In the Second Circle

R Zandonai: Francesca da Rimini, Met encore, Phoenix Picturehouse Oxford, 19 March 2013.

I suspect that many readers will have been as ignorant as I of the composer Riccardo Zandonai, pupil of Mascagni, who lived from 1883 to 1944. Yet he composed twelve operas all successful in their day, five or so still performed. Francesca da Rimini from 1914 is based on a play by Gabriele d’Annunzio, itself based on the story from those of ‘lust’ in the Second Circle of Dante’s Inferno; this episode from Dante has inspired at least ten operas by known composers, including Rachmaninov, as well as Schumann’s Symphonic Rhapsody. Zandonai’s version is an attempt to fit his opera into the verismo style where it does not have a natural place, being much more suited to bel canto melodrama style of Donizetti. While there is much good music and drama with lush orchestration, what comes over is a pastiche of a mass of Mascagni, loads of Leoncavallo with a peppering of Puccini. Added to that the basis of the plot is familiar: that of the handsome young man acting as emissary of unsuitable suitor seeking marriage to a beautiful girl but falling for her himself. In order of increasing bloodiness, Octavian and Sophie with Baron Ochs in der Rosenkavalier, Tristan, Isolde and King Marke with Melot as the agent of fate  and Paolo, Francesca and his deformed brother Gianciotto Malatesta with a third brother, Malatestino, a sadistic paranoid stalker,  betraying the lovers. It is a theme still all too possible in parts of society in the twenty first century. There are reminders also of the Don Carlos, Elizabeth and King Phillip of Verdi.

In detail: Act I is an hour-long build up to the arrival of Paolo. He and Francesca fall in love at first sight. Act II is a battle scene, an attack on the Malatesta’s, in which Francesca, now married to Gianciottio, meets Paolo again and he declares his love. Act III has the two lovers emulating Guinevere and Lancelot, the story of which she has as bedside reading (the fifty shades of grey of the period?). In Act IV, Francesca repulses a pass from Malatestino who then betrays the lovers to Gianciotto. The lovers are discovered in flagrante by the brothers and both are killed by Gianciotto.

This thin and long drawn-out plot is redeemed by the quality of the production and performance and, for the cinema audience, the TV direction of Guy Halverson with its very effective use of close-up. The costumes had a pre- Raphaelite appearance. Francesca was played by Eva-Maria Westbrook (who came to notorious attention as Anna Nicole in Mark-Anthony Turnage’s eponymous opera at Covent Garden and BBC Television in 2011). She sang and acted beautifully as did her many attendants. There was a fine performance, too, from Ginger Costa-Jackson as the pantalooned slave Smaragdi. The men performed equally well in character and good voice – the handsome Marcello Giordani as Paolo, Mark Delavin, not without winning some sympathy as Gianciotto and Robert Brubaker, pure evil as Malatestino.

However, for the cinema audience, the experience bordered on the tedious. Lasting four hours there were three twenty minute intervals, in addition to the customary interviews with the stars, plus a ten-minute pause between the two scenes of in Act IV, during all of which we were only shown the now familiar army of stage hands; hard at work; from the end of Act II the outcome was totally predictable. This was grandiose opera rather than grand opera. Nevertheless there was a great deal to enjoy in the singing, acting and the staging as seen through the eyes of the HD director.

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A preview of the 2013-2014b season is now available on www.metopera.org/HD. The highlight is undoubtedly La Cenerentola with Joyce diDonato and Juan Diego Flores for which we have to wait until 10 May 2014. Will diDonato efface the memory of Christine Rice?


22 March 2013i