In Act 2 we have moved from Vladimiro’s home in St. Petersburg to the reception hall of Princess Fedora’s residence in Paris. Here, we make the acquaintance of two important supporting characters of greater importance. One is De Siriex, a French diplomat who, like Gretch, seems globally attached to Fedora. (Technically, we have already met him in Act 1, but his few lines there do nothing to separate him from the many other small roles.) He will have a dramatic function in Act 3. The other is the Countess Olga, friend of Fedora, who has no dramatic function at all, only a decorative one. De Siriex offers an incidental song about the mysteries of Russian women, and Olga retorts with one about the fizzy shallowness of Parisian men. But the first is of a poor generic variety, and the second is worse. Everything in this chatty, prancey first half of Act 2 is genre writing of an intended operetta-ish tone, and Giordano was terrible at it—we have only to compare Puccini’s efforts in the same direction in La Rondine, or the best work of the operetta composers themselves, to hear how empty it is. The few feints toward something going on underneath pass by unremarked, because the writing has no underneath.

As we have seen, it was almost entirely owing to the title character’s embodiment by Bernhardt and other rivalrous actresses that the play and character had embedded themselves in public consciousness, and she is clearly meant to occupy the central position in the opera as well. The trouble is that her music does not sustain her claim until far along in the show, and even then she is led into her best singing moments by her tenor protagonist, Loris. Her early monologue, “O grandi occhi lucenti,” in which she muses on the features of her new betrothed like an adolescent girl caught up in a whirlwind first romance and sings that a new life is about to begin for her, is intended to establish the inner aspect of her passionate self and the motive for the outbursts of grief and vengeance that follow. But the aria is only conventional word-setting with a few nice accompanimental touches, and the oubursts merely the most obvious exclamations, to which the music adds nothing except raised pitch. The first half of Act 2 gives her only conversational hostess politesse to work with.

Italian operatic music of true affect makes its quite unprepared appearance halfway through Act 2, with the reappearance of Loris and Fedora, arm in arm as they pass through the antechamber of the big reception room. It arrives on the evening’s first music that makes you sit up, the grandly sweeping orchestral introduction to opera’s shortest hit tune, Loris’ “Amor ti vieta.” It is a haunting piece, come so unexpectedly and gone so soon, and both it and the theme of its introduction have motivic use the rest of the way. Now follows a scene between Fedora and Loris. It is sung mostly sotto voce, since the party, including Lazinski’s mock-Chopin house concert, is in full progress in the background. In it, Fedora exercises her wiles to extract from Loris enough of a confession of homicide to confirm her suspicions, but not enough to hear his justification. Here are the Sardoodley contrivances at their improbable full force: the guests depart as news of a Nihilist attack on the Tsar spreads among them, and instead of waiting for Loris’ promised return with the rest of the story, Fedora dashes off her denunciation of him to the Tsarist police—the most important of the opera’s several “postal arrangements.” She does so to a very pretty orchestral passage. (“Oh, that interlude!” exclaimed a woman we briefly encountered during the intermission, and who was loving all she was hearing. One convert!) But it is an interlude only in the sense that no one sings. It melds the theme of Fedora and Vladimiro’s ‘love,’ first heard in the opera’s Prelude, with that of “Amor ti vieta,” and undeniably has some of the “misty, nostalgic, schmaltzy appeal” of which McVicar spoke. What it does not have is so much as a hint of turmoil, let alone anguish, or even vindictive determination, as Fedora pens what she knows will be a fatal letter. Evidently she feels nothing but the gauziest, loveliest sentiments, which it’s assumed we will share. She orders Gretch to surround the house with his men, send a signal when all is ready, and dispatch the letter. There’s to be no noise when the trap is sprung.