Looking for an appropriate piece to pair with Gianni Schicchi, Czech director David Radok decided that instead of the original Il trittico setting, what the opera really needed was a prequel. So in a burst of hubris, he wrote a libretto introducing the characters and laying out a backstory for Puccini’s one-act comedy. Set to music by Czech composer Jan Kučera, Don Buoso is a neat fit with the source material, though the double bill at Prague’s National Theatre leaves a lot to be desired.
The wealthy title character is just about still alive when Don Buoso opens – with seven bullets in his body from an assassination attempt and his will being drawn up. As his scheming relatives arrive, ostensibly to wish him a happy birthday, his suspicions that they are behind the botched hit become clear, as does his intent to leave them nothing. He teases them with a promise that his fortune will end up in “the right hands”, then repairs to his deathbed, surrounded by hypocrites anxiously awaiting his final breath.
There’s a lot to like about Radok’s libretto, which is filled with witty touches like Buoso’s cousin Zita proffering a rare vintage of wine as “a gift from Al Capone for my 16th birthday,” and agreeably jarring language like Buoso excoriating his relatives as “scoundrels, leeches, scum,” and his doctor insisting that to remove a deadly bullet, “I’d have to suck out his brain.” The score is even better, with Kučera incorporating many of the conventions of Puccini’s style – melodic ensembles, clever motifs, ironic contrasts, rich romantic swells – into an animated contemporary framework. As in Gianni Schicchi, the music often seems to be mocking the characters as much as accompanying them.
But the new work never lives up to its promise. The characters are one-dimensional – not unusual in opera buffa, but when they’re all reprehensible, it’s hard to relate. Even Buoso is reduced to a bitter, cynical stereotype. Nor does Radok's set design help, with towering black walls casting an unbroken atmosphere of gloom and doom. And his direction is surprisingly leaden, sapping the energy from what should be a madcap romp. If the intention was to create a black comedy, the black part works very well. The comedy... not so much.
The same problems plague Gianni Schicchi, which opens exactly where Don Buoso left off, with an added twist. Tired of waiting for him to die, Buoso’s greedy heirs suffocate him with a pillow. After that, even Puccini’s high-spirited music and livelier direction from Radok can’t inject any levity into a tawdry tale of just deserts. Schicchi, a servant in Buoso’s household who is fired in the prequel, exacts a measure of revenge. And when Lauretta and Rinuccio sing their concluding love duet, it’s amid a pile of bodies on the floor, all the relatives having inexplicably collapsed – or died. By then, it’s hard to tell.
A strong cast carried this burden well, starting with veteran tenor Štefan Margita giving the title role dignity and some bite in the first piece, and doing heroic duty as a dead body in the second. Svatopluk Sem was a capable Schicchi, bringing energy and swagger to the role and nifty work mimicking Buoso. Rinuccio and Lauretta get the lion’s share of vocal solos, and Daniel Matoušek and Doubravka Součková made the most of them, Matoušek with commanding reprimands to his befuddled aunts and uncles, and Součková with a lovely rendition of “O mio babbino caro” that drew applause. In the acting department, Zdeněk Plech set the tone for all the relatives as a whiny, obsequious Betto, and Jana Sýkorová was the most domineering, overprotective Zita ever to set foot on the stage.
Radok has a long professional relationship with conductor Giancarlo Andretta, which showed in the tight work in both pieces. The music sounded sharp, colorful and richly expressive throughout, often carrying more emotional and narrative impact than the action (or lack thereof) onstage. The National Theatre Orchestra is more at home in the core Romantic repertoire, but outings like this one demonstrate the range and flexibility it can have under the baton of a versatile pro like Andretta.
Certainly there’s nothing wrong with an imaginative effort to push a staid form in new directions. But Gianni Schicchi’s longtime success as a standalone staple in the opera repertoire suggests that it doesn’t need any add-ons. And for all its ambition, this forced marriage does nothing to change that.
