But then there is Act 3. It is not very long, and again one wonders, as with other operatic miracle endings, how its last tableau might be made plausible, or at least not ridiculous. According to Mallach, the audience at the premiere, until then quite receptive, had a tough time with it until that uplifting end. I find it compelling, and as with the Aria della piovra, cannot think of anything else quite like it. Mallach rightly enthuses over the prelude. He terms it “by far the most radical music ever to be presented to a mass audience in Italy,” with its creepy combination of harmonic and orchestral devices, its sounds of dripping and crawling and constant shifting underfoot. We are “nel abisso ove in fogna si sfoga la grande città” (“the abyss wherein the great city drains itself,” and wherein, according to Illica, three sinister nights reign: the night without stars in the heavens, the night without reflections from the dead waters, and the night without tears [owing to] Nature’s insensibility. The slit through which Iris jumped has opened out into this sprawling subterranean realm of filth, wherein the shadowy figures of those who comb it for their livings move about, laughing spectrally at one another’s futile findings. One, a ragpicker, sings a song to the moon. The three male Egoisms appear, bearing their summations of a theme that crops up often in the Verist and Post-Verist oeuvre—the heartless breaking of an innocent female spirit on the wheel of male hunger for or wealth or power (e. g., Liù) or through an equally heartless obliviousness (Cio-Cio-San), sexual conquest being crucially involved in all instances. Mascagni rises to a towering height by sinking to these depths; the scene is unforgettable in the music. Then we have Iris’ brief re-awakening, her greeting to the Sun, and the return of the Inno al sole for her resurrection—for this is, transparently, the Catholic narrative of the betrayed innocent whose purity of spirit earns her salvation through supernatural intervention, set at a far cultural and religious remove for easy disavowal. It’s usually moving, “belief” aside, and is so here.

Olivero is of course the main attraction of this performance, and is a prominent example of the sort of interpreter we hear as “iconic Verist.” That’s hardly the only sort for the part, though. The first Iris, the Romanian soprano Hericlea Darclee, did make a few records (for a singer of her historical significance, very few), and they even included “In pure stille” and the Aria della piovra. They are very rare, though, and the only Darclee I have heard, almost fragmentary samples of Rumanian songs, suggest a good, typical lirico-spinto of her period, but aren’t conclusive enough to help us more than guess at her Iris. At the Met, the part was sung by Emma Eames, Lucrezia Bori, and Elisabeth Rethberg, none too much resembling the other two and Bori of a lighter calibre than Eames or Rethberg, but all deploying tone of great purity and direct, clean emission. Eames, who is often thought of as a cool singer, was congratulated by W. J. Henderson for capturing “the innocence, the unsuspicion of the girl in a high light and without any unwise attempt at detailed delineation.” So the sort of tonal complexity and “detailed delineation” that always mark Olivero’s work has not been to everyone’s taste. It isn’t always to mine, either; there is often, to my ear, a self-consciousness bordering on preciosity to her effect-making, and an air of sophistication that doesn’t immediately come to mind for this character. Bori, who also recorded the two excerptible passages, sings them with plenty of nuance but greater spontaneity, without making quite such a fuss, and she doesn’t have to apply girlishness—it’s in the voice. In terms of a vocal personality-to-role matchup, Adriana seems to me a much better fit for Olivero than Iris. Nonetheless, there is in Olivero’s singing the unquestionable authority of painterly skill and identification with the musical style. She can make her “special effects,” a subito piano, sometimes on an intervallic leap, or a deadening of tone, without a misstep, and when one of them lands (as with “La vita è così bella” in the opening scene or her lifeless repetitions of “Perchè?” in the last one), the emotional charge is real. The voice itself has the range, quality, and amplitude needed, and its inclination to edginess at the top is de-emphasized by this writing. To receive her message, one must overcome any antipathy to strongly vibrated tone.