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.)