The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (51 page)

Michele suspects what is going on, but fails to rekindle his wife’s feelings for him.
They quarrel and she goes off to bed.
Michele sits on the deck and lights a pipe.
Watching from the bank, Luigi takes this as the signal from Giorgetta and creeps aboard the barge, only to be seized by Michele, who forces him to confess the affair with Giorgetta and then strangles him to death.
He wraps the corpse in Giorgetta’s cloak, and triumphantly unfurls it when she comes up on deck.

Suor
Angelica

Sister Angelica has been a nun for seven years, without ever hearing from her aristocratic family, who sent her to the convent after she gave birth to an illegitimate son.
But now the Abbess tells Angelica that her aunt, an elderly Princess, has come to see her.
Angelica is delighted, but the Princess is stern and unforgiving.
She wants some documents signed and tells Angelica that her son died two years ago.

Angelica is distraught.
She takes poison, then worries that the sin of suicide will damn her and that she will never be united with her son in heaven.
Her prayers to the Virgin Mary are answered with a miracle – the Virgin appears, leading
her son towards her.
To the sound of heavenly choirs, Angelica dies happily.

Gianni
Schicchi

In a mansion in medieval Florence, Buoso Donati dies.
His relatives weep crocodile tears, thinking only about the money they will inherit.
They are appalled to discover that he has left everything to a monastery.
They decide to solicit the help of the crafty Gianni Schicchi, whose daughter Lauretta wants to marry Buoso’s nephew Rinuccio.
Schicchi agrees to impersonate the dying Buoso and dictate a new will which will favour the relatives.

A notary is summoned.
But the new will which Schicchi then dictates leaves piffling amounts to the monastery and the relatives, instead bequeathing the bulk of Buoso’s estate to Schicchi himself.
The relatives are furious, but Lauretta and Rinuccio can now be comfortably married.

What to listen for

Il
Tabarro
is Puccini’s one true exercise in verisimo style, not only in terms of its lurid, proletarian subject-matter, but also in its declamatory vocal writing for dramatic soprano (Giorgetta), tenor (Luigi) and baritone (Michele).
Like
Fanciulla,
it offers no real set numbers, but colour comes from the painting of the Parisian landscape and its canalside characters.
The whistle of a tug-boat, a foghorn, automobile klaxon and an out-of-tune hurdy-gurdy can all be heard.

The entirely female
Suor
Angelica
is in contrast more gentle and meandering, at least in the pastoral opening minutes, with its pretty musical depiction of the nuns going about their daily business.
The opera really takes off dramatically with the dialogue between the fearsome Princess (contralto) and abject Angelica (lyric soprano), followed by Angelica’s delicately scored and deeply touching aria, ‘Senza mamma’, a lament for her dead son which closes with a testing pianissimo high A.
The final scene of the miraculous revelation uses several off-stage instruments – including two pianos, an
organ, three trumpets and cymbals to enhance the sense of supernatural incursion.
Like Butterfly, Angelica is a role which requires occasional bursts of vocal heft (including some screaming!) as well as pathos, fragility and charm – Teresa Stratas is widely considered to have been incomparable in this role.
Among the minor roles, that of Suor Genovieffa stands out for some lovely phrases, especially those sung at her entrance.

Gianni
Schicchi
is full of sharply delineated character roles and is ideally performed in a tightly integrated ensemble of quicksilver responsiveness.
Schicchi himself is composed for the sort of baritone who could also sing the title role in Verdi’s
Falstaff –
an opera to which
Gianni
Schicchi
is clearly indebted.
Lauretta is for a young lyric soprano: she has the one famous aria, ‘O mio babbino caro’ (sung a plea to her father to help her courtship of Rinuccio) but in the dramatic context it should be sung with freshness, simplicity and sincerity rather than as a self-conscious diva’s showpiece.
It has often been remarked that this is an opera that makes little impact on the gramophone, but it comes delightfully alive in a good live performance.

In performance

Although all three of these operas stand as individual masterpieces and the balance and contrast between them is brilliantly calculated, their total duration (four hours, including two intervals) makes the sum of
Il
Trittico
just too long for the ordinary Puccini audience and too draining of an opera house’s resources (it is, for instance, virtually impossible to present three such different operas on one unit set and only a limited amount of cross-casting is advisable).
Consequently, both
Il
Tabarro
and
Gianni
Schicchi
often appear paired with one other one-act opera.

In Antwerp, Robert Carsen cleverly skirted these problems by combining the different worlds of the three operas and presenting them all as rehearsals in which the (uncostumed) singers appear to be improvising their roles.

Recording

CD: Renata Scotto (Angelica), Tito Gobbi (Schicchi); Lorin Maazel (cond.).
Sony M3K 79312

Turandot

Three acts. First performed Milan, 1926.

Libretto by Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni

Puccini’s magnificent last work, left unfinished at his death from cancer.
At the first performance in 1926, the conductor Arturo Toscanini famously laid down his baton at the point at which Puccini’s score ceased – the funeral procession for Liù – and announced to the audience, ‘The opera ends here because at this point the maestro died.’ But since then
Turandot
has customarily been heard in a version completed from surviving sketches by Puccini’s pupil, Franco Alfano.

Plot

In ancient Peking, the cruel but beautiful Princess Turandot lives only to revenge the rape of her ancestor Lou-Ling.
She will marry anyone who can answer her three riddles, but those who fail will be executed.
All comers have failed the challenge and suffered the penalty, but when Calaf, son of Timur, the deposed King of Tartary, arrives in Peking in disguise, accompanied by Timur and the adoring slave girl Liù, he resolves to try his luck, despite the warnings of Turandot’s ministers Ping, Pang and Pong and the protestations of Timur and Liù.

Ping, Pang and Pong lament the unhappy despotism which rules over China and long for their rural homes.
Presided over by the elderly Emperor, the ceremony of the three riddles takes place in the palace before a great crowd.
Turandot is dismayed when Calaf, presenting himself as an anonymous stranger, answers them all correctly.
She claims that she would die of shame if she had to marry, but the Emperor insists that the
terms of the test are unbreakable.
Calaf now presents Turandot with another challenge – if she can discover his name before daybreak, he will release her from her obligation.

Turandot orders that nobody in Peking shall sleep until the stranger’s name is uncovered.
In the palace gardens, Ping, Pang and Pong attempt to bribe Calaf, but he is adamant.
Meanwhile, Timur and Liù have been arrested.
To save Timur, Liù steps forward and claims that she alone knows the stranger’s name.
Under torture, she then refuses to reveal it.
Turandot asks her what gives her such magnanimity: love, replies Liù, who then kills herself.

Calaf is left alone with Turandot.
He rails at her coldness and cruelty and then kisses her passionately.
No man has ever done such a thing to her before, and under the spell of his ardour, her ferocity melts.
She begs Calaf to leave with his secret intact, but he tells her his name and puts his life in her hands.
In the presence of the Emperor, she announces at dawn she has discovered the stranger’s name – it is Love.

What to listen for

With its hints of Debussy, Ravel, Strauss and Schoenberg, the largely choral Act I is a kaleidoscope of early modernistic styles, effects and influences, with an ensemble finale which seems to encapsulate the whole tradition of nineteenth-century Italian opera.
Puccini takes a great theatrical risk with Turandot herself – although she makes a brief, silent appearance in Act I, she only begins to sing half-way through Act II, by which point audience expectation is intense.
The role is written for a dramatic soprano with an inexhaustible top register: her aria ‘In questa reggia’, in which she explains the reasons for the challenge of the riddles, is exceptionally difficult in that nothing precedes it, and the voice therefore has had no chance to warm up.
Even trickier are the two long climactic phrases at the end of Act II in which she pleads with the Emperor, rising to top Cs which are expected to ride over the orchestra and chorus.
It amounts to a gruelling twenty minutes for even the steeliest soprano throats.