Opera in Depth Summer 2024: the human comedy

Dante's Divina Commedia was Puccini's model for the trajectory of his most comprehensive masterpiece, even if the subject-matter is quite different for the most part. You can, of course, take Il tabarro, Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi separately, or put the individual operas alongside other one-acters, but it's reassuring to see the trilogy most often presented these days as the composer intended (and no, IMO it is NOT acceptable to reverse the orders of the convent drama and the Florentine comedy). 

The beauty of it is that each is a supreme masterpiece of timing and atmosphere on its own terms.  Each makes use of finely observed vignettes in the first third of the drama before the screw begins to turn. There is something hellish about the barge couple's existence in Il tabarro, but it's offset by an almost Debussyan impressionism and gently comic vignettes. Puccini surely drew some of the details of cloistered life from meeting with his sister in her monastic community. And the better I know my Dante - THE big revelation of recent years since the free course with Alessandro Scafi and John Took at the Warburg Institute - the more pleasure I can take from the passing references to so many Dantean names and places in Schicchi, even though its source is a mere line and a bit in Inferno.

Then each opera packs its punch (and never more so than in Richard Jones' Royal Opera production - we'll be referring to the above regularly). Suor Angelica is the most heartbreaking, on a level with Madama Butterfly; Gianni Schicchi is laugh-out-loud funny tinged with youthful romantic love. It will always be a desert island opera for me since it was on an Edinburgh Fringe week of performing it with the Rehearsal Orchestra that my so far 35-year-old relationship with other half, later civil partner and husband, began. 

I'm hoping the infinitely generous and warm Ermonela Jaho can be persuaded to join us after her unforgettable visit to the Butterfly course (when we also had two hours of Antonio Pappano, but I guess he's even busier now. Just got a proof copy of his autobiography and there's wisdom on every page). Meanwhile, here's the flyer for the forthcoming term with full details of how to join - click to enlarge.

For the last four Mondays I can't wait to revisit John Adams's Nixon in China - for me, the best opera of the last 40 years, though there are comic rivals to Schicchi in Gerald Barry's The Importance of Being Earnest and Alice's Adventures Under Ground). One plus since the last time is that other productions have appeared since Peter Sellars' initial hit toured the world (partner and I saw its UK premiere in the Edinburgh Festival at the aformentioned time). To return to operas I'd studied in live classes is never to repeat; I don't look at the old notes. Picture below by Ken Howard from the Met staging of the Sellars production.

How fresh and wondrous we all found Salome and Carmen this past term.  The most rainbow-hued of Strauss's operatic scores is surely also his most perfectly structured. And seeing it a week after the last class in Bruno Ravella's so richly-layered Irish National Opera production in Dublin was a wonder (image below by Patricio Cassinoni for INO). 

Hpw delighted I am that it will be appearing on the superlative free OperaVision website (YouTube connected) later this month, with Ravella's unsurpassably well-cast Garsington Ariadne auf Naxos). How lucky we were, too, with tie visit of Bruno and conductor Fergus Sheil just before the production opened.

Bizet's instrumental and harmonic felicities in Carmen seem limitless: surely this has to be the opera to take a newcomer to if the performances nail it. And I don't think we'll ever see or hear surpassed the duo of Elīna Garanča and Roberto Alagna in Richard Eyre's Metropolitan Opera production*. 

I used scenes from other productions, but no central relationship goes to the edge in its visceral quality as this one does. I've previously state that the DVD of Glyndebourne's Janáček Jenůfa should be the first port of call for anyone who comes to opera from the world of theatre; for the perfect mix of aria, duet and ensemble form with high drama, the 2010 Met Carmen should be the one.

*UPDATE: Damiano Michieletto's new Royal Opera production comes nowhere near, alas, or certainly not with its first cast, marvellous though Aighul Akhmetshina is. And of course I wanted it to succeed, but the review has to tell the truth.