Author : Jos Hermans
Giacomo Puccini sought and found a middle ground between Verdi and Wagner. It is a path that was also trodden by other composers of verismo and which has produced unmistakable masterpieces. Whether the less frequently played "Il Trittico" is among them is another question. That this applies without reserve to the jealousy drama "Il Tabarro," the first part of the trilogy, the Salzburg Festival left no misunderstanding about that. It is vintage Puccini with exciting atmospheric music, passionate love duets and a gripping finale. In "Suor Angelica," the music ripples along quietly yet impatiently until the harsh confrontation with La Zia Principessa. The heartbreaking finale that follows will leave no mother's heart unmoved but, on the other hand, it appeals too much to cheap sentiment. Very unfortunate. "Gianni Schicchi" finally presents us with a staging problem: the piece gives hardly any room for maneuver to the director. He has no choice but to stick quite literally to the text, which makes the work quite predictable. All stagings of Gianni Schicchi therefore resemble each other.
Personally I have always found the order of the single acts within Puccini's trilogy problematic. Placing the musically weakest act at the end does not make much sense, even when it is intended as catharsis after a "pièce noire" and the sentimental tragedy of Suor Angelica. The evening then ends with a kind of anti-apotheosis. It may be that this consideration played a role in Christof Loy's choice to rearrange the order of the acts but the real reason will undoubtedly be that Asmik Grigorian, Salzburg's audience favorite since Salome in 2018, thus gets bigger and bigger roles to sing as the evening progresses and thus finds herself increasingly in the spotlight. If this was the intention then it has fully succeeded, Grigorian's intense performance goes through a crescendo with "Senza mamma", the concluding finale of Suor Angelica, as a scorching organ climax. Throughout the evening, the Lithuanian soprano (daughter, by the way, of the Armenian tenor Gegham Grigorian) tackles her three roles with her now familiar disarming honesty, directness and artlessness.
It is an unpleasant mirror that Dante holds up to us in Gianni Schicchi. And it's a well-directed burlesque comedy that arises here around the deceased's bed, highlighting the hypocrisy and greed of the crocodile tears shedding relatives. Until the scheming peasant Gianni Schicchi bakes them a polish. It is a kind of Schadenfreude, as employed by Verdi in Falstaff, and that is not my idea of humor.
The imposing Misha Kiria dominates the scene as Schicchi. Lauretta, who feeds crumbs to the birds on the terrace, is the only pure soul left. The major shortcoming of Gianni Schicchi is that the play has no compelling dramatic music to offer to compensate for its higher-cited, inevitable predictability. I also can't understand why Gianni Schicchi of all things is so often plucked from the trilogy to be played along with another one-act play.
What follows is an ironclad Il Tabarro. Michele's cargo boat is moored at a quay where Fabrice Kebour's warm yellow lantern light shines on some of the furniture standing on the quay: a table and some seats. A metal staircase leads to nowhere. Giorgetta's loose dealings with the work force proceed organically. Giorgetta's dreams of Paris are like a prelude to the love duet with Luigi, both supported with powerful dramatic outbursts in the orchestra. Luigi realizes that he is a willless toy of Giorgetta's frivolous adulterous love, and the camera is serving up fascinating close-ups of both of them. Joshua Guerrero never sounds clear and radiant as a sun-ripened Italian tenor, but his performance is rock solid. The duet between Michele and Giorgetta is also a hit. A wonderful Roman Burdenko, well nuanced and completely at one with his role, draws the audience in during "la notte è bella". The probing of each other's suffering over the loss of their child, unmentionable for Giorgetta, leads to the realization of her levity. But then it is already too late: the cloak already conceals a crime. A fine performance too by Enkelejda Shkosa as La Frugola, representative of the Parisian lumpenproletariat, albeit with a somewhat unstable vibrato that she will show even more in the other two acts.
The stunningly beautiful nun Suor Angelica seems to have found a certain inner peace in monastic life under the tutelage of the remarkable Hannah Schwarz in the small role of the abbess. With her gaze she floors the hard-hearted aunt. Karita Matilla is again able to deploy her natural authority as La Zia Principessa but must hastily flee with the solicited signature after her unfortunate niece's emotional outburst. When Angelica is handed a suitcase containing her late son's belongings, she finds a sleek cocktail dress and a pair of stilettos. Trading those for her monastic habit, she lights a cigarette and unties the hair, as if she is about to start a new life. "Sorelli, la morte é vita bella," she has said shortly before. But in her monastery garden she brews a death potion and with scissors she also stabs her eyes. We do not get an apparition of the Virgin Mary. For the director, a cathartic embrace of mother and son during the very last bars is sufficient.
Franz Welser-Möst does not allow the Vienna Philharmonic to drown in late-Romanticist pathos but makes Il Trittico sound like the early 20th century work that it is. Fascinating in particular are the atmospheric pages in Il Tabarro : the muted sounds of trumpets, horns and strings, the river music of the cellos and double basses. The orchestra maintains tension during the sparse accompaniment to the two finales of Tabarro and Suor Angelica. The orchestral climaxes in Il Tabarro can compete with the granite chords in Elektra.
Watch the show at Arte (via VPN) or visit the Paris Opera during season 2023/24.
Should be mentioned in context of this review and directorial limits on directors in 'Gianni Schicchi', Woody Allen's having one of the failed inheritors stabbing Schicchi at the very end of the opera. (Available on DVD.)