100 Great Operas and Their Stories: Act-By-Act Synopses (63 page)

Amelia and her new husband, Gabriele, then come into the chamber with many others. Only now does she learn that Fiesco, her guardian for many years, is really her grandfather. Everyone is deeply moved by Simon’s evident growing weakness. A splendid quartet rises, and then, just before he dies, Simon appoints Gabriele as the next Doge of Genoa.

SUOR ANGELICA

(Sister Angelica)

Opera in one act by Giacomo Puccini with libretto
in Italian by Giovacchino Forzano

Time: 17th century

Place: Italy

First performance at New York, December 14, 1918

    Puccini’s early training was in church music; but by the time he began to compose Suor
Angelica
, which takes place in a convent, he was fifty-eight and had had a long career of writing only for the lyric stage. It was, perhaps, natural for him, then, to try out his score on a preliminary audience which ought to have some special insight into the problems of the opera. His sister Ingina lived in a convent, and there he played his score for the assembled sisters. When his audience dissolved into tears and agreed that the erring heroine deserved forgiveness, he was satisfied.

Lay audiences and professional music critics were less easily pleased. When the opera had its world premiere in New York, at the Metropolitan Opera House, along with
Il tabarro
and
Gianni Schicci
, it was found rather dull—the music all too much alike, male voices entirely lacking. As in
Il tabarro
, the drama really begins only halfway through, the first part of the little work being all atmosphere-building. A reading of the score or a phonograph hearing actually becomes more dramatically
absorbing if one begins with the fourth of the six parts into which the opera is divided, each with its subtitle.

The Penance
begins with two postulants hurrying through the cloisters of a little convent, for they are late to prayers. Sister Angelica, also late, does her own penance by saying a prayer before entering the church. Then the Monitor of the order of nuns emerges and delivers penances to several young nuns and postulates for minor infractions of the rules.

The Recreation
is that brief period after prayers when the sisters gather in the garden to admire the flowers. They also compare wishes. Sister Angelica, it turns out, seems to have none. She is a somewhat mysterious figure to the others. All they know of her is that she has been in the convent for seven years and it is rumored that she is a princess who has been renounced by her family for some crime or other.

The Return from the Quest
brings in two members of the order who carry a load of supplies on a small donkey. They also report that a handsome carriage is outside the convent. A bell announcing a visitor is rung, and the Abbess summons Sister Angelica. Her aunt, the Princess, is there to visit her.

The Princess
, who gives her name to the next section, is an elderly lady of great dignity and severity, who carries a stick. Greatly agitated, Sister Angelica kisses her hand and seems to implore forgiveness. But the Princess has come for only one thing. It seems that Angelica’s sister is about to be married, and a signature on a document is necessary so that their dead parents’ fortune may be divided. As the parents had died twenty years earlier and as she has now no use for money, Angelica readily consents and asks about something that interests her far more: what has happened to her little illegitimate son, whose birth is the reason that she was hidden away in a convent. When the Princess tells Angelica that the child died two years before, she breaks down completely. For a moment the Princess is almost moved by these tears to say something kindly. But she regains her control, calls for pen and ink, obtains the necessary signature, and hobbles off in aristocratic silence.

The Grace
. Alone in the garden, with night descending,
Angelica decides to use her knowledge of herbs, gained at the convent, to take her own life. She sings a tender farewell to her sister nuns, prepares a poisonous potion, and swiftly drinks it. Only then does she realize that suicide is a terrible sin, and that she may never see her son in heaven after all. Frantically she prays to Mary for forgiveness.

The Miracle
occurs in answer to her prayers. The little church becomes illumined with an unearthly light, and the Madonna herself appears to Sister Angelica, leading a little blond boy by the hand. Angelica dies in peace, as an invisible choir of angels promises her salvation.

IL TABARRO

(The Cloak)

Opera in one act by Giacomo Puccini with libretto
in Italian by Giuseppe Adami, based on
Didier Gold’s French play
La houppelande

Time: about 1910

Place: the Seine River near Paris

First performance at New York, December 14, 1918

    
Il tabarro
is the first of three one-acters that Puccini intended to have produced as one evening’s entertainment under the title of
Il trittico
(“The Triptych”). The other two, in order, were
Suor Angelica
and
Gianni Schicchi;
but only the last of the three is often performed these days, for the initial and subsequent receptions of the complete bill almost invariably elicited enthusiasm for
Gianni
and comparative indifference to the other two.

The fact seems to be that the first half of
Il tabarro
is an extraordinary skillful and subtle sketch of barge life on the Seine while the second half is a brutal shocker, and the two parts don’t jell too well.

The central story is brief, violent, dramatic. Michele is the skipper of a barge that is tied up in Paris, on the Seine. He has lost the love of his pretty young wife Giorgetta, since their
child died in infancy. Now she is secretly in love with Luigi, a longshoreman who works for Michele. When Michele has gone to sleep, she tells Luigi, she will strike a match as a signal for him to come aboard to meet her.

Unfortunately, Michele stays up later than usual. Thinking bitterly about his lost love, he lights a match for his pipe. Luigi, mistaking this for Giorgetta’s signal, steals on board. The suspicious Michele surprises Luigi, forces him to confess his love, and then quietly strangles him to death.

Giorgetta, uneasy, comes from the cabin and asks her husband whether he does not wish to have her near him.

“Under my cloak?” asks Michele.

“Yes,” she answers. “You said once that everyone carries a cloak: sometimes it hides joy, sometimes sorrow.”

“But sometimes it hides a crime!” cries Michele, and he tears the cloak from Luigi’s body. As she utters a cry of horror, he seizes her roughly and hurls her forcibly upon the body of her dead lover.

That is the central, dramatic story, most of it occurring in the last few pages. But we are first treated to a whole series of memorable vignettes. There is Tinca, the longshoreman, who drowns his sorrows gaily in wine, and dances drunkenly with Giorgetta. There is Frugola, the wife of Talpa, another longshoreman, who seems to love her cat as much as her husband. There is a song pedlar who passes musically by. There is the idealized picture of life in a small town sung in a duet between Luigi and Giorgetta. And always there is the background of the river Seine itself, suggested by the undulating rhythms of the prelude-rhythms that come in again and again.

THE TALES OF
HOFFMANN

(Les contes d’Hoffmann)

Opera in prologue, three acts, and epilogue, by
Jacques Offenbach with libretto in French by
Jules Barbier based on a play by him and Michel
Carré, based in turn on three stories by
E. T. A. Hoffmann

Time: early 19th century

Places: Germany and Italy

First performance at Paris, February 10, 1881

The “Hoffmann” of our title was a gifted German author, lawyer, composer, literary critic, and caricaturist who was christened Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann. He altered his third name to Amadeus out of love for the works of Mozart, of whose
Don Giovanni
he wrote an influential and highly romantic interpretation. He also wrote the three stories on which this opera is based, though he himself was the hero of none of them and though they are far more macabre and romantic than their familiar transmogrifications in the libretto. (For the curious with a literary bent: the titles of the original tales are
The Sandman, New Year’s Eve Adventure
, and
Councillor Crespel
. They are well worth reading.)

Thirty years before the opera was produced, its librettists had had performed, at the Odéon in Paris, a not very successful comedy called
Les contes d’Hoffmann
, in which the three young heroes of these tales were transformed into Hoffmann himself, thus making a kind of pun on the title’s preposition: they are tales “of” Hoffmann because they are both by and about him. When the comedy was quite dead, Barbier reworked it into libretto form and offered it successively to Hector Salomon, Charles Gounod, and Jacques Offenbach. Salomon was very much attracted but graciously turned over the opportunity to his colleague, Offenbach.

At the time, Offenbach was the most brilliantly successful composer of French operettas—and no one has begun to rival him since. He had produced almost a hundred of these confections, but never a serious work. He therefore set great store by this effort, worked very hard at it, and, being seriously ill at the time, only prayed that he might live to see it on the stage. He did live to see a private run-through with piano accompaniment, and then went back to work to rewrite the role of Hoffmann, which had been intended for a baritone, into a tenor role. But he did not live to see its immensely successful premiere, or even to complete the orchestration. The first act he did himself; the balance had to be completed for him by Ernest Guiraud, who performed an analogous service for Carmen when he composed its recitatives after Bizet’s death.

The opera was enormously successful from the beginning,
in Paris, where it received 101 performances in its first season. On its first trip outside of its native country, however, it encountered an ironically tragic fate. During its second performance at the Ringtheater in Vienna, the house burned down and there were many fatalities. This is precisely the same fate that had befallen Hoffmann’s own masterpiece
Undine
sixty-five years earlier in Berlin. The parallel, which would have appealed to the imagination of Hoffmann himself, impeded the quick success of the
Tales
in Germany. But eventually it became part of the permanent standard repertoire in that country, as it had meantime everywhere else.