Various composers. Opera selections.
It has been said that there is only one plot in opera: the tenor wants to make love with the soprano, but the baritone won't let them. The witticism must sometimes be stretched a bit (in particular, the villain is often a bass), but there is nothing in this evening's selections to seriously contradict it.
For example, Puccini's Fanciulla del West (poetically translated as ``The Girl of the Golden West'', though the title makes no mention of gold) is a simple love story set during the San Francisco Gold Rush. Puccini was fascinated with America, using New Orleans for the ending of Manon Lescaut and casting an American naval officer as the hero/villain of Butterfly. In his ``Western'' opera, the heroine Minnie becomes involved with the fugitive Dick Johnson. The baritone who wants to keep them apart is the local sheriff, Jack Rance, also in love with Minnie. In the final act, Dick Johnson has been captured and is about to be lynched. The heart-rending aria Ch'ella me creda gives voice to his last request: let Minnie believe that I escaped and did not die. But at the last moment, Minnie shows up, rescues Johnson, and goes off into the sunset to live happily ever after.
Giordano's Fedora, on the other hand, is a complex murder mystery in which the Princess Fedora suspects the tenor, Count Loris Ipanov, of killing her fiance. We eventually learn that he had caught the fiance in flagrante with his own wife and had shot the guilty man in self-defense. However, this is after Fedora has already arranged with the police official Grech (bass) to have Ipanov arrested. All of this intrigue does not prevent the two from falling in love, however, and Ipanov's aria Amor ti vieta is a charming declaration of his passion for the princess. The opera ends in tragedy as Fedora kills herself in remorse when Ipanov discovers that she has been the cause of his downfall.
Meyerbeer's L'Africaine, although not one of his best-known works, is nevertheless one of the most charming. Featuring the famous Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama in a somewhat far-fetched plot, it tells how Selika, the African slave girl of the title (an incognito queen, of course) saves da Gama's life twice out of unrequited love, only to be thrown over for Inez, his Portuguese fiancee. The bass this time is Don Pedro, a rival explorer who has da Gama thrown in jail in an attempt to win Inez's affections. (The opera is a veritable spaghetti plate of misplaced adoration: the slave Nelusko lives only for Selika, who loves da Gama, who is engaged to Inez, who is also the object of Don Pedro's affections.) After many twists, Don Pedro is dead, da Gama is united with Inez, and the broken-hearted Selika deliberately breathes poison. The lovely aria O paradiso comes late in the opera, when Selika has introduced da Gama to her homeland, a West Indian paradise that he has been seeking, but before he once again jilts her for Inez.
Perhaps the best example of our ``standard plot'' is found in Tosca, one of Puccini's ``big three'' successes (the others being La Boheme and of course Madama Butterfly). Floria Tosca is a resourceful woman who agrees to let the baritone, Scarpia, have his way with her in exchange for the life of her lover Cavaradossi. She saves herself by killing the rapist, and then discovers that she has been tricked and that Cavaradossi has been executed anyway. Although Tosca is the focus of the work, Puccini wrote some of his best-loved tenor arias for her co-star. In the first act's Recondita armonia, he compares his true love's beauty with that of an unknown woman who has served as a model for his painting of the Madonna and child. A sharp contrast is provided by the last act's E lucevan le stelle, in which the doomed man is in prison, writing a last letter to his beloved and remembering their happy times together.
© 1995, Geoff Kuenning
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