'Cavalleria Rusticana' and 'Pagliacci'

by Pietro Mascagni and Ruggero Leoncavallo respectively

seen at Covent Garden on 10 December 2015

This double bill of two short operas now traditionally linked together is presented in a new production by Damiano Michieletto, conducted by Antonio Pappano with the sets designed by Paolo Fantin.

In Cavalleria Rusticana Aleksandr Antonenko sang Turiddu, Eva-Maria Westbroek sang Santuzza, Elena Zilio sang Mamma Lucia, Dimitri Platanias sang Alfio, and Martina Belli sang Lola. 

In Pagliacci Aleksandr Antonenko sang Canio/Pagliaccio, Dimitri Platanias sang Tonio/Taddeo, Carmen Giannattasio sang Nedda/Columbina, Dioynios Sourbis sang Silvio, Benjamin Hulett sang Beppe/Arlecchino, and Elliott Goldie and Nigel Cliffe sang the parts of two villagers.

The set for the first opera shows us Mamma Lucia's bakery and the piazza outside, by the use of a revolving stage which allowed some scenes to be played outside, and some in the bakery-cum-shop. (This was a nice touch - Mascagni, the composer, was the son of a baker.) It opens with a body lying in the piazza with dozens of villagers staring at it until Mamma Lucia arrives to wail in grief; this was a perhaps perplexing preview of events to come while the prelude was playing. 

With the opening of the action itself, village life (in 1980s Sicily - a car is driven onstage at one point) continues while the domestic tragedy unfolds. Turiddu, the 'rustic cavalier' has both seduced Santuzza and begun an affair with his now married old flame Lola. His mother is worried; Santuzza, in agony at having been betrayed and shamed, tells Lola's husband Alfio what has happened, and Alfio kills Turiddu in a fight for honour. The final tableau thus replicates the opening.

This rather depressing tale is lent a sense of real emotion and tragedy through the lyrical 'verismo' music, which underlines the passions of the protagonists. Eva-Maria Westbroek's Santuzza in particular showed us the peculiar mixture of self-hatred and devastating pain of Santuzza with enormous power, her strong frame somehow bent with repression. Elsewhere the music also invests the rituals of village life with an unexpected grandeur - the great Easter hymn being the prime example. All this was wonderfully played and gloriously sung.

The staging allowed for interesting links to be forged with the second half; during one short interlude posters for a touring company's show of Pagliacci were stuck on the village noticeboard, and leaflets handed out to excited villagers. During the famous Intermezzo, one of Mamma Lucia's bakers wooed a smartly dressed woman who responded  warmly to his rather clumsy attentions. While this slightly distracted from the music being played, it turned out to be setting the scene for the later opera; these were the Silvio and Nedda of Pagliacci.

In the second half we were moved to the village hall - half gymnasium and half amateur theatre hall, and again the revolve allowed for clever resolutions of the overhearing scenes and the attempts by jealous husband to discover his rival. In the meantime the villagers could jostle excitedly in the gym hall while waiting for admission o the play, and could sit in serried rows for the performance. Aleksandr Antonenko, having shown us the rather callow Turiddu belatedly commending the spurned Santuzza to his mother;s care shoulld he come to grief, now took the role of the cuckolded husband Canio, his pain in real life apparently mocked by the comic turn he was supposed to enact as Paggliaccio. The great aria vesti la giubba gives voice to his anguish, and Antonenko sang it magnificently, not melodramatically pasting his face with make-up, but rather with his back to the mirror, standing doggedly, almost haggardly, facing the audience. Dimitri Platainias played the agent of destruction in both operas, first as the outraged husband Alfio, and second as the thwarted and malicious Tonio. The romantic affair begun to the the beautiful Cavalleria intermezzo ends in bloody death for both Nedda and Silvio.

It was a clever juxtaposition to link these two operas into a single setting, 'explaining' how one dovetailed into the other, even though no such intention was present at the different times of their composition (1890 and 1892 respectively). The only problems with the staging were logistical; the use of a revolve with realistic sets in either half drastically cuts the acting space on the stage, and the crowd scenes especially in Cavalleria looked especially cluttered. Also, the principal linkage scenes had to occur  during purely instrumental passages (there was a vignette of Santuzza and Mamma Lucia coming to terms with each other during the interlude between the two actors of Pagliacci as well as the Silvio/Nedda encounter already described). The import of these vignette was undoubtedly a distraction from the emotional tone of the music (which was, of course, not designed for them), particularly as a good deal of sobbing was involved in the Santuzza/Lucia episodes. 

However, all in all this was a very satisfying and atmospheric rendering of two immensely popular operas, with excellent singing by all the soloist and the chorus.