I should have foreseen the inescapable: just as Italo Montemezzi’s once-exalted, now commonly disrespected L’Amore dei tre re came wafting in on wings of wishfulness fanned by its few surviving cultist followers, and landed, for the first time in more than 35 years, in a production by the New York City Opera at the Rose Theatre, the Fates decreed that it open on the night following a  concert presentation of Act 2 of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde by the BSO at Carnegie Hall, which had blown into town on a gale of expectation surrounding Jonas Kaufmann’s first stab at a big chunk of the male title role. For Montemezzi’s compact melodrama has always been tagged as one of “Tristan’s Children” (the title of the germane chapter in Alan Mallach’s fine “Autumn of Italian Opera”), setting it thereby to an Oedipal struggle that no work can reasonably hope to win.

Yet it was the champions of this opera, including musicians and critics of high standing, who themselves first labelled it an “Italian Tristan,” and the moniker is understandable, however overblown. Dramatically, L’Amore posits the Tristan situation with one variant—the princess who is the female partner of the meant-for-each-other couple is unwillingly married to the scion of the conquering tribe’s First Family, not his father (L’Amore) or uncle (Tristan). It is the most thoroughly through-written score of any Italian opera written up to that time that I can think of, and though its vocal line is often rewarding and always singable, its music is for long stretches driven by the orchestra, with some use of Leitmotivic devices. Its plot turns around a long Act 2 erotic encounter that carries the lovers into an otherworldly state on cushions of chromatic musical language marked by richly orchestrated interludes and the call of a distant voice. The old “king” (a baron, but the difference is academic) is in this case actually, not metaphorically, blind. And this last calls to mind another opera wherein a sightless old king is father to a foreign princess’s husband, and to which Montemezzi’s has often been compared—Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande.

When I reviewed the release of the RCA Victor recording of L’Amore, ^(I) I wrote that “The parallels with Maeterlinck’s Pélleas are either uncanny or just plain canny.” Note that I was referring to Maeterlinck’s Pelléas, not Debussy’s, because I was comparing it with Montemezzi’s source, a play by Sem Benelli, and one of the parallels I was talking about is that both Montemezzi and Debussy set their plays directly into sung form with little or no “opera-izing” alteration, a procedure only then becoming at all common. Concerning the plot-and-character likenesses, I said: “We have a beautiful young princess, living in a grim castle with kings of another race, married to one and watched by the aged father. Her true love is a young man of her own temperament; there is a sense of shared childhood between them. In a central position is a scene showing the princess in a tower, with her lover imploring from below; at the denouement, with the antagonist poised to surprise the lovers in a violent manner, the young man cries ‘Your mouth, your mouth!’ In the final scene, the princess lies abed, surrounded first by mourners of the realm, then by the surviving kings.” These similarities easily clear the Funny Coincidences bar, and the synchronicities line up, as well. (Play/opera premieres: Pelléas 1892/1902; L’Amore 1910/1913. Maeterlinck was by the latter date at the height of his considerable standing, and while Benelli is commonly considered a sort of poor man’s d’Annunzio, I’d nominate Maeterlinck as a likely strong second influence.)

Long ago and far away, which is to say in the ’60s and over on the Upper East Side, there was a benevolent organization called the SPCCG—Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Charles Gounod. It was founded by Patrick J. Smith (author of The Tenth Muse, editor and publisher of The Musical Newsletter, editor of Opera News, etc.) and a few of his friends. The Society established an award for good services rendered to the eponymous cause, and if memory serves did actually bestow this award on one or two occasions. I was a little miffed at never being designated a recipient, having on several occasions come to the defense of Faust‘s already-beleaguered reputation, and having said nice things about Mireille as well. But such are the slights we must learn to ignore.

The SPCCG was essentially a waggish, donnish enterprise of a sort whose cultural moment has no doubt passed. But beneath this tone was the entirely valid perception that the long-venerated works of this master were being critically condescended to because of a failure to distinguish between the deficiencies of performance and those of the works themselves. And things have not improved for C.G. over the intervening decades. Indeed, a correspondent recently wrote me about a conversation with the artistic director of an important American opera company who stated flatly that Faust should not be done anymore, because we no longer believe in that sort of salvation, the Devil, and all the rest that goes with that. In its last two productions at the Met, the opera could not be located amid the depredations of its directors (Andrei Serban and Des McAnuff)—D.O.A. before even approaching the matters of conducting and singing.

When we’ll see Faust again, and how, is a matter of pure, dark speculation. Meanwhile, though, Gounod’s other big hit, Roméo et Juliette, is returning to the Met repertory. It’s not on my list of must-sees this year, but I’ve been making some notes, rather in the SPCCG spirit, about both the piece and its presentation, as revealed in the present Met production and the one that preceded it. Looking back over these sets of notes, I’m struck by how similar their observations are, despite changes up and down the line in physical production, musical direction, and casting. And for some time I’ve been intrigued by the fact that regardless of textual decisions, some means are always found to throw Act I under the bus. One reason for the oft-heard complaint that Roméo is nothing but a series of lyrical love duets, and thus comes off as a pressed flower of an opera, is that everything else in the work, of which there is quite a lot, is curtailed either by redaction or in the execution. So, especially in a time when we are unlikely to experience Romantic transcendence in those duets, we might ask what it is that Act I is meant to accomplish, and what light that might throw on the rest of the opera.

First, for anyone who might be confused by recent experience: Roméo, as laid out in its score, is a five-act grand opera. The acts are closed forms; each ends with a decisive “button,” thus implying an intermission to follow. With the cuts in Act IV that were formerly standard (Juliette’s Potion aria and the Epithalamium, in addition to the permanently exiled ballet), it was easy to run Acts IV and V together, leaving only three intermissions. Now, with those numbers restored in whole or in part, the entire show is granted but a single intermission, which chops the score in two in the middle of Act III. So when I speak of “Act I,” I refer to what is now the first of three scenes in the very lengthy stretch before the intermission. This is the scene at Capulet’s ball, and it’s not short, preceded as it is by the overture and choral Prologue. It contains five numbers, but that’s somewhat deceptive, since the first takes in everything before Mercutio’s Queen Mab ballad. In terms of audience experience, the act comprises four important solos (Juliette’s brief but showy introduction, Capulet’s song in praise of youth and dance, Queen Mab, and Juliette’s Waltz Song) and one duet (the madrigal “Ange adorable” at the lovers’ first meeting). These episodes are bracketed by choral and dance music and joined by very concise sections of recitative, originally conceived as spoken dialogue but never so presented, even in the premiere production (1867) at the Théâtre Lyrique. The atmosphere is festive. Tempo indications are prevailingly on the quick side, and triple meters predominate.

Owing to the crunch-time pressure of work on the proofs of Opera as Opera/The State of the Art, I must delay my next post for one week, till Friday, April 13. I’ll be paying some close attention then to Act 1 (the actual Act 1, as indicated by the score) of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette—how the now-customary cuts undermine its function, and how the performed remainder is being staged, sung, and conducted. As with my earlier remarks on Massenet’s Thaïs, there will be reference to what sorts of voices were heard in the opera’s heyday, and how radically that affects the way we receive this work. Also to come over the next few weeks: two Verdi revivals (Trovatore and Luisa Miller); Montemezzi’s (potentially) gripping L’Amore dei tre re; and recent local exploits of Jonas Kaufmann and Anna Netrebko—always dependent, of course, on the real-life materialization of same.

Meanwhile, we are nearing the time when a firm publication date and specifics about ordering can be announced for the above-mentioned book, which is to the best of my knowledge the one-and-only effort to date to attempt a comprehensive evaluation of all aspects of operatic performance over the past couple of decades, and thus of where our artform stands in today’s society. All the considerations dealt with here in bi-weekly chunks, and more, are taken up at greater length, and in the context of some unifying themes, in this book. More detailed description will be forthcoming shortly.

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