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[Met Performance] CID:298010



Il Trittico
Il Tabarro
Suor Angelica
Gianni Schicchi
Metropolitan Opera House, Tue, September 26, 1989

Debut : Federico Davi?, Richard Fracker, Beverly Withers, Dylan Sage, Michael Sokol







Il Tabarro received nine performances this season.
Suor Angelica received nine performances this season.
Gianni Schicchi received nine performances this season.

Review 1:

Review of Martin Mayer in Opera Magazine

The hit of the first month was the Puccini "Trittico," featuring Teresa Stratas in all three roles. I liked her Giorgetta best, probably because I think "II tabarro" the best of the operas: neurasthenic, probably alcoholic, she was credible in her rejection of an immensely appealing Juan Pons, by far the best Michele I have ever seen. (He was also large enough really to conceal the Luigi he has just killed under his cloak at the end.) She even managed the high C over Levine's surging orchestra. She also played perfectly, fragile yet vicious, against Placido Domingo's Luigi. What got the audiences and the critics most, however, was her "Suor Angelica," a businesslike feminist expiating her sin at the start, a human being destroyed by the death of her stolen child and then redeemed by the Virgin herself in a grandly played mad scene at the end. Vocally, the most impressive thing was her ability to come down from the dramatic imperatives of the first two pieces to an amazingly light-voiced 'O mio babbino caro' in "Gianni Schicchi."

Review 2:

Review of Gordon Rogoff in the Village Voice

STRATASPHERE

Any number of statues who happen to sing - Kirsten Flagstad, Lauritz Melchior, Renata Tebaldi, and Jussi Bjoerling come to mind - have demonstrated that supreme voicing of a role can, for an instant, seem like acting. On voice alone, with line held taut or immaculate placement of expressive tone hefted to the rafters, such singers cast a peculiar spell over the dramatic occasion, as if to say that nothing could be more emotionally real than the human body caught in a moment of vocal ecstasy. Yet even when phenomenal singing seems to say everything, someone - Maria Callas or Teresa Stratas - comes along to prove that vocal splendor is nothing compared to an actor who happens to sing.

That said, Callas's disappointing appearance as an actress without anything to sing in Pasolini's "Medea" suggests that musical technique is the structure needed to organize a singer's acting instincts: pressured by chromatic runs or phrases that have to be taken in a single breath, she can release herself into an utterly convincing special reality. It may be misleading, however, to identify that reality with what is otherwise expected from acting. In performance singers simply have more on their minds than actors. Writing of Callas's musical virtues, Walter Legge refers to her "use of ornamentation in all its forms and complications, the weighting and length of every appoggiatura, the smooth incorporation of the turn in melodic lines, the accuracy and pacing of her trills, the seemingly inevitable timing of her portamentos, varying their curve with enchanting grace and meaning." And all this must be happening while she either senses or watches the conductor, balances her sound against the orchestra's, and picks up cues from the prompter!

Legge's reference to meaning is a clue: some singers make sense out of words, trills, and melodic curves, others make potato mush. But even that distinction doesn't begin to define what makes Callas an actor and Tebaldi a statue, since Tebaldi's idiomatic Italian and sinuous legato were not exactly small potatoes. Knowing her own vocal limitations surely drove Callas harder into her natural, obsessive perfectionism, a stance that automatically nourished her theatrical presence: what she inhabited on stage was less a role than a contest with her self.

Stratas, on the other hand, is in a contest with existence. Wherever the music and narrative may take her in Puccini's three short operas, "Il Trittico," she goes there like a prisoner condemned. At first it may not seem so in "Gianni Schicchi," where, as a puppy lover, she's all melting allure, soft around every possible edge, an enchanted ice-cream cone looking for the most appreciative mouth; but by the end it's clear that she's been in perpetual motion, the possibilities of love catching her by surprise, gazing at the Florentine sky like an earnest student in doubt about the universe. Her entrance in "Il Tabarro" tells a similar story: for an instant, her smile looks as if it could light up Paris, but as she moves down the steps toward the barge where she lives unhappily with her husband, a shadow wipes the smile away. That shadow haunts even the simplest domestic phrase, her "Buona notte" emerging in a reluctant hush. Compelled to listen to her friend, Frugola, for a moment, she covers up her desire to be anywhere else by combing her hair as if it were her last act on earth.

All this begins to suggest that Stratas seems more actor than singer because she fills silences with action and temperament. In "Suor Angelica" during the interminable first half-hour of fussy note-spinning - Puccini's strategy for the melodramatic wallop he's saving for the last half-hour - she buries her head while sitting on the side, or retreats to the outside oven, a diminutive Julia Child with nothing better to do. At last, Angelica gets the bad news from her aunt - her sister's marriage means that she must renounce her fortune. But worse is yet to come. She circles the ominous messenger, her hands no longer restrained, one shooting up to her mouth as she tries to silence herself, the other soon pawing her aunt's dress. She's guessed already that her baby son is dead, and when this is confirmed, she dives recklessly to the floor. The harsh scream she utters has nothing to do with singing - indeed, it's more like a declaration of war against song and what it can do. And from then on, her tight-fisted little body becomes a symphony of frantic hands and little spins, an unaccommodated creature left with only vision and attack.

Singers like Stratas and Callas spend all of themselves at every performance, surely one sign of an actor, whatever the medium. In 1824, Giuditta Pasta is reported to have held "her listeners spell-bound ? so seized and carried away that she collapsed before the end." Wagner found Wilhelmine Schroder-Devrient much the same way, writing of "the almost demoniacal warmth radiated by the human-ecstatic achievement of this incomparable artist." And Maria Malibran is described by Delacroix as ripping "her handkerchief and even her gloves to tatters." All of this could easily encompass Stratas in full sail on Puccini's high Cs - much the better part of her shredded voice, by the way.

It's no surprise to learn that the earlier divas were just as plagued by vocal miseries as Callas and Stratas. Acting in opera is usually about mad scenes or any emotional state that cries out for lunatic concentration. But it's also about ordinary gestures in extraordinary circumstances. On Lear's heath, an actor can't only respond to wind and rain, he must overreach them as if ready to burst into song. In opera, music is the stretch that makes it possible for the singer to act. Most singers may not know it, but opera is their chance to look like the rest of us: it's the naturalism of the soul.

Search by season: 1989-90

Search by title: Il Trittico, Il Tabarro, Suor Angelica, Gianni Schicchi,



Met careers

• James Levine [Conductor]
• Teresa Stratas [Giorgetta]
• Giorgio Merighi [Luigi]
• Juan Pons [Michele]
• Mignon Dunn [Frugola]
• Federico Davi? [Talpa]
• Charles Anthony [Tinca]
• Stanford Olsen [Song Seller]
• Richard Fracker [Lover]
• Joyce Guyer [Lover]
• Fabrizio Melano [Production]
• David Reppa [Designer]
• Gil Wechsler [Lighting Designer]
• Teresa Stratas [Angelica]
• Florence Quivar [Princess]
• Joyce Guyer [Genovieffa]
• Jean Rawn [Osmina]
• Elizabeth Anguish [Dolcina]
• Sondra Kelly [Monitor]
• Wendy Hillhouse [Abbess]
• Gweneth Bean [Mistress of Novices]
• Ariel Bybee [Nurse]
• Sandra Bush [Lay Sister]
• Elyssa Lindner [Lay Sister]
• Barbara Bystrom [Novice]
• Linda Mays [Novice]
• Loretta Di Franco [Alms Collector]
• Beverly Withers [Alms Collector]
• Teresa Stratas [Angelica]
• Florence Quivar [Princess]
• Joyce Guyer [Genovieffa]
• Bruno Pola [Gianni Schicchi]
• Teresa Stratas [Gianni Schicchi]
• Vinson Cole [Rinuccio]
• Joyce Guyer [Nella]
• Ariel Bybee [Ciesca]
• Mignon Dunn [Zita]
• Anthony Laciura [Gherardo]
• Philip Cokorinos [Betto]
• James Courtney [Marco]
• Federico Davi? [Simone]
• Dylan Sage [Gherardino]
• Michael Sokol [Spinelloccio]
• Andrij Dobriansky [Amantio]
• Herman Marcus [Pinellino]
• Peter Sliker [Guccio]
• Terry Allen [Buoso Donati]