Mascagni’s Iris at Bard Summerscape

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Note to our readers: We will be resuming regular postings of this blog at the opening of the Metropolitan Opera season in late September 2016. In the meanwhile, here is a comment on a performance we attended this summer in upstate New York.

Each year, the festival at Bard College, led by its president, Leon Botstein, exhumes an opera unfamiliar to today's audiences. This summer it was the turn of Iris. Mascagni’s opera (1898) was born in the heyday of Italian verismo, between two of Puccini’s great successes, La Bohème and Tosca. The prolific composer of the Cavalleria rusticana (1890), a perennial favorite, was ever intent on varying his subject matter and style with each new work. Iris, his seventh opera, reflects the contemporary vogue for orientalism. The Bard production (as seen by us on July 29, 2016), staged by James Darrah, designed by Emily Anne MacDonald and Cameron Jaye Mock, concedes little to the exoticism of the libretto.

Iris is surely one of the most cruelly abused of all the many ill-fated heroines of opera. Knocked unconscious and kidnapped by a procurer, unknowing that the place in which she is held is a brothel, and still a virgin, she flings herself into a sewer when her father, literally and figuratively blind, curses her for sins she has not committed. In the end, she is transfigured by the sun god she worships.

The opera enjoyed considerable success in the early 20^th-century, only to see its popularity wane soon thereafter. Mascagni himself brought Iris to New York in 1902 as one offering of his disastrous American tour. The Met staged the opera in three separate seasons with starry casts: first in 1907 with Eames and Caruso, in 1915 with Bori conducted by Toscanini, and in 1931 with Rethberg and Gigli. In all, it achieved only a paltry company total of sixteen performances. Sporadically revived in Italy through the 20^th century, in recent years there has been a flurry of interest in Mascagni’s all but forgotten work, with its many pages of full-throated melody and its rich orchestral palette.

Conducted by Botstein, well cast (with an outstanding young tenor Gerard Schneider) and, for the most part, intelligently staged, the Bard Iris made a strong case for the opera’s musical qualities. The libretto could not be salvaged.

Three recorded excerpts convey Mascagni’s lyric gift. The first, “Apri la tua finestra,” a serenade sung to Iris by her would-be seducer Osaka, has appealed to generations of tenors. The gentle strumming of the strings is flattering accompaniment to beautiful timbre and scrupulous phrasing. Osaka, in the guise of Yor, the son of the sun god, urges the innocent girl to open her window and yield to his entreaties. Antonio Cortis, active in the 1920s and 1930s, supplies tone of beguiling sweetness and an impeccable line in this 1929 recording. 

In Act II, Iris awakens in the sumptuous bordello which, in her naiveté, she mistakes for Paradise. Osaka, more urgently and erotically, continues his seduction, extolling, one after the other, the physical attributes of his prey. Giuseppe di Stefano, in a live performance from Rome (1956), is here at the peak of his form, the character’s desire manifest in his voluptuous timbre. The Iris is Clara Petrella, in the 1950s one of Italy’s foremost sopranos.

In response to Osaka’s ardent pleas, Iris refuses physical love in one of Mascagni’s most original arias, “Un dì, ero piccina.” She recalls hearing the tale of a young girl who dies in the embrace of an octopus. The lesson is clear: the act of love leads to death. The composer punctuates the soprano’s precipitous recital with outbursts of emotion. In this 1931 recording, Maria Farneti, a Mascagni specialist, finds the happy balance between beauty of tone and clarity of diction, indispensable to an artist in the verismo tradition.

   

The opera's most famous pages are its prelude and "Inno al sole (Hymn of the Sun)." Iris concludes with the stirring choral theme. This version is conducted by Giuseppe Patanè.

Turandot Is 90: 1926-2016

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Giacomo Puccini’s posthumous Turandot (unfinished at the composer’s death in November 1924, with the final scene completed by Franco Alfano) was an event of national moment at its La Scala world premiere in April 1926. Prior to reaching the Met just seven months later, in November of that same year, it had been the subject of lively interest in the New York press. The then general manager, Giulio Gatti-Casazza, filled the stage with stars, comprimarios, choristers, dancers, and supers reported to number between six hundred and seven hundred. Joseph Urban’s spectacular orientalist design, a pinnacle of decor, was just one of his fifty or so Met commissions, an oeuvre still unequaled.

Fifteen opening night curtain calls spoke eloquently of audience approbation. But most critics disagreed, some vehemently. The New York Times reviewer, Olin Downes, for one, embarked on the mission of striking the opera from the boards. He fulminated at every revival: “a whole resplendent operatic edifice, destined sooner or later to collapse like a house of cards, has been made of virtually nothing;” “Puccini had stopped creating when he wrote it, but had mastered the art of saying nothing exceedingly well; and in a final insult,” “there is only one work by a great composer of modern times that we think as bad, and that is the Egyptian Helen by Richard Strauss.” Downes and his colleagues notwithstanding, Turandot led the box office in 1926–27 and rang up receipts far above average the following season.

Following a run of twenty-seven performances between 1926 and 1930, Turandot was dropped, no doubt the victim of high production costs, hefty royalties, and the departure of the star soprano, Maria Jeritza, who had made the Chinese princess one of her signature roles. Here she is as Turandot, with Gatti-Casazza.

On the heels of the La Scala and Met premieres, Turandot made the rounds of the world’s great opera houses, and the tenor’s third act aria, “Nessun dorma (No one shall sleep)” quickly became an audience favorite. Calaf, the “Unknown Prince,” has bested Turandot in their riddle contest, but will renounce his prize, the princess herself, if she succeeds in discovering his name. At the climax of the aria, certain that he will prevail in their battle of wills, he exclaims “Vincerò.” Among the first to record “Nessun dorma” was Spanish tenor Antonio Cortis, moving in the dreamy opening section and thrilling in the concluding heroic outburst.

Turandot finally returned to the Met stage in 1961. The clarion voices of Birgit Nilsson and Franco Corelli would secure the opera’s place in the company’s canon for good. Here Corelli sings the Act I aria, “Non piangere Liù (Do not weep, Liù)” in a 1958 Italian television production. Calaf comforts the slave girl, Liù, who has accompanied his father into exile. Known for his stentorian top notes, Corelli exhibits the plangent tone and firm legato demanded by the piece.

The direction of the 1961 Turandot fell to Nathaniel Merrill. But the plaudits went to the delicate chinoiserie of Cecil Beaton’s long-ago Peking, with décor less grandiose than Puccini’s immense canvas had known in New York and elsewhere in the 1920s and 1930s.

Met audiences will see again this season (the “Live in HD” simulcast is scheduled for January 30, 2016) the Franco Zeffirelli mise-en-scène which is by now three decades old. No surprise here. A year after assuming the mantle of general manager, Peter Gelb told an interviewer: “I promised the Met subscribers when I first came on board—well, I didn’t promise anything, but I did say that there were two iconic Zeffirelli productions, Bohème and Turandot, and that the other Zeffirelli productions are going to be replaced.” Gelb has held fast to his word. The lavish La Bohème and the massive Turandot live on.

It was back in 1987, and thanks to the philanthropy of Sybil Harrington, and to the particular fancy she took to Zeffirelli’s menageries, that general manager Joseph Volpe’s Met could take on the expense of the gigantic production. Harrington’s clout provided another opening for lamentations on the state of opera in New York. One critic groused that Zeffirelli’s La Bohème, Tosca, and Turandot, all underwritten by Harrington, had “turned the Metropolitan from house of art into tourist attraction, a nice conclusion, perhaps, to a bus tour including lunch at Mama Leone’s.” He may have been thinking of that moment during the Act 2 riddle scene when audiences gasped in amazement, and most reviewers in dismay, as the princess’s imperial backpack gushed multicolored streamers. Even without the soon-abolished streamers, Zeffirelli’s overstuffed palace stands in vivid contrast to Beaton’s elegant staircase, seen above.

Turandot enters to sing one of the most taxing arias in the soprano repertoire. “In questa reggia (In this palace)” is a narrative about her ancestor, Princess Luo-ling, who was captured and murdered by the enemy. Turandot swears vengeance on any man who sues for her hand. She will put to him three riddles; if he fails to solve them he forfeits his life. Joan Sutherland, who performed heavier roles before becoming a bel canto coloratura soprano, is Turandot in this studio recording. She never sang the part onstage. Sutherland recounts the story compellingly and surmounts the exacting, high-lying phrases with ease and power.

Pucccini’s music ends just after the death of Liù, the slave girl who takes her own life rather than reveal the name of the Unknown Prince. In a lyric outpouring, she predicts that the ice princess, too, will fall in love with Calaf. Mafalda Favero, who appeared only twice at the Met in the late 1930s, expresses the grief and resolve which Puccini invested in the last aria he was able to pen.