Tragedy, lyrical moral tale, or farce? Take your pick, suit your mood and watch our Opera(s) of the Week one a night over the next week. Il trittico (the tryptich) is three one-hour operas of completely different styles and set in completely different milieux, but united in the concealment of a death.
The performance comes from the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and is streaming over their YouTube site from Saturday June 6 at 6 am (our time) till June 21st. Here's the trailer and programme. It was Puccini's last complete opera, premiering at the New York Met in 1918. This ROH production is by Richard Jones and was first performed in 2011. The performance we'll see (also on DVD and Blu-Ray) is conducted by Antonio Pappano.
OperaJournal has an intelligent and thoughtful review of this performance, remarking "It’s Antonio Pappano’s contribution to the production as a whole however that proves to be the critical factor in its overall resounding success. All this richness and diversity, the sense of fun and drama, along with the serious musicological insight and consideration of the deeper qualities of the work is borne out in Pappano’s conducting of the orchestra of the Royal Opera House, who give a mesmerising performance. With excellent casting and singing, and an appropriate staging, you really couldn’t ask for more."
OperaNut (Bill Cooper) is a more personal take but discusses the theatrical aspects more closely, and concludes enthusiastically "This opera is to be seen and heard, not to be written about it. Go, if you get a chance."
Opera-online has an intelligent discussion of the triptych, its common threads, and its musical styles (though it gets some dates and world events quite wrong). Puccini saw the three as a whole and strongly resisted attempts to perform them separately. When you watch the opera(s), look out for common themes of concealment, deceit, causes of death, and the flow of time, all of which various critics have remarked on.
The tragic: Il Tabarro (the cloak)
A gritty tale of the proletariat with a gritty setting - the Seine dockside in Paris in 1900. This is Puccini's opera verismo in spades, where a sordid love triangle leads to murder. Notable in this performance is the great Dutch dramatic soprano Eva Marie Westbroek, - she played Maddalena in Andrea Chenier for Opera Australia last year, and unforgettably as Sieglinde in Die Walkure at the Met in the same year.
Go to Artaxmusic for a synopsis, history, and interesting introduction to the music. No catchy Puccini-esqe tunes here, it's too brutal. For a deeper insight into the music, watch Antonio Pappano's discussion, comparing this work to Puccini's other operas and with many examples of the music's innovative structure - we've left behind the nineteenth century here! OperaNut remarks "There are no major arias, but the sense of their history and their social position as vagabonds, a life that is slowly grinding them down, is expressed in the singing and in the voices, the intensity of the emotion and expression of temperament as important as they actual words they sing, if not even more so."
The lyric: Suor Angelica (Sister Angelica)
This was Puccini's favourite of the three, a sentimental tale set in a nunnery in the seventeenth century. The theme is what happens when you sin against the religious morals of the day. As I recall it from a few years back, Puccini has set up a triangle of conflict between Catholicism, religion-as-it-was-meant-to-be, and humanism. See what you think. Ermolena Jaho is the eponymous Angelica.
Here's Pappano again going into detail on its music, and Artaxmusic again on history and synopsis. Do you know of another opera with an all-female cast? OperaNut is enthusiastic: "I have never, ever, seen an opera singer who so completely lived a fictional character as Ermonela Jaho lived Sister Angelica." OperaJournal remarks "If Il Tabarro has a kind of spiritual connection with La Bohème, the fatal tragedy of the romantic heroine of Suor Angelica is aligned closely with the circumstances and the fate of Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly.... There is however considerable maturity in the through composition of the opera and in Puccini’s attempt here not so much to accompany the action as much as describe the otherworldly aspects that drive it."
The producer Richard Jones omits the very final scene which resolves the dramatic tension for Angelica - is it Heaven or Hell for her. We the audience are left to play God.
The comic: Gianni Schicchi
Why is the reading of a will such a staple theme for farces? The story here has the themes of the old commedia dell'arte with the clever servant (come across that before in opera?) Puccini set it in Florence in 1299, and the story is derived from Dante's Divine Comedy. Gianni Schicchi was a real person, a unscrupulous con-man whom Dante assigned to the eighth circle of Hell. Nevertheless it was to him that Lauretta, his daughter, sang that famous aria O mio babbino caro - O my beloved father. Fun stuff!
Wikipedia has all the historical background Dante drew on, as well as the history and synopsis of the opera. Unfortunately Pappano doesn't seem to have discussed this opera. I can't resist a long quote from OperaJournal:
"The comic opera is certainly not a style you would associate with Puccini, but his treatment of the humour in Gianni Schicchi is nothing short of brilliant. Closer to Verdi’s Falstaff than say Donizetti’s clever but broader slapstick, there’s no heavy comic underscoring here (whatever that might entail, I’m not sure), but rather an almost furtive, subtle, insidious expression of the nature this mixed bag of greedy, grasping, backstabbing, moneygrubbers in all their scheming self-importance. It’s dazzling to hear how a composer of Puccini’s experience and maturity handles himself in this unfamiliar register, from the false sobs scored into the opening notes, through the knowing self-parody of heartfelt (yet still justly famous) arias that don’t express ‘Addio del passato’ as much as ‘Addio to the money’, to the frantic jostling for positions of influence of this motley mob and their eventual well-deserved comeuppance."
Enjoy! Let the group know what you think.
Tom, 5th June 2020.