Shaw’s Duse-Bernhardt comparison is too well-known to be in need of any detailed recounting. It remains necessary reading because, apart from the delights of its prose, it so clearly outlines the distinction between a style of acting dependent on high-quality artifice and one grounded in the absence of same—a distinction met with at any of the several junctures in the history of acting that mark a shift in the general perception of what is “real,” “natural,” or “authentic.” Duse was the winner of the bout, hands-down, as refereed by Shaw, and she, like Chaliapin, has been laid claim to ever since by actors and acting gurus in all forms of modern theatre, whether spoken, sung, or danced. Some were not fully persuaded, though, and among them was Beerbohm, who saw Duse in several roles (including Fedora) at London’s Lyceum in 1900. After first congratulating his critical colleagues on their fluency in Italian (“else they would not be able to tell us unanimously that Duse’s technique is beyond reproach”), he addresses the actress’s conceptions of her roles. And therein lies his crucial departure from Shaw’s way of watching acting. Shaw follows his ever-amusing description of the Bernhardtian artifices of cosmetic and lovability, and his willing submission to them, but ends by saying that ” . . . it is always Sarah Bernhardt in her own capacity who does this to you . . . she does not enter into the leading character; she substitutes herself for it. All this is precisely what does not happen in the case of Duse, whose every part is a separate creation.” Beerbohm sees the same contrast, but receives it quite differently. Of four of the five roles Duse had brought to London, he assures us that “I know them well enough to be convinced that Duse has no conception of any one of them. She treats them as so many large vehicles for expression of absolute self.” Outlining the localized typologies of each of these characters (e. g., Paula in Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, or the Princesse Georges in Alexandre Dumas’s play of that name), he complains that Duse “does not make it her business to understand and impersonate.” He finds her convincing only in an Italian part, that of La Gioconda. “If I had never seen her in any other part,” he concedes, “I should have raved about her conception. ‘She is La Gioconda,’ I should have exclaimed. As it is, I can only remark that La Gioconda is she.”

There we have an eternal divide in actors’ approaches to the problem of character. It should be understood, I think, not so much as the debate between “from the outside in” vs. “from the inside out,” as that between how far one takes oneself into all the circumstances of the character vs. how completely the character is brought into all the circumstances of oneself. That is of especial pertinence to operatic acting, wherein many characters are at a remove in period, social understanding, and language from any contemporary self, and wherein all actions must be carried out, all passions embraced, by a singing self. Writing in 1895 about Gismonda, and thinking of Emma Calvé’s Carmen and Anitra (in Massenet’s La Navarraise), GBS mused: “It seems a strange thing to me that we should be so little awake to the fact that in these plays which depend wholly on poignant intensity of expression for the simple emotions the sceptre has passed to the operatic artist.”

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Before evaluating the work of the production team and performers, it is only fair to ask what they had to work with. Giordano had been drawn to the play since, at a susceptible age, he had seen Bernhardt in it. So it wasn’t material he’d had to settle on; it had spoken to him. But how well did he and Colautti wave their sceptre over the realm of the intense expression of simple emotions? Music, after all, had lifted many a melodrama to tragic stature. And the operatic Fedora does have some strengths. There’s quite a lot standing in the way of getting at them, though. In an NYT preview article, the Met production’s director, David McVicar, comes as close as I’ve ever seen a prominent participant in an artistic enterprise come to saying “We know this isn’t much good, but you’re going to have a rollicking time anyway (” . . . not going to pretend this is a neglected masterpiece . . .  sort of an operatic guilty pleasure . . . has a sort of misty, nostalgic, schmaltzy appeal . . . you have to respect that its ambitions are quite low.” I don’t know why we must respect low ambitions, but such advocacy does leave our expectations with nowhere to go but up, which I guess is the point.