La Scala has revived a title all but forgotten in the repertoire: L’amore dei tre re, by Italo Montemezzi, premiered in this very theatre in 1913, with great success. It was supported by the best conductors of the time, Tullio Serafin and Arturo Toscanini; it had a tremendous success in the US, saluted as “the best operatic work coming from Italy after Verdi’s Otello”. Given that almost all of Puccini’s production was available to the American public, that now sounds like a bold statement.
Montemezzi’s music avoids the verismo style; his score presents a thick, sophisticated orchestration closer to composers like Zandonai. It also shows clear references to Wagner, who was belatedly becoming famous in Italy, not only in the use of leitmotifs, but also, for example, in the love duet closely following Tristan und Isolde. The singing is mostly in declamatory style, with peaks of great drama and dream-like, lyrical moments. The orchestra ends up telling the story more than the singers. The richness of sound is often luxurious, opening up in lyrical phrases rather than in arias or closed numbers of the Italian tradition. There is a clear search for a continuous dramatic arc (Wagner, indeed).
The action is set in the early Middle Ages, where Fiora, an Italian princess, is coveted by three men: the old, blind, barbaric king Archibaldo, his son Manfredo (her husband), and the Italian prince Avito (her lover and former fiancé). Archibaldo’s passion is repressed and unacknowledged; this repression, in a violent, old control freak, results in murder: Archibaldo strangles Fiora when he realizes her betrayal. Manfredo’s love is pure and almost platonic; he idolises Fiora, cannot bring himself to hate his rival, and commits suicide over her dead body. Avito is spineless: his great passion never gives rise to plans to run away with her and he tends to whine and beg for her love without much effect. He dies, killed by Archibaldo, who is left alone at the end. Fiora seems to be the only one with the pride necessary to confront the old king, and pays for this boldness with her life.
The libretto, by Sam Benelli, relies heavily on decadent paradigms: the love-death duality, the symbolism of Fiora’s veil, the dark, gloomy atmosphere. The text is emphatic and grandiloquent, again close to the Decadent movement. The eroticism is expressed by daring metaphors which, frankly, sound embarrassingly funny to our modern ears. The great success of the opera seems to indicate that Montemezzi managed to catch the spirit of his times: this combination of decadent text and atmosphere with a post-romantic score caught a moment in the death of the Belle Époque which nowadays resonates much less. This may explain the loss of appeal of a work which still has some merits.
Director Àlex Ollé (La Fura dels Baus) highlighted Fiora’s lack of agency, her being completely at the mercy of the three men who desire her, filling the stage with chains hanging from the ceiling (sets by Alfons Flores). A moving platform, with stairs, rises from the floor in Act 2 to represent the tower of the castle. The palette is globally black, with spotlights on Fiora’s bed, or her funerary bier in Act 3 (lights by Marco Filibeck). The modern costumes (Lluc Castells) support this view: Fiora is barefoot, wearing a super-sized T-shirt as a nightgown, while all the young men are in black leather and boots and the old king is in an embroidered rich robe. The point does come across, but the monotony of the visuals becomes quite boring.
Conductor Pinchas Steinberg led the La Scala Orchestra in an emotional reading of the score, at times too enthusiastic: the orchestra had a tendency to overpower the singers, especially in Act 1. Fiora was Chiara Isotton, a former student of the Accademia at La Scala. Her soprano showed the edge and the power necessary for this unfortunate princess, with impressive high notes and a good command of the declamatory style. Evgeny Stavinsky was the old king Archibaldo, his bass lacked some depth in the low register, but he was very effective in the first aria “Italia! Italia!”.
Manfredo was Roman Burdenko, his baritone mellow and on the light side, very suited to the goodness and kindness of the character; he showed elegance and emotion. Avito, the lover, was tenor Giorgio Berrugi, whose powerful voice managed all the difficulties of a treacherous score, full of wide-open high notes and lyrical passages.
