Thoughts on Antagonists: Don Pizarro

Guys, the Zurich 2004 Fidelio with Kaufmann, Nylund and Polgar is now on YouTube in HD, with English subtitles. If you haven't seen it, do. It's worth it for Kaufmann's devastated Florestan alone.

Today's blog post will be, if you haven't already guessed, Fidelio-centric. I've finally, after six months of studying, grumping, procrastinating and generally being lazy, tackled the issue of Don Pizarro.

Pizarro is, by everyone's account and agreement, a cardboard villain. He mustasch-twirls his way through the first act, more gloating in his evil than actually acting it out. He yells at Rocco for letting the prisoners into the garden, and threatens the captain of the guard with dismemberment, but overall, in the first act, Pizarro does not come off as particularly menacing. Many critics have censured Beethoven for this, but the problem is not so much his fault as it is his librettists'.

Pizarro is more malevolent in Act 2, when he tries to murder Florestan and revels in his victory over his enemy. This is where we see how sadistic Pizarro is: here is a man that he has systematically broken over two years, who is about to die anyway from sickness and starvation, and Pizarro gloats over him. We see the end result of his evil in Florestan, who is supposed to be so weak he can hardly move, in chains, and semi-crazy from solitary confinement and long sickness. Listen closely to his aria and you hear the subtext that Florestan has been so ill-treated for so long that he has absolutely no hope of ever regaining earthly freedom. His vision of Leonore is not as a mortal woman, but as angel coming to take him away to heaven. So we see that Pizarro has not been passive about this prisoner. He has taken measures to degrade him to this point, and (as Rocco tells Leonore) has recently ordered him to be slowly starved to death.

The disconnect comes from not making Pizarro himself seem particularly villainous. The menace has to be brought by the singer portraying him. In the hands of a good singing-actor (Walter Berry and Alfred Muff, above, spring to mind) Pizarro can be terrifying. But his evil is more implied than seen.

So how does that translate to the novel that I'm working on?

In fiction, it's essential to have a villain that is a worthy match for the protagonist. Think Harry vs. Voldemort, Valjean vs. Javert, Scarlett O'Hara vs. well, everybody. Leonore is the main protagonist (though Florestan shares the story, his journey is psychological and essentially passive). She smart, strong, brave, and ballsy, and it has been causing me a world of hurt to create a Pizarro that is a worthy match for her. My Pizarro is, at the moment, more of a "phantom menace" to quote one of the more unfortunate Star Wars films: he's there, but they don't clash as much as they should.

So my goal for this month is to write a handful of small scenes to be inserted throughout the text, between Pizarro and Fidelio. I have a great clash between Pizarro and Leonore-as-herself (if I do say so myself), but we see in the opera that Pizarro doesn't like Fidelio much: in the garden scene in Act 1, he attacks her as well as Rocco for letting the prisoners out, snarling that she's a "menial servant". Clue.

I've got my work cut out for me, but I've brainstormed the ideas, and now must bring them to life. And then figure out where in the narrative to put them. Wish me luck.