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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Questions for Discussion and Writing
Projects and Further Study

A. SETTING THE STAGE

[Puccini’s] friends engaged in what might now be called a “brainstorming Session” to find the right word to suggest a trilogy. Eventually Marotti came up with Trittico (Triptych), the word used for a three-paneled picture, especially to an altar piece. Although they knew that this suggested a greater connection between the three than was justified, the title stuck, and there is no doubt that it expresses the complementary nature of the three operas -- a dark, violent melodrama, a sentimental and pious morality play, and a sparkling comedy.

(Peter Southwell-Sander)

... the modern Italian libretto, which has today been confined on stage to the works of Puccini, was remarkable not only for its quality but also for its scope. As had been the case in France, the libretto was not restricted to the melodrama formula but could embrace a variety of approaches equally well. The contrasts in tone and spirit within the Italian libretto are well encapsulated in Puccini’s Il Trittico (1918 -- Il Tabarro, libretto by Giuseppe Adami; Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi, libretti by Giovacchino Forzano), in which the first opera is a “verismo” work, the second an exercise in sentiment in the French vein, and the third a brilliant modern commedia play.

(Patrick J. Smith)

Il Trittico is a rather mixed bag; no overriding concept associates it, and its parts are seen more frequently on a bill with some other work than, as intended, in trio, most likely because Part II, Suor Angelica, a tearful tale set in a nunnery, does not equal its brothers. Part I, Il Tabarro (The Overcoat), was adapted from a Grand Guignol favorite, Didier Gold’s La Houppelande, and constitutes Puccini’s sole verismo excursion. Laid in the claustrophobic slums of Paris, on a barge in the Seine, Il Tabarro reprised the impressionistic coloring of La Fanciulla del West, especially in the opening water music and, with Schicchi, is occasionally nominated as Puccini’s masterpiece for its wiry economy.

(Ethan Mordden)

Puccini’s last operas abandon realism. The Trittico rebuilds the old vertical, spiritual theater, encompassing all the gradations of nature. Puccini’s original plan was to make the panels episodes from Dante; though that didn’t happen, they still constitute a divine comedy. Il Tabarro is set in an urban inferno, Suor Angelica in a convent which serves as the heroine’s purgatory, Gianni Schicchi in a mercenary Florence which from the heights of Fiesole looks like a radiant paradise. Because Dante’s was a journey through the undiscovered country, all three works map Orphic voyages into the underworld.

(Peter Conrad)

Puccini’s three single acts can comprise a unified piece. And the unity comes, if anything, from the character of contemporary music, which Puccini has gradually approached ... The character of contemporary music has a uniformity ... a declamation that levels the characters, whether they are Seine bargemen or cloistered nuns, that annuls dialogue as comic or dramatic substance and as musical design, that slows and blanches words into a monotonous expression of scant humanity and of no lyrical personality.

(anonymous critic,
Idea Nazionale)

While none of the three works has become especially popular, the triple-bill itself tended very early on in its history (and much to the composer’s chagrin), to disintegrate. The palm of critical approval was awarded on the first night to Gianni Schicchi, the last of the evening’s three entertainments, while Il Tabarro and especially Suor Angelica were to some degree found wanting. Subsequent productions followed the same pattern of appreciation, the practical result being that Gianni Schicchi has sometimes been paired with other operas ... while the other two have been only occasionally performed.

As with the fate of other Puccinian pieces, however, things seem to have improved somewhat for Il Trittico as an entity of late. Perhaps the central criticism -- that the triptych has no unifying theme -- has come to be seen as irrelevant. Puccini’s art, here as elsewhere, operates, and very successfully, on a quite different guiding principle: that of contrast. And if the merits of Gianni Schicchi are both undeniable and immediately apparent, the other two operas, both subtler and more elusive, as well as in certain respects more problematic (notably Puccini’s own favorite, Suor Angelica), offer fascinating examples of the composer’s later, refined artistry, and dramatic experiences of considerable power.

(George Hall)

“As long as a transatlantic cable,” said Puccini, jaundiced after a performance of Il Trittico. That was in the early 1920’s, several years after this triptych of one-act operas had first been heard at the Met in New York in December 1918. The three operas together, he reluctantly came to feel, were too long for a single evening, and at close on an hour each they certainly extend the limits normally set by this master of operatic timing.

(Edward Greenfield)

As a successful composer, Puccini would normally have gone directly to other productions of the Trittico, but in such a difficult time he found it hard to sell ... In 1919 and for years to come, many theaters were closed, while others could barely manage to give standard operas, which the singers knew very well and for which they had costumes and scenery ... Puccini’s three one-act operas were expensive to produce and hard to cast. Singers had to learn new roles in works that would be infrequently performed; and this meant a net loss for them. Also, there was the matter of public taste, for critics and audiences obviously liked Gianni Schicchi better than Il Tabarro and especially disliked Suor Angelica.

(Mary Jane Phillips-Matz)

During the autumn of 1912, the composer saw the one-act play La Houppelande (The Cloak) by Didier Gold at the Theatre Marigny in Paris, where it was enjoying a long run. It was the melodramatic story of the murder of a wife and her lover by her jealous husband on a Seine barge. The atmosphere and local colour appealed to Puccini, as it had to Parisian audiences ... It is said that Didier Gold walked him along the banks of the Seine to give him the feel of the setting ...

(Peter Southwell-Sander)

In reality, the striking thing about Il Tabarro, beyond the acknowledged orchestral skill, is the structural coherence that governs the whole opera, in an obsessive, dramatic frame. The Debussy-like 12/8 meter as the curtain rises not only is supported by happy choices of timbre but also seems to foreshadow ternary subdivisions (like fragments of rhythmic leitmotif) in all aspects of the opera -- as if dialogue, quotations, and echoes of distant music, frequently “in three,” are aimed at effecting an incessant -- even obsessive -- shuffling of characters and events. Puccini, usually aware of practical questions (such as giving an aria to both the tenor and the baritone, and granting a certain prominence also to La Frugola), in fact forgets them: he allows the flow of orchestral color and the “fragmented” thematic structure to continue uninterrupted by drawn out lyrical oases, unless they produce the effect of alienation -- and are therefore highly modern ...

Thus it is understandable that at the opera’s first appearance, in a culture whose median level still had not accepted the musical theater of Debussy and Strauss, Il Tabarro provoked dissent. It was, after all, the first time a Puccini opera actually had no “arias”, and Luigi’s lyrical outbursts and, even more, those of Michele (the victim, really) were unable to make these characters sympathetic. Il Tabarro is Puccini’s first and only opera without heroes (not even bourgeois ones) and, especially, without heroines.

(Leonardo Pinzauti)

Frustration, indeed, is what the opera’s main characters have in common -- Michele in his passionate but unreturned love for his wife, Luigi in the misery of his existence, Giorgetta in her aspirations for a different kind of life and her almost desperate need for the love of a younger man. So, aptly, the impassive music of the river underpins much of the opening dialogue between Giorgetta and Michele, and will return at significant points later.

(George Hall)

Equally unconventional in its use of the conventional brindisi [drinking song] is Il Tabarro ... Its characters are Zolaesque bargemen and stevedores, laboring on the murky Seine. Work makes their lives a misery, and drink is a merciful oblivion. Tinca is an alcoholic who’s grateful to the bottle for quelling his thoughts of revolt. He who drinks, he says, doesn’t think; he who thinks doesn’t laugh. His brief song erupts into cracked mirth. The Dionysian musical ecstasy is here a disease.

(Peter Conrad)

... Giovacchino Forzano ... remembered an idea he had for a one-act play, Suor Angelica. It was the simple tale of a young girl from an aristocratic family, who has been forced to become a nun after having an illegitimate baby.

(Peter Southwell-Sander)

I did not know that he had a sister who was a nun. The subject pleased him very much indeed. The finale -- in which the nun drinks the juice of poisonous herbs in order to see her son again in Heaven -- moved him.

(Giovacchino Forzano)

I am now indifferent to everything that is not angelic.

(Giacomo Puccini, letter to
Giovacchino Forzano)

... the reasons why it appealed to Giacomo are obvious. The plea for compassion and forgiveness to an unforgiving world by someone who has committed “a sin of the flesh” was one with which he could identify. Here too was the pathos ... in sister Angelica there is the pleading sweetness of Cio-Cio-San, combined with the flawed character that the composer appeared to find so irresistible in real and fictional women.

Puccini often visited his eldest sister, Iginia, at her Convent ... where she was now Mother Superior, and this gave him access to authentic detail and atmosphere. It is said that he played and sang the completed opera to the sisters, and many of them were deeply moved by it. He himself was not religious, though the dramatic possibilities of Catholic ceremonies fascinated him. In the estimation of his friend, Father Panichelli, Puccini was an unbeliever.

(Peter Southwell-Sander)

It is hardly surprising that Suor Angelica was the last of the three Trittico operas to be fully appreciated. It used to seem bizarre that the composer himself counted this his favourite of the trio, but ... the seeming flatness of the musical landscape is deceptive, with melodies moving by step and with a predominance of slow-moving ideas in common time.

(Edward Greenfield)

... New York critics greeted it with scorn, compared it to a cheap Christmas card, and wrote of monotony, sentimentality, and cheap theatrical effects.

(Mary Jane Phillips-Matz)

Puccini has often been accused -- and particularly in the context of this work -- of sentimentality, but there is nothing sentimental about the way in which he stares human cruelty in the face ... Impassive, implacable, apparently devoid of human feeling, Angelica’s aunt is depicted in stern, harmonically fractured phrases and a declamatory vocal line.

(George Hall)

The point about Il Tabarro and Suor Angelica, I believe, is that, in addition to their dramatic content, they should captivate the audience as “pictures” for the eye and ear at once; Puccini’s scores are filled with small, fine episodes of instrumental painting ... if Suor Angelica is not played as a sweetly and richly sentimental piece it loses all its character and charm. It is the most elegantly tender of Puccini’s scores, as Gianni Schicchi is the most elegantly inventive.

(Andrew Porter)

That rabid phantom, that mad creature,
Is Gianni Schicchi; all of us here dread
Being ripped apart by him ...

... that shade you see
Fleeing there, in order to possess the one he craves,
The queen of the herd, made himself out to be
Buoso Donati, drawing up a will whose fallacious
Terms were convincing in the highest degree.

(Dante Alighieri, Inferno,
Canto XXX, translated by
Seth Zimmerman)

Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi actually takes place in 1299. Librettist Giovacchino Forzano ingeniously evolved the comic opera from a few lines in which Dante (in Canto XXX of the Inferno) summed up Schicchi’s roguery. Dante and Forzano, however, did not see eye to eye in respect to the main characters. Dante the patrician did not regard Schicchi with the same sympathy the opera’s authors did more than six centuries later. In his view, Hell was the rightful place for such cheats. Besides, the person Schicchi had the temerity to impersonate was Buoso Donati, the poet’s kinfolk. At the same time, Forzano’s contempt for the entire greedy Donati clan leaps out of every page of his libretto, right down to the second-guessing of “gran padre Dante” in Schicchi¹s final spoken apostrophe.

(George Jellinek)

Tell me, ladies and gentlemen,
if Buoso’s money
could have had a better end than this.
For this prank
they sent me to hell,
and so be it;
but, with the permission of the great old man Dante,
if you’ve been entertained this evening,
allow me
(He claps his hands.)
extenuating circumstances.

(Gianni Schicchi, in Forzano’s
libretto, translated by
Kenneth Chambers)

S’apre la scena col morto in casa
Tutt’i parenti borbottan preci
viene quel Gianni -- tabula rasa
diorini d’oro divetan ceci.

(Up goes the curtain, the rich man is dead,
The relatives, praying, are all round the bed.
Gianni, arriving, soon spots what’s afoot,
And quickly makes off with their hopes of the loot.)

(Giacomo Puccini, translated
by Peter Southwell-Sander)

... of all Puccini’s operas this -- his only true comedy -- was the one least to be expected of him. As with Verdi and Falstaff -- an obvious ancestor -- a late excursion into a new genre proved not merely a brilliant success but fully to realize musical potentials only partially developed in previous works.

... a work he conceived in a desire “to laugh and make others laugh.” And in that he certainly succeeded.

(George Hall)

“Addio Firenze ... :O mio babbino caro” and “Lauretta mia” are all palpable interpolations to guarantee some of the leading interpreters the opportunity to sing at least one “aria”, as the majority of the audience still demanded. The real greatness of Gianni Schicchi lies rather in the irresistible invention that sustains the whole orchestral texture ...

... Gianni Schicchi gives the impression not only of sealing -- like the model of Verdi and Falstaff -- the achievement of a composer, a twentieth-century composer (with linguistic similarities to Stravinsky, Ravel, Respighi, and Falla), but also of being the last and loftiest result in the history of Italian opera buffa.

(Leonardo Pinzauti)

The Trittico begins in reality, but it ends in the theater. Gianni Schicchi acknowledges that opera is a province of faked emotions. Buoso’s relatives profess their sorrow to the sound of lachrymose falling seconds which soon become automatic; Zita marvels that they are able to produce real tears -- but this is only after they read the will. Schicchi compliments them for acting better than strolling players. Yet beyond these pretenses lurks a magical power to transform life. The theater enables Schicchi to perform his own croaking death and ebullient resurrection. Soon his legacy will prompt a similar renaissance in Florence, for he is hailed in Rinuccio’s aria as one of the new men who are changing the city; and when that cultural nativity happens, it will bring with it the rebirth of opera.

(Peter Conrad)

B. QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION AND WRITING

1. The first several items in Setting the Stage are mostly concerned with whether the three operas of Il Trittico actually belong together. What do you think? Is there anything that unifies them? Should they be performed together in a single evening?

2. One act operas (and plays, and short films) are seldom commercially successful. Why?

3. One reason cited for the relative unpopularity of the Trittico operas is that there are few “high points” in the form of arias or excerptable numbers. Is this a weakness, or instead a dramatic strength?

3. When Il Tabarro is labeled a “melodrama” or a Grand Guignol, the implication is that it is second-rate. What is meant by those terms? Do they deserve their negative connotation?

4. Puccini’s era was associated with an operatic movement called “Verismo,” meaning realism, though it is more precisely identified with the literary movement known as “Naturalism,” which explored the lives of the poor and downtrodden, showing them caught in destructive social forces beyond their control. Il Tabarro has been called Puccini’s only “Verismo” opera. In what ways does it represent this movement? Is its portrayal of society “veristic” -- that is, true?

5. Suor Angelica has come in for severe criticism, as the above passages attest. Does it deserve this criticism? Is it really so sentimental and cheap?

6. Gianni Schicchi is a villain in Dante’s Inferno, but a charming rogue in Puccini’s comic opera. How do you regard him?

C. PROJECTS AND FURTHER STUDY

1. All of Puccini’s operas except his first apprentice efforts are in the Met (and international) repertory. Hear and see them, read about them, consult the study guides on this site, and consider how the Trittico operas fit within the context of his work. Think especially about Angelica as a typical Puccini heroine; about the portrayal of working class people in Tabarro compared to the impoverished characters of La Boheme; and about the comic episodes in Boheme and Turandot in relation to the sustained comedy of Gianni Schicchi.

2. The most popular one-act operas in the standard repertory are two Verismo works almost always paired, as they are at the Met: Cavalleria Rusticana and I Pagliacci. (Technically, the latter is in a prologue and two acts, but it’s always played as a one-acter.) Get to know them (there’s a study guide) and compare them, particularly in structure, to Puccini’s one act operas. Why are they more popular? Are they better?

3. An opera company can save money on costumes by scheduling Suor Angelica in the same season as another opera about nuns, Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites. Otherwise, they have very little in common, but the contrast is instructive. You’ll find a study guide for the Poulenc opera on this site.

4. Verdi’s Falstaff, his last opera and only mature comedy, is considered a model for Gianni Schicchi. It’s a delight. Make its acquaintance, and see the study guide.

5. Read Dante’s Inferno, especially Book XXX, for a sense of the source of the Gianni Schicchi story (not to mention because it’s one of the greatest works of Western literature). There are many translations; those by Robert Pinsky and John Ciardi are among the best. The lively Zimmerman translation quoted above is online.

6. The Met has other triple bills in its repertory. Parade is a trio of twentieth century French works by Satie (a ballet), Poulenc (a comedy), and Ravel (a fairy tale). Stravinsky gives us a ballet, another fairytale opera, and an “opera-oratorio” by that Protean composer. Read about them at this site, listen to the works in sequence, and decide whether it makes sense to combine them. (Both of those evenings, incidentally, were unified largely by the wonderful set and costume designs of David Hockney; illustrations are available in a number of books devoted to this major contemporary artist.)

7. Assuming that you’d like to keep the three Trittico operas intact in their original sequence, but wish to emphasize unity instead of diversity, design a production that would do that. Consider sets, costumes, staging, and other ways to bring out themes which you believe recur from opera to opera.