Here is a Puccini opera that you never hear about. That's my impression, at any rate, and one piece of evidence is that this 2008 production was the first time it was done at the Met since 1936. That's nuts. This isn't some sort of dubious bit of juvenilia; this is mature Puccini. It comes immediately after La fanciulla del West and before Il trittico,which means that in addition to whatever else, it's also Puccini's last completed multi-act opera. That's...something, isn't it? So let's have a look.
Puccini was commissioned to compose an operetta. He wasn't a big fan of the form, but after ascertaining that he didn't need to include spoken dialogue and could basically just write a regular opera, he agreed. But then the War broke out and things were difficult, such that it took a while to produce and wasn't a big success. So there you go.
The story is that there's a high-class courtesan, Magda, who's kept by a rich, older man. Ruggero is a young man from the sticks in Paris for the first time for...reasons. It's not entirely clear. But he meets Magda and when she goes out for a clandestine night on the town, they meet again and fall in love. They go away...somewhere, for some reason, to be together, but when he wants to marry her, she feels constrained by her past and leaves him to go back to her old life, much to his chagrin. Finis.
Okay, so I absolutely loved the first two acts here, in Magda's salon and then in a nightclub. They were sparkling and sophisticated and romantic and fun in every way. Of course, you can't object to Puccini's music either, and this nineteen-twenties production seems to perfectly complement the action. But the third act was...a bit of a mess. It's a rather violent tonal shift from the first two, and I have so many questions: why did they feel the need to run off? Where are they, exactly? Why is there a butler? How is it that the "poet" from the first two acts (who at first seemed comic and fun, but is revealed as kind of a douchebag) and his lover, Magda's former maid, show up? What are they there for? And why doesn't Magda evince any surprise to see them? These are questions, and they made the whole thing a bit disorienting. But they're not my main annoyance.
No, the fact is, I just can't deal with this "oh, she can never escape her past" thing. The conceit just strikes me as incredibly sexist, obviously written by a man; maybe she would feel so constrained because of ideals driven into her by the ever-present patriarchy, but I don't think that's the point, and I think that even if we're not supposed to agree with her decision, we're supposed to sort of sympathize with it, and I just can't: maybe I'm guilty of refusing to take the text on its own terms, but given that everything's fine, his family would be happy to see her, and that he's made it totally clear that knowing about her past is not going to bother him, it just annoyed me. I wanted to be swept away by his heartbreak and the general melancholy, but I just kept...not being able to. Unfortunately.
God knows it's still Puccini, and clearly worth seeing, but somehow it was not the unalloyed classic I was hoping for.
…This story's basically La Traviata minus the tuberculosis, though, innit? Wikipedia doesn't seem to consider that Alexandre Dumas's story could have been put to contribution, but. Still.
ReplyDeleteThe resemblance is obvious, but I think that a) the lack of fatal diseases or b) any kind of familial obstacle and c) the completely different motive for the affair being cut off make it kind of distinct.
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