Mascagni clearly breaks with verismo in this opera set in some hazy European vision of medieval Japan. The first thing you notice is: wow is this music ever gorgeous. Breathtaking. On a purely compositional level, there's no reason that Mascagni should be known as more than a one-hit wonder. This is easily Puccini-level. And there are plenty of opportunities for great singing too. Why is this not in the standard repertoire? And then, the second thing you notice explains this, which is: wow is this libretto ever dire. Seriously, I don't say this lightly, but it may be the worst such I've ever seen. The disparity between music and words is truly striking.
Iris is the naive young daughter of a blind man who lives with him and helps him. Osaka, a young noble, plans to kidnap her with the help of Kyoto, some sort of pimp (...it is extremely obvious that you named these guys after cities, dude. You really thought you should write a libretto for an opera set in Japan even though you couldn't think of a single Japanese name?). He does this by sort of dazing her with a puppet show and carrying her off (don't think about this too hard). In his private palace or whatever, he plans to seduce her, but gets annoyed by her naïveté and tells Kyoto to just send her back. Unfortunately, her dad--a real asshole--assumes she just went off of her own volition and disowns her. In her grief, she jumps down the sewer (as you do). There, she meets four wisecracking mutant reptiles who--sorry, wishful thinking on my part. She's discovered by some ragpickers, who run off when they see she's not dead. She has visions of Osaka, Kyoto, and her dad, and then she dies. And I guess she goes to Heaven, so it's triumphant. In some sense.
That might sound kind of dopey, but I don't think it adequately expresses just how utterly unbearable Iris really is. She's supposed to seem super-innocent, but she mainly seems like she's just suffered a severe head trauma. There's a longish scene after she's been captured before Osaka appears where she thinks she's dead, and it's very much unintentional comedy. And the part after that reads like it's meant to be a parody of an opera: I mean I guess it's not nice to laugh because she's the victim and all, but when Osaka plans on having his wicked way with her but then decides, nope, not worth it, take her back, it's hard not to. Her piteous wailing is meant to generate pathos, but...can't say it does. People criticize heroines in operas for being too passive and always dying for love, but GOOD LORD, anybody who has ever had anything bad to say about Cio-Cio-san has never seen this one. Her ultimate demise is very much a relief for everyone concerned.
This production is adequate as far as it goes, although the exaggerated childishness of Iris being portrayed by a singer who looks to be in her forties at least (Paoletta Marrocu) is a bit odd. Good singer, though. But mainly I just wanted to note that at various points, thematically appropriate images are projected onto the backdrop, and at one point while Iris is babbling about sea creatures (there's a lot of babbling here), we get that classic work of Japanese art, "The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife." And I thought: is this production mocking the opera? If so, I certainly couldn't blame it.
You've gotta hear the glorious music here, but the rampant idiocy of the plot may be a bit of a turn-off. Probably one of those works that's better listened to than seen.
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