L'amore dei tre Re

by Italo Montemezzi

seen at Holland Park on 28 July 2015

This production of the opera, composed in 1913, was first seen at Holland Park in 2007. The revival features Natalya Romaniw as Fiora, Joel Montero as Avito, Simon Thorpe as Manfredo, Mikhail Svetlov as Archibaldo and Aled Hall as Flaminio, and is directed by Martin Lloyd-Evans, designed by Jamie Vartin and conducted by Peter Robinson.

The orchestration is lush and dramatic, the plot rather over-heated with heady proclamations of mystical love (between Fiora and her erstwhile suitor Avito, and also from her husband Manfredo, though this is not reciprocated) and unwavering suspicion and vengeance (on the part of Archibaldo, Manfredo's blind and suspicious father). 

Curiously, only Archiboldo is actually a king, despite the opera's title - the husband and lover are only princes. The crisis is partly caused by the fact the he is a conquering king (of Italy in some pre-medieval time or other), who has forced the Italian princess Fiora to marry his son.

This terrible old man hears something of Fiora's tryst with Avito, but cannot prove it. Manfreo's appeal to his wife to wave a veil in farewell as he leaves for yet another campaign wins her pity, but not her love, and she agrees to his request. When Avito reappears she at first tries to resist him, but eventually succumbs, at which point the veil is dropped. Archiboldo, once more on the prowl, hears footsteps again and confronts Fiora then strangles her - fairly clearly, he is in love with her too but repressing his feelings entirely into hatred and suspicion. By the time Manfredo returns, anxious that Fiora might have fallen from the tower where she was waving the veil, it is too late.

An opera of doom might well have stopped there, or perhaps have had a confrontation between the two princes, but there is more in store here as the crowd of resentful Italians prepares Fiora for burial and Avito appears once more to kiss his beloved in farewell. He is hardly dismayed to be told that Fiora's lips have been smeared with poison in order to trap the unknown lover (he has after all shown and sung clearly that he is half in love with easeful death) and he expires as Manfredo confronts him. But Manfredo himself is lost without his wife and kisses her too, dying as his father approaches thinking to have achieved his vengeance. The crowd execute him.

All this is summarised to show what lies behind the stirring music of this opera - a grim picture of thwarted passion leading not so much to tragedy as to annihilation. I found it rather overblown as a piece, though very well sung by all, and with a suitably pitiless staging that was all grey and drear (saving some scarlet fittings to Manfredo's uniform) until the final scene when Fiora's body was draped in an Italian flag, whose green and red stripes were made more vivid by contrast with the set and costumes. Given the extreme width of the Holland Park stage, it was an inspiration to focus all the attention on the outside corner of a tower presented diagonally to us. Unbalustraded steps led up to a precarious platform jutting from this corner, from where Fiora waved her veil, a strikingly long white affair that (with the aid of a maid) could stretch across one whole side of the stage. On her death, the mourners produced a similar veil in black.

As an example of what Italian opera was producing in the wake of Verdi, Wagner and Richard Strauss, along a far less lyrical path than Puccini's, this is heady stuff, but perhaps still more of a curiosity than a classic.