This particular conformation—which is also the Romeo/Juliet conformation, the Paolo/Francesca conformation, etc., ad inf.—is one variant of the metanarrative, medieval in origin, that governed operatic creation between, roughly, 1835 and World War I. The reason this metanarrative did not exhaust itself before generating virtually the entire canon (Mozart aside) of what we still must call the “standard repertory” is that it provided so much room for variants of the Tristan/Pelléas/L’Amore sort dramatically, and inspired such a wide stylistic range of overwhelmingly powerful musical settings, that the story never feels redundant, even though in all essentials, it is. In the instance of L’Amore dei tre re it evoked from its composer one of those odd single-inspiration responses of which we find so many around this time. (Well, not quite literally—Montemezzi did complete several other operas. But even more than Mascagni, Leoncavallo, Giordano, et al., he falls with a thump into the “one and done” category.) (I) L’Amore sounds as if it were written in two weeks of running a high fever. That wasn’t at all the case, but the action is so tightly wound, the musical impetus so well maintained, and the atmosphere so redolent of High Romantic erotic melodrama spiked with veristic violence, that in a good performance it feels like the case. I’ve loved the score ever since my first hearing, on an early ’50s radio broadcast, of the Cetra recording (RAI Milan, with Clara Petrella, Amadeo Berdini, Renato Capecchi, and Sesto Bruscantini, Arturo Basile, cond.) and, having missed its last Met go-round in the season of 1948-49 (I didn’t think it would just disappear), I’ve had frustratingly few chances to experience it live.
Footnotes
| ↑I | The gigantic La Nave, which Montemezzi considered his chef d’oeuvre, never got much past its premiere run. Of his other works, I have heard only the late (1943) one-act, L’Incantesimo, also with a libretto by Benelli. It survives in an air-check recording of its concert presentation by the NBC Symphony, conducted by the composer and doubtless enabled through the good offices of Toscanini, a Montemezzi advocate from their pre-WW I days. It shows much of the same command of orchestral/harmonic coloration that we hear in L’Amore, augmented by some Straussian touches in the strings, and in a few passages early on—especially one in which the husband, Folco, recounts his dreamlike forest encounter with a doe that mysteriously also seems to be his wife—the piece promises something interesting. But then it gyrates into hyperbolic vocal writing that confuses high tessitura with dramatic effect, and reaches a perfunctory and unconvincing happy end. Altogether—and especially when contrasted with L’Amore dei tre re—L’Incantesimo is one more bit of evidence for the hypothesis that once the Romantic/Veristic metanarrative fell into disuse, composers and librettists started grasping after evermore-strained subject matter in which they themselves had difficulty believing, and for which they could not produce anything approaching their best work. The performance does serve to showcase the powerful, rich, and long-ranged baritone of Alexander Sved, and to give us modest documentation of the sparsely recorded Virgilio Lazzari, a famous Archibaldo in L’Amore. |
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