Puccini: Il Trittico (The Triptych)
This entry is a retrospective of a production I attended in July, one day after I landed in Italy (hence the jet lag and disclaimer for any inaccuracies). I bought the ticket really early, like as soon as I was set to go on a work trip in Bologna, and it was not until halfway through Il Tabarro that I realized the ticket I bought was for an operatic marathon with three one-hour operas. That was quite a pleasant surprise, though!
So, back to Trittico. After attending quite a few art exhibitions here in the land of opera, I usually knew “Trittico. " The term is for a three-panel art piece of wood coated with gold that depicts biblical scenes and characters, e.g., Mary, Jesus, and the Saints. Like the panels of gold-coated art, these three operas have a shared, underlying, and interconnected theme while remaining in stark contrast as to how this theme is presented on each panel: love.
Let’s talk about the first panel, oops, I mean opera: Il Tabarro. It is a tale based on a play, on how a pair of couple living and working on a barge drifted apart over the years after their child died, and that the wife was having an affair with one of the barge’s workers.
The affair partner was contemplating leaving the barge such that he doesn’t have to share the wife with the husband, but at the end of the contemplation, it grew sinister: he said he would rather kill her than share her. Soon, the husband found out and killed the affair partner, hid him under his cloak, and showed the guy’s body to the wife.
Personally, I find the symbol of the tabarro (i.e., the cloak) rather weak in the opera, and putting it as the title seems more like a red herring. But since the husband indeed mentioned that he used to shield his wife and the now-dead child under his cloak before they drifted apart, there is a certain unsettling contrast within the symbol in which the ‘product’ of their love whom he had shielded died and now that the ‘confirmation’ that the couple had drifted apart has also died.
Anyhow, both the husband and the AP love is jealous love, and the image of love in this opera is bleak. Hence, the opera is classified as part of the ‘verismo’ (realism) movement in Italian opera during the late 19th century (although I’m not sure how real killing people’s APs are; hopefully, not).
After the first intermission was Suor Angelica, which was where the famous ‘O mio caro bambino’ came from (but almost nobody ever watched the original opera). In terms of the story arch, there really isn’t one. The brief mention of Angelica’s past and that Angelica’s kid died was only made in passing, and those were the sections in which bits of the plot were shown.
But that is okay because the main focus was the color change, showing the change in the seemingly pious Sister Angelica’s emotions. While the arie weren’t too difficult in terms of virtuosity, showing these color and emotional changes could only be done with great emotional depth in the vocalist/soprano. And this thing I liked about Bologna’s production was they kept the set for Suor Angelica really simple to put the focus on Angelica’s voice.
This change from pious composure to an emotional breakdown (hearing that her son died from the Princess), at last, epiphanic salvation that allows her to reunite with her son in eternal peace was quite a magical journey for me, as a musician, to grasp and learn from. The love that Angelica had shown was motherly love, which trumped any mortal sins that she might have committed during her lifetime.
I would say Puccini’s placement of Suor Angelica in the middle was really wise. It acts as a soft cushion for the bleakness we just witnessed in Il Tabarro, although it turns the scariness into sadness. Now, after a rollercoaster of emotions, we are ready for the comedic relief in Gianni Schicchi.
Schicchi’s name was repeated multiple times before he even appeared onstage. He was ‘the new guy,’ the outsider, the foreigner from who-knows-where. He’s also a middle-aged, sly guy. The opera's setting was, in fact, a mimicry of the Italian comedy tradition: la commedia dell’arte. After a wealthy guy died, his relatives gathered around the deathbed, discussing the rumours that the guy planned to donate all his wealth to the friars. There are a pair of love-struck youngsters (Schicchi’s daughter and the nephew of the family in focus), with a chorus of aunties and uncles that tried everything in their might to get the part of inheritance they wanted, even to the extent of asking Schicchi for help (only to be scammed).
But Schicchi wasn’t bad; he was just looking out for his daughter! So the inheritance was passed down to Schicchi’s daughter and nephew so they could get married comfortably. Except for the scheming relatives, everyone is happy. The ridiculous conspiring exchanges between Schicchi and the relatives were funny enough, but that they got scammed was perhaps a turn of karma. The love in Schicchi was not just about the lovey dovey, but the love of Schicchi for his daughter.
We would have thought that Schicchi joined in the conspiracy for his own benefit, but it was not until the end that he revealed he intended to make his daughter happy by facilitating her marriage with her loved one. That’s cute. What’s cuter is the backdrop in Bologna’s production. When the newlyweds embraced and kissed, Schicchi’s theme reappeared and crescendoed into a climax in a romantic way, and… Pompeii decided to celebrate with an eruption.
That looks oddly similar to the other Pompeii movie many years ago, where while the volcano erupted, the lovers still kissed like nothing happened. lol.
