Man of the Masses: San Francisco Opera’s Simon Boccanegra Reviewed

# Overview San Francisco Opera opened its season with Verdi's Simon Boccanegra. The production, reviewed by Matthew Travisano, pairs a strong central performance by Amartuvshin Enkhbat with a staging that emphasizes the crowd and public consequences of political life. Offstage events — notably a labor dispute involving the company orchestra that led to canceled performances — add a layer of topical relevance to an opera already concerned with power and public scrutiny.

# Performance and Central Role Enkhbat's portrayal of Simon stands out as the evening's chief success. The reviewer calls his performance "superb," presenting a credible, burdened public figure who lives under constant threat. That characterization fits neatly with Verdi's recurrent theme of solitary men surrounded by hostile forces, found also in Rigoletto and Un ballo in maschera.

# Staging: Rewind and Neo‑Realism Director Claus Güth opens with Simon dead onstage and then literally rewinds the action: characters walk backward out of the scene, and the opera plays itself in reverse to show how events culminate in that initial tableau. Güth sets the drama in a postwar Italian neo‑realist idiom — fedoras, neutral suits, hard lighting — which pushes the opera toward the look of warring mob clans rather than medieval civic conflict.

# Set and Visual Devices Christian Schmidt designed a realistic set with surreal touches. A large mirror functions as a second playing area, and forced perspective compresses spaces so private anxieties appear to intrude on public scenes. Doubles for characters move in an upstage netherworld that occasionally crosses into the main action. Maria Fiesco, Simon's lost love, is shown in that netherworld and dies offstage after a visually explicit passage across the set.

The set intentionally avoids rooting the action in a single place. Details such as heating and cooling grates are small but telling, adding texture that makes civic spaces feel generic — neither clearly Genoa nor any specific modern city. The overall effect is a stripped-down, everyday civic environment that amplifies the opera's concern with public life.

# Political Resonance — Onstage and Off

# Final Impression The evening presents a strong central vocal performance within a production that privileges public spectacle and political atmosphere. The staging's reverse chronology and neo‑realist setting make for a coherent visual concept, even if the shift in time and place does not deepen the opera's political argument in new ways. The production's detail work and visual devices create a deliberately placeless civic world that keeps attention on how public role and personal tragedy collide.