First Night at the Opera

Last night, Stella and I caught the final performance of Puccini's El Trittico at the Chandler Pavilion. The show has had a lot of press because of its directors - the first two one-acts were directed by William Friedkin (of The Exorcist, and The French Connection fame), and the final one was directed by none other than Woody Allen. It was my first time sitting in the audience of a professional opera, and it will most definitely not be my last.

The three stories are very different from each other. The first act, Il Tabarro, deals with a love triangle that ends, not surprisingly, with the cuckold husband taking revenge on his wife's lover. Then, in Suor Angelica, the evening's most powerful hour, a banished woman in a convent takes her own life after discovering her young illegitimate son has died. The final act, Gianni Schicchi, is a comic farce about a greedy family pursuing their patriarch's fortune.

The sets were also extremely different, but each one equally lavish and detailed. I was once an opera stagehand at the MAC at Indiana University, so I understand a little about what goes into a scene change with sets on such a scale. I wish I could have had a backstage view to watch the crew change out these gigantic three dimensional paintings.

All three acts were strong, although Friedkin demonstrated a more thorough understanding of the medium from the point of view of the last row in the house. This is especially clear in Suor Angelica, where every character wears the same costume (except for a few nuns and the wicked aunt who comes to tell Angelica the bad news.) When it began I was worried that I wouldn't be able to keep track of the main character! But the direction and choreography were deft; once Angelica rises out of the group after the beautiful introduction, not once was I left confused. This demonstrates to me that Friedkin had everyone in the theater in mind.

Allen's offering, which was entertaining, light, and joyous, was harder to follow. The set was magnificent (I think its reveal caused the biggest gasp of the evening), but is was cluttered and the choreography was busy. There was so much movement on the stage at moments, it was difficult to know what to look at. I'm certain that several jokes only played to the people on the lower levels; you could hear guffaws and chuckles rising up through the house. In some ways, the first act of the evening was funnier, not because Friedkin has a better handle on comedy, but because he has a better handle on how to play an opera to everyone in the theater.

With that said, my mixed response to the last act wasn't necessarily to its execution. The second act, Suor Angelica, was so powerful and exhausting, that the light farce afterward full of caricature and goofiness didn't resonate as well. I think that perhaps they should have ended the evening with the tragedy, although that's not how Puccini intended it. Watching the second piece was unlike anything I have experienced in live musical performance. The moments where tragedy and beauty reached their pinnacle had me weeping for a very long time during the show. Puccini's music is extraordinary, and when put into dramatic context, it has the capability to overwhelm the senses. The whole evening was a grand surprise. I went for a good time, and I came away challenged (its almost 4 hours long with two intermissions), and rewarded beyond all expectation.

The most important aspect of opera I learned last night is that you can give a paragraph synopsis to tell what happens in an opera, but that synopsis rarely describes what the opera is about. The subtleties of meaning have to be experienced first hand to gain the most from the work. Puccini's sympathies for the working class are lost in a paragraph about Il Tabarro. His careful rendering of a despairing mother in Suor Angelica does not translate fully if you listen to the music alone. You have to watch it live for all the nuances to breathe, and meanwhile, the virtuoso singers take you to places you didn't know existed.