In its search for works that will hold the attention of today’s audiences for at least a season’s run of performances, the Met has followed two summoned from the days when the term “standard repertory” was not quite yet making sense (Cherubini’s Medea and Mozart’s Idomeneo) to one that had secondary standing in the time of its flourishing, Umberto Giordano’s Fedora. By “secondary standing” I mean two things, first, that it was one of a number of operas from its era that never acquired a high critical reputation but which, in the hands of gifted performers at home in its stylistic assumptions, was a programmable piece so long as those assumptions were in place, then settled into relative obscurity as soon as they were not; and second, that it has always been considered Giordano’s second-best opera, meaning that it is perceived as at least somewhat better than, say, La Cena delle beffe, Madame sans Gêne, or Siberia. Such “second-bests” are trotted out when enough time has passed to qualify them as novelties, and/or when a management has ticket-selling singers who will consent to the leading roles.

Fedora premiered at the Teatro Lirico in Milan in 1898, with Gemma Bellincioni and Enrico Caruso as the protagonist couple, and proved successful for some years thereafter, especially in Italy and South America. It arrived at the Metropolitan in 1906, with Caruso opposite Lina Cavalieri in her company debut, and with Antonio Scotti in the baritone role of De Siriex, and had a three-season run in the mid-’20s starring Maria Jeritza, Giovanni Martinelli, and (again) Scotti.^(I) It then languished locally for seventy years, till a revival mounted for Mirella Freni and Placido Domingo, and hasn’t been seen since. I missed that ’96 production. So, my acquaintance with Fedora being only a rather spotty one via recordings, I betook myself down to the Big House to see what I could recover of the onetime excitement.

Like a healthy plurality of 19th-Century opera libretti, Arturo Colautti’s for Fedora was worked up from a popular play, thus ensuring that a rudimentary structure, an established level of theatrical playability, and some audience familiarity with the subject were all in place at the outset. In this instance, Giordano was seeking to capitalize, as did Puccini a few years later with Tosca, on one of the several boffo box office hits of Victorien Sardou. So fashionable was Sardou for the last three decades of the Ottocento, and so unfashionable ever since, that a quick look at Fedora’s standing in its time is at least a matter of curiosity to anyone encountering its operatic adaptation now. Though it was quickly incorporated into the repertoires of nearly all the leading dramatic actresses of the era, it had been written expressly for Sarah Bernhardt, whose personality and range of effect the playwright had shrewdly assessed. That range is suggested in the report on her Fedora by the New York-based critic William Winter who, first noting that Sardou had placed “great stress on the feline elements” of his title character, wrote of Bernhardt that her “intensely vital, impulsive, passionate, erratic personality comported with the character of Fedora, and therefore her performance was excellent.” Winter disapproved, of course. Knowledgeable and perceptive, he also carried to the point of censoriousness the then-common belief that the stage should show only those personages and situations as could be held to be morally elevating—or at least that any others meet their proper comeuppance and that Virtue triumph in the end. Of Fedora he said that its “distinguishing characteristic  . . . is carnality,” and as for the actress, he christened as “The Bernhardt Doctrine” the conviction that ” . . . any kind of conduct, so long as it is activated by ‘love,’ is necessarily impressive and interesting.”