After The Captive Au Pair Nanny’s Nightmare Charles wanted a respite from Lifetime and I found one in an oddball video from the Buenos Aires opera in 2011: Puccini’s Suor Angelica (“Sister Angelica”), the central segment in his evening of three one-act operas, Il Trittico (“The Trilogy”). The first one, Il Tabarro (“The Barge”), is a typically grim verismo tale about a barge captain who discovers his much younger wife is having an aair with one of his crew members, so he ends up, Pagliacci-style, killing both of them. The last episode, Gianni Schicchi, is a comedy based on a passage in Dante about a lovable schemer who impersonates a dead man to dictate a new will so two young lovers can get together at the end. Suor Angelica takes place in a convent — though Giovacchino Forzano wrote the libretto it was obviously inspired by Puccini’s sister, who was a nun; for that reason he’d long wanted to write an opera about nuns and use some of the background details of convent life he’d heard from his sister. The title character was a woman from a noble family who several years earlier had had an affair, got herself pregnant and was sent off to the convent after her baby, a boy, was born and her relatives — particularly her aunt, referred to as “La Zia Principessa” (“The Old Princess”) in the original cast list but as “Tia Principessa” (“Princess Aunt”) in the Spanish-language credits for this telecast — kept custody.
After a few scenes setting the color of life in the convent (including the nuns celebrating that this evening is one of only three all year in which the setting sun’s light hits the streams of their fountain just right so it looks like the water is gold), the main action takes place: La Zia Principessa arrives at the convent to demand that Angelica sign over to the rest of the family any share she might have in its fortune. Angelica insists that she will only do that if she can first see her son, and the Princess informs her that the son died of fever two years earlier. Angelica collapses as the Princess leaves and sings the one portion of the score that even resembles an aria, “Senza mamma,” in which she expresses the feeling that her kid essentially died of a broken heart because she was not there to support and raise him. At the end of the opera Angelica herself dies — adding herself to the long list of Puccini heroines (Fidelia in Edgar, Manon, Mimì, Tosca, Butterfly and, later, Liù in Turandot) who loved not wisely but too well and ended up dying tragic but beautifully sung deaths. As she expires she has a vision of the Virgin Mary descending from heaven, bringing her there and reuniting her with her dead son — though, alas, stage director Marcelo Perusso made some pretty heinous mistakes. The two biggest ones were showing a line of five silent male characters walking by the outside of the convent as the action began — one of the things Suor Angelica is famous for is having an all-woman cast, and the fact that these five men’s presence was not accidental was proven when they actually lined up on stage for the curtain calls — and his total refusal to dramatize the vivid ending Puccini and Forzano wrote.
Instead of having the Virgin Mary and Angelica’s son descending from the back stairs of the convent set to escort her to her rightful place in heaven, Angelica just died in full view of the audience, expiring on the stage floor where she’d mostly been since she sang her aria. Charles marveled at the influence of Wagner on Puccini — though they don’t sound that much alike, one thing Wagner did do that affected later generations of opera composers around the world was to smooth over the distinction between “recitative” and “aria” — Angelica’s “Senza mamma” is the one even remotely severable piece in this score — and it also occurred to me that this is an opera that reveals how Debussy influenced Puccini’s later (i.e., everything after Butterfly) operas. Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande had premiered in 1902 and, though it’s never been a very popular work, it made a major impression on Debussy’s fellow composers. It particularly made a major impression on Puccini because he’d actually gone after the operatic rights to Maurice Maeterlinck’s play himself — only Debussy had beaten him by just a few weeks — and it’s interesting to imagine what a Puccini Pelléas might have been like. (Most likely it would have been less “symbolist” — to use the literary term usually applied to Maeterlinck — I suspect Puccini would have wanted his librettists to put more flesh on the bones of Maeterlinck’s characters and make them less symbolist abstractions and more flesh-and-blood human beings, which might have worked, though much of the appeal of Debussy’s Pelléas is the shadowy dream-world in which it takes place and the existence of little but the flimsiest emotional grounding in the characters and the story.)
After Madama Butterfly Puccini clearly wanted to move away from writing
operas with Big Hit Tunes and also wanted to get away from Italy and what
Italian audiences still expected opera to be. (Butterfly was the last Puccini opera to premiere in Italy
until Turandot, which Puccini
left unfinished and wasn’t staged until two years after Puccini died.) Seen in
context with the other two operas of the Trittico, Suor Angelica might work better than it does on its own — it would
be a (mostly) lyrical interlude between the high-tension melodramatics of Il
Tabarro and the hi-jinks of Gianni
Schicchi — but even on its own it’s an
estimable piece of work even though it didn’t get much help from these
performers. Florencia Fabris is an O.K. Angelica rather than a great one (once
again, in order to probe the psychological depths of this role, one would have
to go to Maria Callas, who recorded only the big aria “Senza mamma” but managed
even out of context to make it heartrending) and Elizabeth Canis brought a sort
of quiet authority to the Princess, though I would have wanted more fire and
venom in the role. The direction was pretty pedestrian — just a bunch of women
wandering around in nuns’ habits —and the conducting by Carlos Vieu was good
and lyrical but also at times seemed too slow and poky for a score that has
only one real dramatic confrontation and also only one big emotional moment.
