The Flemish lands form part of Belgium today, the lands where a dialect of Dutch is spoken rather than French. We would be more likely to associate Flanders with trench warfare during World War I or with an earlier age of Renaissance commerce and art: the great commercial centers of Ghent, Bruges, and Antwerp, the sublime Flemish masters Hans Memling, Hieronymus Bosch, and Pieter Breughel. A devout Catholic who unsuccessfully sent the Spanish Armada against England in 1588, Philip, in a lesser-known aspect of his reign, bloodily crushed an uprising of his subjects in Flanders. Don Carlos, the heir to the Spanish throne, introduces the Flemish deputies into the scene as an act of defiance against his father King Philip II, absolute ruler of Spain, master of the New World of the Americas with its precious lodes of gold and silver.
The six Flemish deputies appear in the third act of Don Carlos interrupting the horrific choral celebration of the auto-da-fé, the public execution of religious heretics-often secretly practicing Muslims and Jews-victims of the Spanish Inquisition. The glory and freedom of Ukraine had not yet perished and were being appreciated with stunned astonishment in parliaments, embassies, intelligence agencies, newspapers, universities, and even opera houses. Four days later, observers were perhaps even more shocked to discover that the Ukrainian army was resisting the Russian invasion and that the former-comedian President Volodymyr Zelensky was about to assume the mantle of Winston Churchill, courageously defying one of the world’s military superpowers. The outbreak of the war in Ukraine had been a shock to international observers, including many experts who believed up until the very last minute that Putin was bluffing. Standing at the center of the Met stage with his hand on his heart and singing with fervor was Vladyslav Buialskyi, the 24-year-old Ukrainian bass-baritone who was about to make his Met debut as one of the sextet of Flemish deputies in Don Carlos. Before the opera began the Met chorus sang the Ukrainian national anthem, “The Glory and Freedom of Ukraine Has Not Yet Perished,” written and composed in the 1860s and first performed in Lviv in 1864, just three years before Don Carlos in Paris, at a time when there was no Ukrainian state, when the lands of Ukraine were divided between the Romanov and Habsburg empires. Four days later on February 28 the Metropolitan Opera presented for the first time the original French version of Verdi’s Don Carlos, as composed for Paris in 1867, extending over five acts that lasted almost five hours at the Met. On February 24 Russia invaded Ukraine with infantry, tanks, and missile attacks, shredding the post-Cold War international order in an enterprise of savage aggression.
“Sauve la Flandre!”: Don Carlos at the Metropolitan Opera
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