Boston setting) makes its American première in New York.
March 15, 1861: The New York company of Un ballo in maschera plays in Boston, with an added galop danced by opera patrons onstage in the last act.
June 1861: Un ballo in maschera plays at the Lyceum Theatre, London, and then at Covent Garden. Both productions are in Italian. Covent Garden’s manuscript includes inconsistent names for the characters.
1865: Auber’s Gustav III plays in German at Gothenburg, Sweden.
1868: A Swedish translation of Un ballo in maschera is published, but not performed.
1871: Un ballo in maschera plays in New York, in English.
1882: Löwenhjelm’s manuscript memoir Minnen af Gustaf III is published by the executors of Swedish historian Anders Fryxell (1795-1881).
1927: The 1868 Swedish translation of Un ballo in maschera plays in Stockholm.
1952: Edward Dent prepares an English translation of Un ballo in maschera for Covent Garden that restores Scribe’s Swedish setting for the first time in a major opera house, calling it “the only way to rescue Un ballo in maschera and give it the popularity which it deserves.”
 January 7, 1955: Marian Anderson makes her operatic debut as Mam’zelle Arvidson (called Ulrica in this production) at the Metropolitan Opera, the first African-American to join the Met company. Reporter Howard Taubman notes, “Miss Anderson—like Joshua, but much more quietly—had fought the battle of Jericho, and at last the walls had come tumbling down.” Reviewer Olin Downes observes, “There was no moment in which Miss Anderson’s interpretation was commonplace or repetitive in effect. In Ulrica’s one half-act, by her native sensibility, intelligence, and vocal art, Miss Anderson stamped herself in the memory and the lasting esteem of those who listened.” Both writers mention extended ovations.
Downes also praises “the certainty and effectiveness of [24-year-old] Roberta Peters’ Oscar, the page—a page equipped not only with voice, but also, may we say, with limbs such as all the women pages appareled as men should display in operaland.”
1960: Royal Swedish Opera tours a version of Un ballo in maschera to London in which Gustavus is more interested in Oscar than in Amelia.
February 11, 2006: Malmö Opera, Sweden, offers a production of Un ballo in maschera in Swedish that alludes to the 1986 assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme. Spokeswoman Catarina Ek explains, “When Verdi wrote A Masked Ball it was not a biographical opera, it was about the mythology of Gustav III. And there is a similar mythology surrounding Palme. We are not changing the story, just setting it in modern times where Gustav III is in our production called ‘prime minister.’ They sing ‘Olof’ instead of ‘Gustav III’ and the character resembles Olof Palme.”
March 30, 2007: 215 years plus two weeks after the original Masked Ball, Boston Lyric Opera opens its first production of Un ballo in maschera.
Information in this timeline comes from many sources, especially the Dent and Bain articles in our Resources section.
|
