Alemania
Several Sins
Jesse Simon
By the time Il Trittico had its
première in 1918, Puccini had been pondering the idea of three one-act operas
designed to be performed together for over a decade; however the uneven quality
of the individual works all but guaranteed that each one would go on to enjoy a
very different life of its own. The Deutsche Oper Berlin, for their first new
production of the 2023/24 season, presented the three operas – Il Tabarro,
Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi – together in their intended
order; and while the evening boasted some winning performances – most
notably the Lauretta and Angelica of Mané Galoyan and the Schicchi of Misha
Kiria – the staging of Pinar Karabulut, for all its visual brilliance,
could not quite make a convincing case for Il Trittico being anything
greater than the sum of its flawed parts.
Puccini had initially conceived of the
cycle as containing three episodes based on passages from the Divine Comedy,
and while the operas all deal in some way with the notion of sin, in the end
only the figure of Gianni Schicchi was lifted from his home in Hell’s eighth
circle. Yet the story of the Florentine rogue who ingeniously defrauds an
obnoxious family of their uncle’s fortune is inspired enough to make one wonder
if Puccini had not perhaps missed his calling, and that instead of devoting his
career to sentimental shockers, he should rather have channelled his disdain
and love of human suffering into caustic comic parables. Indeed, the gleeful
energy of Gianni Schicchi – the only
one of the three tales to achieve any measure of universality – has the unfortunate
effect of laying bare the facile melodrama of Suor Angelica and, in Il
Tabarro, the sensationalism so often passed off as realism.
In her staging, Ms Karabulut sought to
bring unity to the diverse materials of Il Trittico by returning to
Puccini’s original inspiration in Dante, but also by interpreting the title of
the cycle – the Triptych – in its most painterly sense. The stage was framed
by a simple construction that suggested that frames one might find around a
late-Medieval altarpiece, albeit in a vivid red belonging wholly to the recent
half-century; and the three operas, although linked by the same basic
rotating-stage set, seemed to follow a Dantean spiritual progress, from the
dank hell of Il Tabarro, through the purgatorial uncertainty of Suor
Angelica, and arriving at the distinctly warped paradise of Gianni
Schicchi. As starting points go it was undeniably intriguing, but all too
often the conceptual foundations seemed mismatched with the stories they were
intended to support; and while Ms Karabulut brought a vibrant, pop-inspired
visual sensibility to the stage, it was not always enough to carry the
narrative or mask the deficiencies in the source material.
Puccini, Il Trittico: Il Tabarro. John Fiore, conductor. Pinar Karabulut, director. Berlin, Deutsche Oper, September 2023. © 2023 by Eike Walkenhorst / DOB.
Il Tabarro
seemed the least well-suited to the staging’s approach. The story, a simple
tale of infidelity and bloody revenge, relies almost solely on the desperate squalor
of its riverside locale and the hopelessness of its inhabitants for its
dramatic effect. The staging, however, played out against a cavernous space
with a pool of water at its centre, and the clash of mythical setting and
realist melodrama proved jarring: at best it placed the emotions and desires of
its characters within a disconcerting void; at worst it merely pointed up the
banalities of the libretto. The use of colour was arresting – the darkness at
the centre of the stage was surrounded by objects in cartoon shades of orange
and purple, and even the shiny quality of the costumes was eye-catching until
one realised that the use of waterproof materials may have been employed solely
to allow the characters to splash around in the central pool (which they did to
the point where the splashing become devoid of any real effect). The stage
imagery was not, however, enough to invest the story with any sense of meaning,
and when the climactic murder had taken place, one felt neither the plight of
the doomed lovers nor the futility of existence, but rather a vague sense of
relief.
Puccini, Il Trittico: Suor Angelica. John Fiore, conductor. Pinar Karabulut, director. Berlin, Deutsche Oper, September 2023. © 2023 by Eike Walkenhorst / DOB.
Although the visual mood lightened somewhat
for Suor Angelica – the cavernous background was lifted to reveal
an ambiguously stormy sky – the set remained the same. As the music started,
the stage began to rotate, but instead of stopping to reveal a new set of
structures against which the action could take place, it kept on spinning and
spinning … and it continued to spin at varying speeds for nearly the entire
opera. There is no question that the ceaseless rotation of the stage offered a perfect
visual metaphor for Angelica’s private torments, but it grew tiresome quickly
and after about five minutes one was desperate for it to stop. It is perhaps no
coincidence that the best scene – the climactic confrontation between Angelica
and her aunt – occurred when the stage had slowed almost to a halt.
Gianni Schicchi, although considerably more enjoyable as a work of narrative drama,
was also not without its maddening moments. The family of Buoso were a
stylishly grotesque collection of blue- and green-faced pseudo-monsters lifted
straight from twentieth century trash culture; and while the delightful rogue’s
gallery of avaricious goons would have been enough to carry the story, the
staging insisted on pushing the physical comedy to the max. There was not a
moment when the characters weren’t gesticulating wildly or falling over
themselves, and while the audience seemed to respond to the barrage of
pratfalls, after a while it began to seem just as relentless as the spinning
stage in Suor Angelica. It was, in its own way, a tour de force of manic
energy, but the family members were never allowed to settle down enough to
allow the genuine mean-spiritedness of the libretto to emerge.
Puccini, Il Trittico: Gianni Schicchi. John Fiore, conductor. Pinar Karabulut, director. Berlin, Deutsche Oper, September 2023. © 2023 by Eike Walkenhorst / DOB.
If Gianni Schicchi was nonetheless
the most successful part of the evening it owed as much to the exuberance of
the staging as to the show-stopping splendour of Mané Galoyan’s ‘O mio babbino
caro’ and the commanding presence of Misha Kiria’s Schicchi. Mr Kiria also
appeared as Michele in Il Tabarro, in which he delivered a performance
of understated warmth and sympathy that turned suddenly to rage and menace on
the discovery of Giorgetta’s infidelity. But his haughty Schicchi was the
greater achievement: his contempt for Buoso’s family was palpable in nearly
every line, his impersonation of the deceased Buoso was a perfect blend of
expressive delivery and comic timing, and in his final address to the audience
he shrugged off his own moral shortcomings with such agreeable nonchalance that
it was impossible not to grant him the indulgence he craved.
Mané Galoyan’s ‘O mio babbino caro’ in
Gianni Schicchi was so delicate and heartfelt that it seemed to have come from
a different opera entirely; it was such an unexpectedly fine moment that it
didn’t much matter whether it was a genuine outpouring of feeling on Lauretta’s
part or a naked attempt at manipulating her father; it worked equally well as
both. But before that graceful interjection, Ms Galoyan had been the dominant
force in Suor Angelica, bringing a
tortured humility to the title role that exploded into a frenzy of emotion on
learning of her son’s death. While the ecstasies and terrors of her final scene
were wholly convincing, it was the tender lament following the departure of Angelica’s
aunt that made the greatest impression: here Ms Galoyan delineated Angelica’s
sudden loss of everything with despairing softness.
Annika Schlicht, who appeared in all three
operas (as La Frugola, La Suora Zelatrice and Zita) was on excellent form
throughout; her Frugola especially brought a jolt of earthy personality to the
reticent mood of Il Tabarro. Both Jonathan Tetelman and Carmen
Giannattasio, as Luigi and Giorgetta, the doomed lovers of Il Tabarro,
sounded a touch restrained in the earlier sections of the opera, but when they
came together for their joint evocation of Belleville and inevitable love duet,
the results were suitably majestic. Violeta Urmana, with stern presence and
captivating low passages, brought necessary dramatic weight to the central
confrontation in Suor Angelica.
John Fiore, who took over conducting duties
from Sir Donald Runnicles at the very last minute, gave the evening the stable
foundation it very much needed. If there was nothing overtly flashy in his
readings, there were also very few indulgences: he could coax playing of great
delicacy from the strings – as in the opening of Suor Angelica – and
build to the explosive climaxes so essential to Puccini’s operatic conception,
all while remaining in the service of the singers. His inobtrusive control was
most evident in Gianni Schicchi, in which musical effervescence and taut
pacing helped transform the evening into a triumph of comedy over tragedy.
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