I realized yesterday that I love Puccini. I have seen Tosca, and I loved it, and La Boheme, which I also loved. Then I loved all three parts of Il Trittico. Next month we see Madama Butterfly. I can't wait.
Puccini has a way of expressing through music and lyrics what is generally confined to private emotions. His work is incredibly moving because it gets right to the heart of what we have all felt and experienced: love, pain, pleasure, desperation. Puccini's charcteristic style is called verismo which has been defined by William Berger as "seeking to show life as it is among people as they are." Of course actors and actresses in costume and make up on a stage performing some plot is hardly real life, but there is a truth to his operas that is both genuine and unapologetic.
The all three operas in the triptych (which is what il trittico means) have a common theme of death, but each one has its own disposition. Puccini drew on the Parisian Grand Guignol model of three naturalistic plays performed together which portray the horrific, the sentimental and the comedic. The first two operas, one dark and one tragic, were directed by William Friedkin, director of The Exorcist, and the last one, the comedy, was directed by Woody Allen.
The first of the operas was called Il Tabarro, or the Cloak. Like Tosca, it is a story filled with deception, vengeance and tension. It's mood is dark. Giorgetta is married to Michele, a barge owner who works on the Seine. The day is winding down and the workers are nearly finished unloading the barge. Giorgetta is from the city, as is Luigi (one of Michele's workers), and they reminisce about the romance of city living. They dance to the the songs of an organ grinder and Giorgetta pours wine for the workers. Michele returns and the festivities abruptly end. Giorgetta and Luigi secretly plan to rendezvous in the night, as they have been doing, when Giorgetta gives the signal of a lit match. Luigi leaves and Michele laments to his wife that he longs for things to be as they were, when they were happy together, before their son died, when he could fit all three under his cloak. He knows Giorgetta is unfaithful to him and he wants to win back her love. Darkness falls and Michele, alone on the barge's deck lights a pipe. Luigi, mistaking the lit pipe for Giorgetta's signal, appears. Michele confronts Luigi and forces him to confess his affair. Luigi does and Michele kills him and covers him with his cloak. Giorgetta has had a change of heart and comes to the deck wishing to make up for her coldness to Michele and tells him that she wishes she could again find loving comfort in his cloak. Michele replies by pulling back the cloak and revealing her dead lover.
I was shocked by the ending of the opera. I knew that death was the common theme, but I assumed the death was that of their son, an event which had driven them apart. The synopsis I read said nothing of the murder, simply that Luigi was forced to confess to the affair, and that in response to Giorgetta's change of heart Michele opened wide his cloak. I didn't do my homework well or I would have known Il Tabarro was a tragedy. Instead, I thought the opera would have a happy ending! I sort of enjoyed being thrown off because it seems like in opera there are no surprises. The synopses are spoilers and of course if you know it is a tragedy it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out the end anyway. Always death, death, death.
I really loved the music. It was absolutely fantastic. There was even a scene when the street performer is playing that the orchestral music is transformed into an organ grinder. It really made the music an integral part of the plot, unlike The Fly.
The second opera, Suor Angelica, was my favorite. It is hard to compare a one act opera with a full feature opera, but Suor Angelica ranks up there with the best I've ever seen. It is about a young woman from a wealthy and successful family who, seven years before the story begins, had an illegitimate baby and was forced to give him up and enter a convent. Presently isolated from the outside world and news of her family, she lives as Sister Angelica in the peace of the nunnery and prays daily for atonement for her sins and news of her beloved son. On this day the Abbess announces that she has a visitor, her first contact with the outside world since entering the convent. Her aunt arrives to explain that Angelica's sister is to be married and Angelica must sign a document turning over her share of her dead parents' estate to her sister. Angelica begs for news of her son and her aunt tells her that died of a fever two years earlier. Angelica cannot bear the news. After her aunt leaves and she is alone she sings a heartrending song grieving that her son died without knowing how much she loved him. She then drinks a deadly poison but realizes too late that she is damned because she has committed a mortal sin. She prays to the Virgin Mary for mercy and the Virgin answers by appearing with Angelica's son, welcoming her to heaven. In LA Opera's production the Virgin Mary descends from above center stage and suddenly the Church door opens and luminous white light spills out into the dark courtyard where Sister Angelica lies dying. Her son appears in the doorway and walks toward his mother. The curtain falls.
It was so moving that I have included the two best videos I could find on YouTube, the first called "Senza Mamma" or "A Mother's Cry" and the second video is the finale "Ah! Son Dannata!" and I honestly am not sure what that translates to. I think LA Opera's finale was much more effective than the one in the video, because in LA Opera's version you see that Mary has forgiven her, and you see her son welcoming her as opposed to just standing in the doorway.
I actually cried, more than my normal welling up or shedding a single tear. It was so sad. During the intermission I used the restroom and found that most of the other ladies had also cried. We all agreed that we were ready for a comedy.
Luckily the last opera, Gianni Schicchi, is a comedy about a rich uncle who dies and leaves all his money to a monastery and his family's scheme to rewrite his will. It opens with the family looking for Buoso Donati's will and pretending to mourn. Young Rinuccio asks his Aunt Zita whether he can marry his sweetheart Lauretta if Uncle Buoso left him well off. She agrees and Rinuccio sends for Lauretta and her father Gianni Schicchi, a nouveau riche man from the country. The will is finally found and they discover that Buoso left his wealth to the monastery. They are angry and stop pretending to mourn, even blowing out the candles they had lit. Rinuccio suggests that Schicchi is clever enough to solve their problem somehow but the family will not agree to let a low born country bumpkin in on their affairs.
Then Schicchi, dressed like a mobster, and Lauretta arrive at Buoso's house and Aunt Zita tells Rinuccio that she will not allow him to marry a girl without a dowry. Rinuccio asks Schicchi to look over the will but feeling slighted Schicchi at first refuses. His daughter's touching pleas, in the song "O Mio Babbino Caro," to allow her to marry her beloved, change his mind.
Schicchi hatches a plan to keep Buoso's death a secret long enough to allow him to dress up like the old man and draw up a new will. The family agrees and each member of the family tells him what they want and promise him rewards in return. He warns them all that the punishment for falsifying a will or helping to falsify a will is to have the right hand cut off and be exiled from Florence. He has a funny song about how he will miss Florence and he will salute it with his stump as he leaves. He then strips down to boxers and a black mesh wife beater a la Tony Soprano and changes into pajamas and is tucked into bed. The notary arrives to record his last will and testament and Schicchi dictates the will leaving a few lire to the monks, some pastures and country houses to the family, and the prized estate in Florence, the mills in Signa and the mule to Buoso's "good friend," Gianni Schicchi! The family is angry but are powerless to stop him, lest they all be implicated in the scheme.
But Schicchi's intentions are good, and he makes his gains into his daughter's dowry, allowing her and Rinuccio to marry. One of the Donati's comes back in a fit of rage and stabs Schicchi, but he asks forgiveness of the audience as the curtain comes down. It was pretty hilarious, from the stereotypically Italian portrait of the Donati family to the steamy scenes between Rinuccio and Lauretta, and I'm sure Woody Allen had a lot to do with that.
Two of the Opera's characters are taken out of literature and history. Mary Jane Phillips says that Gianni Schicchi is from Dante's Inferno, coming from a horrific scene in the thirtieth canto where Danta and his guide encounter Schicchi among the Falsifiers, "impostors who had assumed false names or taken on the identities of others." The passage reads,
I saw two shadows, pale and naked, which ran arounf biting others just as a hungry hog does when let out of its sty. One of the shadows came to [another figure], fastened its tusks into his neck, and dragged the victim across the rocky floor of Hell, letting it dig into his belly. As others trembled in fear, one man said to Dante, 'that sprite is Gianni Schicchi, who is rabbid and rips other men apart.' When he was alive he disguised himself as Buoso Donati, a rich Florentine who had died, and drafted a fraudulent will and managed to make it legal.There is also a historical Gianni Schicchi who did live in Florence and supposedly swindled the Donati family.
Here is a preview/montage put together by LA Opera of the production.
Then we rushed off to the next theater to see This Beautiful City which was a unique play with music about the evangelical movement, its effect on Colorado Springs (its unofficial capital), and the confusion of a community in crisis following the scandalous fall of pastor Ted Haggard. It was funny and sad, and the music was awesome, and the cast was interactive, and overall it was great. It was a very insightful look into the community of Colorado Springs.
The music was by Michael Friedman who also did the music for my favorite musical, Bloody Bloody Andre Jackson, and it was sometimes serious, sometimes irreverent, and sometimes just like Sunday morning worship in a contemporary evangelical church, from the worship leaders up on the stage to the lyrics projected on the back wall.
I thought it did a good job of telling the story of a community in a very objective way. Of course I am not from Colorado Springs, nor have I ever been there, but it didn't seem slanted toward one side or the other. It introduced us to evangelical members of New Life, Ted Haggard's church, as well as associate pastors and the youth group TAG. We also met towns people who went to other Baptist churches, and a Catholic priest, a church that had revivals in a cave, atheists, jews, students at the Air Force Academy and more so it was pretty well balanced.
Between the scenes a park ranger would come out and give advice about visiting Pike's Peak, like always be prepared for anything and carry the essentials, pack out your trash because otherwise animals will dig it up and spread it all around, watch out for mountain lions because they will strike and kill, and making it up to the top of Pike's Peak is only half the journey. Obviously these little nuggets of wisdom are metaphors for what happened to Pastor Ted and his congregation.
I still can't really sympathize with Haggard. If he is miserable in a heterosexual marriage I do feel bad for him, but it is his own fault. I do feel for his family and for all the people that looked to him as their fearless leader. But as for Haggard, he played a large role in making life hard for homosexuals in Colorado in general and Colorado Springs in particular. From openly hostile and narrow-minded church members to Focus on the Family just down the street, it doesn't sound like a welcoming environment for gays, and there sure weren't any legal protections. So it seems that he made his own bed.
But that wasn't really the point of the play. The point was that Colorado Springs was a city of people searching for the American dream, and it was also a city divided by those dreams. Everyone was seeking the ability to express themselves and their beliefs freely and to live their life as they chose, and yet their choices isolated them from the other side, either religious or non-religious.
So, we saw the preview but the show officially opens to the press next weekend. I suggest you get tickets and go see it for yourself. Call them up and give them the code NEWLIFE and you can get any seat in the house to selected shows for $20, and there really isn't a bad seat in the house. It plays till October 26th so don't miss your chance! Click here to visit their website.
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