The first thing anyone will notice in approaching Fedora is that the fall-off from Andrea Chénier has been precipitous, far more so than Mascagni’s from Cavalleria to L’Amico Fritz (actually a very nice piece), or Cilea’s from L’Arlesiana to Adriana Lecouvreur (a step up, in most of our estimations), or perhaps even Leoncavallo’s from Pagliacci to his La Bohème. The lavish melodic gift and keen musicodramatic instinct that Giordano so consistently displays in Chénier make only cameo appearances in Fedora. This is due in part to the fact that, granting the above-cited advantages of a successful pre-existing script, Giordano and the game but inexperienced Colautti were also stuck with its mechanics and personages, whereas for Chénier the deft Illica was able to freely fashion a specifically operatic structure from “un ambiente storico“—an historical milieu in the common awareness, and of inherently dramatic qualities and “real-life” significance. Of at least equal importance was the nature of the story extracted from the ambiente storico, which is directly in line with the pervasive E-19 protagonist-couple narrative. As I noted in writing about Mascagni’s Iris, when the Italian operawrights of the fin de siècle turned away from some form of that narrative, they floundered about in search of a story to tell and the way to tell it—in short, of something worth singing about with classical voices as developed during the century just ending, and worth scoring for the similarly elaborated pit orchestra. Furthermore, Chénier embraces a particular form of that narrative, in which the hero and heroine fight their way toward coupledom with a nobility of purpose, so that their tragic end may come on a tone of exaltation, of sacrifice in the cause of justice. That, I think, inspired Giordano, and brought his skills for vocal setting and splashy orchestration to their peaks.

And what of Fedora? What sort of story is this, and who are these people? Whose side are we asked to be on, and why? Let me direct attention to the supporting characters first. In Chénier, all of them—L’Abate, Fléville, Bersi, Madelon, Roucher, Matthieu, L’Incredibile, even the Contessa and Schmidt, the Jailer—have musical identities, and are directly connected to dramatic developments. None of them is incidental, and the only solo ones we could say are purely functional are the Major-Domo, who opens the opera with a single instruction, and in Act 3 Dumas, president of the revolutionary tribunal, and Fouquier-Tinville, the revolutionary prosecutor. In Fedora, we have a welter of bit parts, named characters who hang about swelling the progress and pulling focus, as it were, but who either have no further purpose, or who look as if they should but have no musical markers to give them the slight recognizability they need. They are meant to collectively convey the sense of aristocratic Petersburg household life (Act 1) or Parisian social conviviality (Act 2), but they are mostly just clutter. Three of them could be said to have moments of potential dramatic importance in the first two acts, though only one is given strong enough material to register. That is Cirillo, Vladimiro’s coachman, who narrates the scene of the shooting and the sleigh ride with the mortally wounded Count. His brief scene is not melodically memorable or otherwise musically distinguished, but the setting has sufficient dramatic suspense to be effective in the hands of a gifted character singer. Then there is Gretch, the police official evidently permanently assigned to the Princess wherever she may be, who must lead the interrogation in Act 1, and with Fedora set up the trap for Loris in Act 2.  A possible dramatic presence, we might think, but his writing is of the strictest functional sort—any few bars of Eighteenth-Century recitativo secco will offer more inflectional assistance, and as much accompanimental interest. And last, there is the boy Dimitri, who has a moment center stage while being pressed to recall the name of the suspected assassin. He is designated as mezzo soprano, and his writing is of the same transactional kind.