The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (46 page)

Plot

Easter morning in a Sicilian village.
Most of the action occurs while the population is celebrating Mass in church.
After being made pregnant by Turiddu, Santuzza has been excommunicated. Turiddu is now infatuated with a married woman, Lola, and refuses to honour his obligations to Santuzza.
In revenge, Santuzza informs Lola’s husband Alfio of the affair, and Alfio kills Turiddu in a duel.

What to listen for

For all its crude orchestration and harmony, this is indisputably a strongly characterized and constructed opera, dominated melodically by a ‘tragic destiny’ motif which accompanies Santuzza’s entrance and which is restated at its climax.
At the centre of the opera is the long impassioned duet between Santuzza and Turiddu, but both these characters also have striking solo arias – Santuzza’s narrative ‘Voi lo sapete’ and
Turiddu’s drinking song.
For the chorus, there is the ‘Easter Hymn’, led by Santuzza, and for the orchestra, the plangent Intermezzo, the melody of which is based on the Hymn.
Much verismo is written as if to imitate the speaking voice and therefore only uses high notes to mark moments of great emotional stress and eschews coloratura.
Santuzza can thus be sung by either a soprano (such as Maria Callas) or a mezzo-soprano (such as Tatyana Troyanos), though the mezzos often omit the top C at the end of the opera.
Turiddu requires a tenor who can both out-belt the prima donna in the duet and muster some sweetness for the high-lying serenade at the beginning of the opera.

Bizet’s
Carmen
was the great influence on this opera, as one can most obviously hear in Alfio’s aria, which is strongly reminiscent of the toreador Escamillo’s song.

In performance

An opera whose effectiveness depends on singers willing to give their histrionic all, and one which can withstand a certain degree of coarse singing if the emotional commitment is sufficiently intense.
Perhaps the most successful production of the piece has been that of Franco Zeffirelli, seen in different versions in various opera houses.
It realistically evokes the life and look of a Sicilian hill town, and makes a great point of establishing characters for each member of the chorus.
A production at the Berlin Staatsoper tried the experiment of performing
Cav
after
Pag,
presenting the former as a sort of ritualized Greek tragedy, ignoring the specified rural Sicilian setting.

Recordings

CD: Renata Scotto (Santuzza); Placido Domingo (Turiddu); James Levine (cond.).
RCA 7 4321 39 5002

Video: Placido Domingo (Turiddu); Georges Prêtre (cond.).
Philips 070 104 3.
Directed by Franco Zeffirelli.
Coupled with
Pagliacci

Ruggero Leoncavallo

(1857–1919)

Pagliacci
(
Strolling Players
)

Prologue and two acts (normally performed without an interval).

First performed Milan, 1892.

Libretto by the composer

Leoncavallo drew the plot from an incident remembered from his own childhood – his father was the magistrate who presided over the case.

Plot

Tonio peeps through the curtains to introduce the audience to the drama which will ensue.
The violent and jealous Canio leads a troupe of travelling players who pitch up in an Italian village.
Canio’s unhappy wife Nedda rejects the coarse advances of Tonio, a fellow actor.
Tonio then spies on Nedda’s meeting with her lover Silvio, with whom she plans to elope.
In revenge, Tonio summons Canio.
Silvio escapes, and Nedda refuses to reveal his identity, despite Canio’s threats.

Before the assembled villagers, a performance of the evening’s play begins.
It is a comedy of marital intrigue, and for the disturbed Canio, fiction becomes confused with reality.
He breaks out of character and again demands to know the name of Nedda’s lover.
When she continues to defy him, he stabs her.
As she dies, Nedda cries out for Silvio.
When he instinctively rushes out of the audience to help her, Canio stabs him to death too.
Tonio ironically announces that ‘La commedia è finita’ – ‘the comedy is over’.

What to listen for

Written in conscious imitation of
Cavalleria
rusticana,
although its score is more refined, varied and ambitious.
Ever since the days of Caruso, the role of Canio has provided a
tour
de
force
for a dramatic tenor – Vickers, Domingo and
Pavarotti have been outstanding among recent interpreters – not least because the climax of its hit number, ‘Vesti la giubba’ doesn’t demand a killing high C; Nedda, a gift for any attractive young soprano who can convey febrile sexuality, is more subtly composed, and the score even asks for trills in her aria, though few sopranos today are capable of providing them.
Older, heavier Italian baritones relish Tonio’s big prologue aria, usually sung in front of the curtain; younger, lighter ones cut their teeth on Silvio, a nice role offering several gracefully arching phrases.

In performance

The appearance of Tonio in front of the curtain to announce the drama to the audience may seem an odd break with the naturalism of what follows, but it is of a piece with the gap between reality and pretence which overtakes ‘the drama within a drama’ at the climax.
For WNO, Elijah Moshinsky made a plausible transposition of the scenario to the world of post-war Italian neo-realist cinema; a production by Franco Zeffirelli in Los Angeles went further and set it on a modern tower-block estate, under the concrete piers of a highway.
This had the effect of making the idea of a troupe of two-bit travelling players drawing an excited audience somewhat implausible.
Several productions have intensified the twinning with
Cav
by using the same set.

Recordings

CD: José Cura (Canio); Riccardo Chailly (cond.).
Decca 467 0862

Video: Teresa Stratas (Nedda); Luciano Pavarotti (Canio); James Levine (cond.).
Met production.
DG 072 448 3 Coupled with Puccini’s
Il
Tabarro.

Umberto Giordano

(1867–1948)