The last operatic work that Italian composer Giacomo Puccini ever completed in his lifetime is called Il trittico (The triptych).
It's an unusual night at the opera, with an experimental flavour that might surprise opera goers who think of Puccini as synonymous with the red-curtained operatic canon.
Made up of three standalone pieces, each clocking in at just under an hour, it goes to three very different places.
"He sort of grabs you by the lapels and takes you on a ride," says Constantine Costi, who is directing the first piece in Opera Australia's production.
Il trittico is now being performed at the Sydney Opera House, 100 years since Puccini's death, in what Opera Australia Artistic Director Jo Davies says is an "exciting experiment".
This opera is rarely staged in its entirety, but the company is not only running all three parts together, it's also commissioned three different directors to tackle each one.
Puccini's triptych
The first opera of the evening, directed by Costi, is Il tabarro: a tragedy where love, deceit and murder storm through the Parisian docklands.
When Il trittico debuted, Il tabarro was particularly controversial. Even Puccini's longtime collaborator, the conductor Arturo Toscanini, considered it too gruesome and grimy a way to start a piece.
But Costi thinks Puccini was ahead of his time: "He was obsessed with the French street life of the time and wanted it to feel sort of almost documentary in a way… He wasn't so interested in kings and queens."
The second opera, Suor Angelica, is set in a cloistered nunnery where the titular character carries a dark secret about the life she had before taking her vows.
This one is directed by Imara Savage, who considers the piece "a strange proposition". The protagonist is almost completely silent for the first 20 or so minutes of the piece, "and then the drama really begins in a very familiar kind of way".
The final sequence "becomes a kind of monodrama", which Savage compares to a close-up in film.
"You know, you have a giant close-up of that person, the protagonist, and they're not saying anything, but there's a lot of conversation that's kind of swirling around them, but they're not a part of it. It's got kind of an underwater quality."
Perhaps because of this unusual style, when the operas are separated (against the express will of Puccini, who intended the trio to always be performed together, in order), Suor Angelica tends to be the one that gets left off.
On the other hand, the final opera, Gianni Schicchi, is the most famous of the lot and the most frequently plucked out of Il trittico for a solo outing.
It's a full-on farce that takes the ecstatically heart-rending tone of the first two operas and turns it on its head. The titular character is an affable chancer who navigates a mourning family bickering over their dead relative's will for his own gain.
Director Shaun Rennie has taken great pleasure in directing Puccini's only true comedy.
"It's a perfect little opera," he says, "and rare in the operatic canon to have something legitimately funny… It's funny in the same way as Fawlty Towers or Weekend At Bernie's."
Despite those comparisons, Gianni Schicchi is also the opera in which Il trittico's best-known musical moment takes place.
'O mio babbino caro' (Oh my dear Daddy) — the aria Gianni Schicchi's daughter sings plaintively to her father — doesn't have any jokes in it, but it is an extraordinary vehicle for a soprano, in this case Stacey Alleaume (who has a busy evening with roles in Il tabarro and Suor Angelica, too).
Staging that aria is a tricky balance to strike.
"It can't feel like we're going to be coming here for this; it's not more important than the rest of Schicchi," Rennie explains.
"But there is an awareness that, okay, this moment needs to be well-lit and beautifully sung, which it is!"
Three individual voices
Artistic Director Jo Davies is credited with the idea of three directors for this staging of Il trittico.
The trio she chose are all energetic younger artists with credits all over the place — from La Traviata on Sydney Harbour (Costi), to a run of quietly radical premieres with Sydney Chamber Opera (Savage), to Bell Shakespeare's The Lovers (Rennie).
"Con's focus on psychological realism felt perfectly suited to Il tabarro," says Davies.
"Imara's more abstract surrealist approach seemed to be something that could bring a whole new perspective to Suor Angelica, and Shaun Rennie's brilliantly detailed and truthful approach to comedy was exactly what Gianni Schicchi required."
There's a practical consideration, too. This way, each director had to focus on just a one-hour piece. In a landscape low on mid-budget stomping grounds, this can be a canny way of getting young, fresh directors onto the mainstage.
"She really wanted us to lean into each piece as individual artists," says Rennie, who describes it as "working not necessarily alongside, but parallel to, Con and Imara".
The directors only saw each other's work for the first time in tech week, after rehearsing individually.
"All of a sudden, you understood your piece didn't exist in isolation," says Savage.
Costa laughs: "It's a bit like 'next week on Opera Island'."
Putting it together
The directors cite designer Michael Hankin as a crucial part in unifying the three "radically unique" pieces contained in the triptych.
"The real through-line and the success, the whole thing, comes down to Michael Hankin on sets and costumes," says Costi.
Davies agrees: "He worked relentlessly to create an environment that celebrated the difference of each piece and directorial style, but also held all three pieces in one world."
Meanwhile Russian-American conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya was thrilled at the prospect of working with three different directors for these pieces.
She says when there's a single director, there can be an impulse to unify and find parallels between the pieces.
"But in this case, actually we focus on the differences between each one, and I think that's so much more exciting."
This hearty melange of directors, composers and designers has seen the production met with overwhelmingly positive reviews. But it's Puccini whose "genius" at weaving a narrative gives Il trittico its power.
"They're these very miniature epics," says Savage. "He kind of does in one hour what other operas might do in three: really distils the point."
"He knows when to pull the heartstrings," says Rennie.
"He knows how to weave narrative, how to manipulate an audience's emotion through the dramaturgy of his work. He knows when to open up, he knows when to make a sharp turn… It's sort of like Puccini told me how to stage the show, in a way."
Costi puts it most concisely: "The emotional manipulation going on is like, completely skilful."
Opera Australia's Il trittico runs until July 19 at the Sydney Opera House.
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2024-07-12 03:27:07Z
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