I feel I probably need to revisit most of Puccini's oeuvre. See, the thing is, I've definitely gotten better at opera appreciation the more I've watched, and most of them I only saw when I was less adept at it. I think that more than anything else explains why my impression of him has been a bit lukewarm. My own dern fault! It's just, there's always something new to see. Sometimes it's hard to motivate myself to revisit stuff that definitely deserves revisiting.
Well, in any event, here's his obscurish second opera, which he was not happy with: he spent a lot of time tinkering around with it, trying to make it better, before just giving it up as a lost cause. Still, I actually don't have any big problems with the music. It's pretty good, actually! It's just, I think with this libretto, salvaging the piece was a lost cause. It's an interesting theoretical question, whether you could potentially save a weak libretto by rejiggering the music, but...certainly not in every case, I'd say.
So there's this guy, Edgar. He uses tools such as the autocrossbow, bioblast, and chainsaw to attack his enemies and...what? Okay okay, I know that was the lamest joke ever. Forgive me! Edgar is some sort of knight or something who has a True Love named Fidelia (NOTE SYMBOLIC NAME), but he's cast her aside for the charms of Tigrana, who is some sort of gypsy or something. But he's tired of all her debauchery, so he decides to join the army to escape her clutches. But then, he dies in battle. Only not really. He reappears disguised as a monk with no explanation. Tigrana shows up to mourn Eddie, but he plies her with jewels until she agrees to betray him. Ed reveals himself to Fidelia and they sing about how much they're in love, but then Tigrana shows up again to stab her, after which she's captured. The dern ol' end!
I mean, there's some nonsensical stuff here like the monk disguise, but that doesn't really bother me. I didn't start to really dislike this until the part where our "hero" is bribing Tigrana to get her to reveal her venality, which is some really ugly, misogynistic stuff. But beyond that, the relationship between him and Fidelia is never really convincing, in spite of this production including sepia-toned footage of their previous love over the fourth-act overture. It's just really dramatically weak. It has obvious echoes of both Tannhäuser and Carmen, but it is not on the level of either one. I did think Julia Gertseva was very good as Tigrana; it's just too bad the character receives such ill narrative treatment.
Well, whatevz. Now I've seen all Puccini's operas except his first. Weird fact: both Wagner's and Puccini's rarely-performed first operas are called "The Fairies:" Die Feen and Le Villi. Is it because that's a theme that naturally suggests itself to young composers just starting out? In that case, you'd expect more examples. Still, it's sort of interesting.
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