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.

Brave new world

Could you think of a better use for Buoso Donati's money than the rosy future of these two incandescent young things - Ekaterina Siurina's Lauretta and Francesco Demuro's Rinuccio as pictured by Bill Cooper for the Royal Opera - in one of my desert island operas, Puccini's Gianni Schicchi? Wouldn't you put them on top of a wedding cake and eat them? And, yes, they sang as spiritedly as they acted.

If we've learnt one new thing about Schicchi in the past few years, it's that the comic payoff is so much richer if it comes after the Seineside hell of Il tabarro and the foolproof pathos of Suor Angelica, a true trittico indeed. And on Monday night Richard Jones, the only visionary director of our times (I've said it before and I'll say it again), pulled off the feat of connecting the three operas in far from obvious ways, using three of our best set designers, no less. Perhaps I was over-subtle in what I detected they had in common, since these things - the bedclothes, the shadows and - in Tabarro and Schicchi - the impersonation of a dead figure wrapped in a sheet/cloak by the same singer (Lucio Gallo) - weren't picked up by others. Read all about it on The Arts Desk.


Some bloke accused me of lacking objectivity in saying that I might have warmed to Ermonela Jaho's pharmaceutical nun if I'd been able to see her face better - and, yes, doesn't she look lovely in the above photo? But I thought it WAS objective to announce where I'd been sat (in the balcony, seemingly demoted by RO press after swanning in the stalls). And what you can or can't see does make a difference. In any case, the problem with Jaho is the tight, vibrato-y voice which just won't open up for the crucial 'Senza mamma'. Here's the greatest performance of it I've ever heard, Callas included: Scotto's on the Maazel recording.



People who said they usually squirm at Suor Angelica - I never have in the opera house, always wept buckets - found they warmed to the Royal Opera take, Jaho included, but that was Pappano, Jones and Puccini all doing their stuff, surely. The kid business as radically rethought here was, I reckon, more rather than less moving than usual.


Love the Mimi-seamstresses at work on the quay in Il tabarro. One, I noticed from the cast list, was Jones regular Michelle Wade of Maison Bertaux fame (how's it doing? Our Bertaux phase seems to have passed - it just got too ludicrously expensive). And the set design put Ultz absolutely on a par with current (well-deserved) darling Miriam Buether's kiddies' hospital and John Macfarlane's floral-wallpapered Florentine apartment. Love, too, those dayglo costumes by Nicky Gillibrand (one constant throughout).


It would take a really bad Schicchi for me not to chuckle indulgently at every jot and tittle; this one, staging-wise, was as taut and perceptive as it gets. As I've written before, we put it on at City Lit 23 years ago; David Edwards, who graduated to bigger things at the Royal Opera and elsewhere, gave it a Sicilian-mafia look with lots of scrumpled pieces of newspaper as decor. I was Marco, a relative who can't really stand out (Robert Poulton at the Garden didn't; though Alan Oke's Gherardo, thanks to nightmare-retro costuming, certainly did) but has as much fun as anyone being on stage nearly the whole time.

The fabulous Vasiliki Fikaris, dear Vassa (where is she now?), was la mia moglie. The diplo-mate, subsequently the best of Escamillos at City Lit before moving up the register to be the greatest Florestan at St John's Smith Square (I kid you not, but then you could say I'm partial), sang Maestro Spinelloccio. Our relationship began in the enchanted air of a summery Edinburgh - my city - when we took it to the fringe with the Rehearsal Orchesta.

So it's 'our opera', and I've loved it irrationally ever since, though I'm still convinced that Puccini's comic timing is extraordinary - if anything even better than Verdi's in Falstaff - and as Pappano proved, the score never stops yielding up more secrets (that bassoon for the bowel movement!). Though Bryn was his usual charismatic self as Schicchi when the Jones production first appeared, il maestro has to be Alessandro Corbelli, who plays the cunning peasant as an extra member of the Marx Brothers (watch for gookies).

Corbelli was good in a messy Met production, but incomparably better for Annabel Arden at Glyndebourne, Jurowski conducting. Watch this segment - sorry about the Japanese subtitles - for Rinuccio (Massimo Giordano) setting up his entrance and Lauretta (Sally Matthews) persuading him to stay and sort it. Jones treated 'O mio babbino caro' rather seriously: maybe Lauretta really will throw herself in the Arno if she can't marry her Rino, clearly Gallo's Schicchi cares for her more than life itself. In the Glyndebourne Schicchi, she's the sweetest of manipulators. Battleaxe cousin Zita is, of course, Felicity Palmer, playing her rather elegant, though Elena Zilio at Covent Garden is my favourite (her solo 'lllllladrrrrrrro' to Schicchi once the lawyer's gone brings the house down). Enjoy - and don't forget to listen to the Radio 3 broadcast of the Royal Opera production on Saturday.