We approach, beloveds, as unto a shrine, for this is no ordinary performance for most opera lovers. To many, this is the equivalent of a trip to Lourdes, Obberammergau, and the Holy See in Rome with deluxe remastering and DTS sound laid on. Our Lady Renata Scotto sacrificed her voice on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera so that we may all live on with the memories forever and ever. Amen.

Over the past two months, Met Opera on Demand (my drug of choice) has been loading (one by one, mind you) the televised operas of Giacomo Puccini’s Il Trittico from the way back machine in 1981. December was Il tabarro, Suor Angelica rang in the New Year, and Gianni Schicchi joined the party late last month.

Puccini’s Il trittico premiered at the Met in 1918 with a gala cast that included Claudia Muzio as Giorgetta in Tabarro, Geraldine Farrar as Angelica, Giuseppe De Luca as Schicci, and the extraordinarily versatile Florence Easton as Lauretta. (She sang everything from Micaela to Fiordiligi to Tosca to Isolde and Brunnhilde, sometimes within a few days of each other.) The Triptych debuted to mostly mixed reviews and has never reached the critical or popular regard of his more celebrated works. In over one hundred years, it has only received 81 performances at the Met in three productions. Frankly, that’s a sin as it offers the extremely rare opportunity to enjoy three expertly crafted operas in a single night.

White Studios

I’m not certain when the fashion for using the same soprano for the whole evening started, but I have no doubt it was the brainchild of some thrifty impresario saddled with a diva of vaunting ambition. It really is ludicrous since it requires a Meryl Streep-esque ability to shapeshift from hardened Parisian cougar to young noblewoman forced by familial shame to take the veil to juvenile virgin hoping for matrimony. It’s not just a stretch, it’s more like the eternal history of woman, played in reverse, all in one night. So how, I ask you, could La Scotto possibly resist?

As far as I can tell, the first soprano to pull off this hat trick in New York was Beverly Sills over at the City Opera in 1967. Sills writes in her eponymously titled, score-settling, autobiography with a side of bitters, Beverly, that the production happened to coincide with the institutionalization of her young son who was developmentally disabled. No matter how ill-suited she was to Puccini, we can only imagine what kind of emotional inferno those performances must have been like. Understandably, she never sang it again.

Since then the only sopranos brave enough were Teresa Stratas in 1989 (who ducked a planned telecast, tsk, tsk,) and Patricia Racette in 2009. Scotto, however, was first at the Met in 1976 and on tour, where our beloved James Jorden was struck by lightning in Dallas.

Mme. Scotto had recorded both Tabarro and Angelica in 1976 for CBS/Sony under Lorin Maazel, ceding the Lauretta in Gianni Schicci to her Sister Genovieffa, Ileana Cotrubas, who sounds much younger even though she was only four years Scotto’s junior. The recordings, first issued separately within the space of a year then later boxed, were all well received, even if Edward Greenfield in Gramophone Magazine lamented their lack of “atmosphere.” My guess is this was due to the uncommonly clean and forward engineering balance which, frankly, for me, is one of their primary assets. Plus, Maazel’s conducting is almost Klemperer-esque (i.e. slow) in providing a sharply defined roadmap to Puccini’s very detailed musical construction. Another advantage is the presence of Marilyn Horne as the implacable Zia Principessa in perhaps one of her greatest studio-only portrayals. You forget Horne made her first big success with Kunst (Marie in Berg’s Wozzeck) before she became the ultimate Stimm Diva. There’s some serious word-pointing between Horne and Scotto.

The Schicchi production actually debuted in June 1974 coupled with the Met’s first-ever Bluebeard’s Castle by Bartok starring David Ward and Shirley Verrett which I had never heard of until now. The next year, in December 1975, the other two operas were added by the same production team for Schicchi with director Fabrizio Melano and set and sostume designer David Reppa. The conductor was Sixten Ehrling. Then, a month later in January of 1976, La Scotto stepped in to do her hat trick.

In 1981, it was televised with Scotto in the three lead female roles. For context, the season opener on 21 September that year was the infamous production of Bellini’s Norma with all its ensuing brouhaha which Scotto said affected her confidence for at least a year. As a matter of fact, her last Norma of the season was 6 October and this revival opened 30 October. She did seem to have regained her considerable poise by Saturday afternoon the 14 November when they brought in the cameras.

James Heffernan

All three operas boast uncommonly fine casts here and all are led by her favorite conductor, James Levine, in the pit. For context, Scotto had been singing at the Met fairly regularly since 1965: Butterfly, Adina, Lucia, Gilda, Amina, Marguerite, Violetta, the usual lyric soprano fare. Then, she and Levine finally collaborated in Verdi’s I vespri siciliani in the fall of 1974 when the production was revived from the previous season. They played 147 performances together over the next decade with all of her greatest successes. Mimi in Bohème, the Trovatore Leonora, Desdemona, Luisa Miller, Elisabetta in Don Carlo, Puccini’s Manon, Lady Macbeth, Francesca Di Rimini, and finally Vittelia in Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito. Her gifts are so bounteous here it’s like opera Christmas. Let us all bow our heads for a moment of contemplation and then I’ll begin the Mass.

Il tabarro starts with the quietest and most evocative prelude Puccini wrote. His stage directions insist on curtain up before the music to circumvent an overeager audience’s applauding the set. These are the same overeagers, by the way, who ruin the concluding bars of Bohème Act I; we know who you are. So, we have curtain up with nearly the full cast in tableau on Reppa’s very handsomely designed bank of the Seine with barge downstage. There is applause. Mme. Scotto then makes her entrance at the top of the stairs upstage left, pauses, downbeat.

It’s the story of an unhappy marriage with an even more unhappy ending. Scotto is a big boiling pot of Giulietta Masina and Anna Magnani with the lid on too tight as Giorgetta. Her husband, the barge owner Michele, is played expertly in equal parts of tenderness and roughness by Cornell MacNeil. They have suffered the loss of their infant child and she has cooled to him in the years since. Now, having taken up with the young stevedore Luigi, played by the swarthy Vasile Moldoveanu, her sexual frustration is palpable.

The estimable Charles Anthony and Italo Tajo play the other dock workers and they are all lucky in the collaboration of the magnificent Frugola of Bianca Berini. You can see that she alone not only understands what the men don’t about what’s happening between the two secret lovers, she also intercedes at two points preventing the situation from becoming apparent to everyone else. Her discreet compassion for Giorgetta starts the wheel of tragedy turning in this performance that makes the outcome all the stronger.

Moldoveanu exhibits a fine tenor with some excellent metal on top. He gets big applause after both his brief aria on the hopelessness of life, “Hai ben ragione,” and after riding out what must be a half page of high A-flats in the second part of his duet with Scotto. Their pairing veritably crackles and his good looks bring a welcome, and rare, veracity to this presentation. MacNeil is in solid, late career, voice and builds his soliloquy,”Nulla…Silenzio!” into a monstrous finale flung out into the house to a huge ovation, his transformation from malcontent husband to fledgling murderer complete.

You could put a microscope to Scotto’s performance there’s so much detail — the work she does with her eyes, the money she pulls from her bra, her exhausted carriage, the way she places her hands on the tenor alternately clutching and stroking him. In a role that lacks any time alone on stage, or even its own aria, she seems to relish the challenges. Her singing here is representative of this era in her career. She consistently has the cleanest vowels and most pointed pronunciation of almost any singer I can think of and she always keeps the words on the breath. Her top is wiry and she does clip the one high-C she’s given. It’s all scaled to big theater stagecraft and she constantly gives the illusion of spontaneity underneath her studied layers of resignation and sexual frustration.

Tabarro is burdened with a finale that’s hard to stage but, it not only comes off brilliantly here, it’s finally disturbing and repulsive in all the right ways. MacNeil pushes Scotto down onto the freshly dead corpse of her lover while she covers him with kisses in her crazed grief. Curtain and I’m spent.

White Studios

Now, I know there are those of you out there who hate on Suor Angelica. As far as I’m concerned, you can all sit down and stay quiet because in the hands of this team it may as well be Parsifal it’s so weighted with purpose and meaning. Curtain opens on an excellent set, with the sanctuary stage right, Angelica’s outdoor kitchen left, and the Tuscan countryside up center through the iron gates of the convent. Scotto as Angelica enters late for vespers and does a full supplication on the stone courtyard floor before entering the church and you immediately know it’s going to be that kind of evening.

Once again, an excellent supporting cast with the uber-stern Jean Kraft, who you just know is hiding a wooden ruler in the sleeves of that habit, as a very potent Mother Abbess and Betsy Norden as Sister Genovieffa, Our Lady of the Over-Bite. All the important plot points are touched on well and Melano manages to stage the opening 20 minutes without making it look like everyone’s just standing around, which they essentially are.

Things hot up with the arrival of Angelica’s Aunt, La Principessa, in the personage of French Mezzo Jocelyne Taillon. She’s come to have Angelica sign over her inheritance to her sister in order to enhance the young girl’s dowry. This interview contains what I think is the most skillful character writing Puccini ever did and Taillon nails every line with her slate gray mezzo matching her La farbissina punim. She wastes little time in reminding Angelica why she was dispatched to the convent and all heck breaks loose with Scotto demanding to know what happened to the child she had out of wedlock and pointing a threatening Italian finger at the Virgin in the adjacent vestibule to remind Auntie who’s watching over them. She’s so clear and on-message the English subtitles are redundant. The cold recitation of the news of the child’s death brings with it an emotional devastation and Scotto manages one the most artfully crafted stage faints I’ve ever witnessed. She seems to be simultaneously falling forward as she goes back and finally down. Magda Olivero wept.

She signs the document and Auntie leaves with Angelica ignoring her offered hand to kiss. The rest of this performance is nothing short of a passion play. Scotto starts “Senza mamma” in a quarter turn away from the audience with her head cast slightly down and her eyes hooded and not visible to the camera. Only at the mention of seeing her child in heaven does she turn her face up to the audience again and it’s completely apparent she’s been unhinged. She ends well on that tricky A-natural pianissimo and manages to give a near definitive rendering of this aria. She does not invite audience applause at its conclusion and everyone is too moved to contradict.

The finale is brilliant in its simplicity. Puccini was also specific about the realistic representation of the miracle he wanted in the final pages, but, what need have we of fog machines, electric lights, and mere tawdry theatrical effects? We have Scotto and her power. The epiphany is a solo pantomime and we see everything through her eyes. As she raises her hands upward in supplication at the first thundering fortissimo from the pit, the cameraman pans up to follow her hands and the camera itself jiggles, giving the impression that the great volume of the orchestra caused the vibration. You’d almost think it was planned. Seriously, here it is, che bella morte, baby. Madga Olivero passes her handkerchief to Jesus sitting next to her.

Gianni Schicchi follows and it’s a romp about Daddies, dying and who’s got the will? Then… it’s who’s going to write the new one? This Schicchi is maybe a tad disappointing after having been put through the ringer already by the two proceeding operas. I’m less impressed here by Reppa’s slightly Escher-ish design in drab terra cotta and the Colorform costumes that could use a little more detailing, at least for the home screen. We have Tallion back as Zita, which she apparently owns. The rest of the cast reads like old home week at the Met circa 1980. I don’t even know how anyone else stands a chance with Italo Tajo onstage as Simone. Philip Creechas Rinuccio displays a quaint, lyric instrument and pulls off the hymn to Firenze without pushing the top on those ‘e’ vowels.

James Heffernan

Gabriel Baquier has a face made out of Silly Putty and he is clearly relishing every nuance. From his entrance, he is in complete command and we have yet another classic performance to enjoy. Scotto’s Lauretta is a little harder to judge. She has clearly sung herself out for the night and at this point she’s got no business performing ‘O mio babbino caro’ to anyone. To her enormous credit, she proceeds to turn in one of the funniest, most coy, tongue-in-cheek interpretations ever and the byplay with the deadpan Baquier is hilarious in the extreme. I forgive her. All these old pros play through this like a lively game of doubles tennis and we all win. No surprise since the prosciutto is sliced pretty thick here.

Now, a word on the curtain calls. Our Lady’s performances didn’t stop at the foot lights, as you all well know. She was the absolute queen of the humble glide into those harsh bow lights, squinting at the surprised discovery of an audience present and rendering up an expression of, ’I give… so… much.’ She does not disappoint at the end of either of the first two here. She even gets the ticker tape at the end of the Angelica. Deservedly. Levine and the orchestra play up a storm and you can sense how much the performers really trust him because you rarely catch anyone with that tell-tale sidelong glance into the pit.

The Met did release these on DVD in the James Levine Anniversary boxset where they showed great respect for these performances by breaking them out onto two discs instead of cramming them into one, making more room for picture, which is very good for its time, and sound, which has been well sweetened and warmed up. For those who still enjoy DVD & Blu-rays they’re worth searching out. My nephew, the computer science whiz, will happily give you a lecture on why streaming will never equal physical media, but you’d need a slide rule and a calculator to get through it. However, Met on Demand is just about the greatest thing that happened to yours truly. Now if we could get them to finally release the Live in HD Trittico from the very first season, that would be fabulous. Still, this was a great, nay, historic evening. Go in peace, my children.