On this Gay Pride weekend, I remember my late friend Robert Chesley, activist and playwright (Stray Dog Story), who had also been an elementary schoolteacher. Challenged one year to cast his fourth graders in a play for the holiday season, Bob had the happy notion of staging Giovacchino Forzano’s libretto for Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi. The nine-year-olds were thrilled. The fifteen speaking characters are full of personality, and none of their personalities or motivations puzzled the kids. Greed is eternal, and nothing in the story will be found mysterious at any age.

The figures all come from commedia dell’arte, from the enterprising con man to the pretentious Bologna doctor to the girl so much in love she’d jump in the river. These types had been playing in the street-theaters of Italy from the days of Rome’s emperors; they were as well known to Dante’s fellow citizens as they are to anyone who tunes in to sit-coms. The source for Schicchi is half a dozen lines in Dante’s Inferno—evidently the Alighieris were among the families he’d cheated. As the opera ends, Gianni suggests we take his side and applaud. We always do. Everyone but the victim loves a scoundrel.

But the very hilarity of the proceedings doomed Bob’s school play: An assistant principal, not herself Italian, denounced the enterprise as discriminating against Italians. Showing the Florentines to be grasping, dishonest, venal—and funny! Why, it smacked of the Minstrel Show! Bob asked how Dante and Puccini could detract from the glory of Italy. They are the glory of Italy! In vain. Lying, cheating Italians had to go. If you want a healthy Italian treat, stage The Godfather or La Dolce Vita: something with moral structure.

Chesley’s misadventure with Gianni Schicchi came to mind this weekend because the Princeton Festival (ninety minutes south of Penn Station) has staged it, preceded by Rachnmaninoff’s Francesca da Rimini. (The program will be repeated next Saturday.) When you ponder that pairing, reflect that both stories derive from brief passages in the Inferno. Puccini just happened to focus on the comic side of a Dante sneer. Dante condemned a lot of folks he didn’t like. It didn’t make him happier that he was chased out of town.

He fetched up in Ravenna, where he finished his poem and died, a guest of the hospitable Polenta family. The Polenta were minor Renaissance potentates without a single major crime to their account, so everyone has forgotten them—except that they hosted Dante and told him the terrible story of their Aunt Francesca, married to the nastiest of the nasty Malatesta family, lords of Rimini. Francesca allowed herself to be seduced by her ugly husband’s handsome brother, Paolo—supposedly, while they were reading about the adultery of Lancelot and Guenevere, and they got carried away. (Books! I ask you!)

Adultery would have been all right, but her husband found them in the very hour of consummation and slew them both without time to confess and be absolved of their sin; therefore they are in Inferno, tormented by the whirling winds of lust—and by the memory of brief happiness—instead of in Purgatorio, working things out. (Even more upsetting, to the Polenta family, thirty years later the murderer was still happily in power down the road even as Dante wrote.)

The story came to symbolize the overpowering sex urge and, in the sensual late nineteenth century (Rachmaninoff’s opera dates from 1906; six other operas were composed on the subject during that generation), the superiority of beauty and true feeling over duty and propriety. Today, Francesca’s story serves the moral: If you want your story to live forever, take a poet to dinner.

In terms of operatic source material, less is usually more. Few successful operas are based on full-length novels; a play or a short story or a brief legend allows the dramatist scope for invention. Dante sums Paolo and Francesca up in forty-four lines. (We are assured her husband will, eventually, get his.) Rachmaninoff’s opera is an hour long, which includes much orchestrated scene-setting, a moody monologue for suspicious Lanceotto Malatesta, the only fully fleshed-out character, and the seduction by love duet with its gory climax, happily brief. Compare that with the dithering Zandonai’s opera puts us through for three and a half hours.

Rachmaninoff had such a gift for late romantic melody that one may wonder why he did so little in the operatic vein. Francesca may indicate his problem: the story does not really engage him; the music is pretty but without dramatic or sexual tension. Francesca is not often given with his student opera, Aleko, because the stories are so similar, and there, too, it is the murderous husband who gets the best music. Francesca begins in the Inferno, with Dante asking the heroine her story, but her focus is on her husband’s inner life of which she cannot possibly know anything.

In Lanceotto’s despairing meditation the music simply does not rise to the anguish and fury the text suggests. Think of  “Ella giammai m’amo,” same situation, half as long and ten times as effective. Comparison to Verdi is unfair but suggests why Rachmaninoff realized opera was not his métier. Too, since the sympathy he feels for Lanceotto detracts from any affection we might spare for his victims, the music fights the story it is intended to tell every step of the way. The score is attractive and harmonically inventive, but as an opera it doesn’t get the job done.

Stephen Gaertner’s attractive, Verdi-sized baritone, though well able to handle Lanceotto’s range and easily filling the Matthews Theater, took rather a time warming to the awkward task, and sounded gruff when he did. Working out the problem may have distracted the singer from portraying the physical repulsiveness which (we are told) turned off his bride: His limp was limp. Caroline Worra played rather a chilly Francesca (with both of her men), and though her silvery top and womanly chest voice fall sweetly on the ear, the link of each to each was not evident.

Rolando Sanz has a pleasant tenor and line but he sang a less than urgent, unseductive Paolo. Nathaniel Olson sang Virgil with dignity; Samuel Green’s Dante sounded like a Yiddish comic. (I have no Russian and no idea how well these singers performed the language; I am impressed that Russian is becoming a tongue young singers are expected to handle. Not so long ago, translation would automatically have been the rule.) The staging was clear and basic, except for some dancers writhing about as damned souls. They distracted us from Rachmaninoff’s score, which illustrates matters far more precisely. The orchestra lacked the overpowering lushness the composer might have desired—his fault or theirs?

The second half of the Dante-esque program was Gianni Schicchi. What Schicchi needs is a director in tight control of his performers. At Princeton, there was no indication that director Steven LaCosse exercised any control at all. There were jokes all right, but so many, with so little rhythm, that the singers might have been improv artists crowding a subway platform, crying, “Look at me!” It is almost impossible (even at the Met) to get a cast for Schicchi to behave with the dignified restraint of, say, fourth graders, but Moe Howard of the Three Stooges would have deplored this production’s lack of finesse.

Musically, though, things were in far better shape. Led by Richard Tang Yuk, the Princeton Festival Orchestra sounded professional and delicious in Puccini’s highly sophisticated score, its wisecracks and bons mots serenely balanced and genuinely humorous.

Schicchi is not a very vocal piece, but none of the cast seemed vocally ill chosen. Jodi Burns sang the score’s hit, the constant audition piece “O mio babbino caro,” with heartfelt grace and unflawed sweetness. (In Prizzi’s Honor, which has a score drawn almost entirely from Schicchi, this aria of true love is quoted just once, when Anjelica Huston is twisting her father’s arm to get him to murder her ex-fiancé—one of those movie moments that give an opera lover special glee.)

Alex Richardson, the Rinuccio, was less happy with “Firenze è un albero fiorito,” but he saved what energy he had for the two ringing high B-flats at the end, for which, if properly delivered, an audience will forgive whatever came before, as they did here. My favorite moment in the opera, the trio of ladies dressing Gianni up as their cousin the corpse—Puccini’s sidelong wink at Wagner’s Siegfried and the Rhinemaidens—was exquisitely performed by Jamie Van Eyck, Ms. Worra and Cindy Sadler.

In the title role, Gaertner sang in many voices, the confident man of business, the sarcastic commentator, the not-so-dying Buoso Donati (when the doctor calls) and the expiring Buoso dictating his new will. He acquitted them all well, sounding smoother and in easier command of varied nuance than he had in the lengthy soliloquies of Francesca. His acting, too, was better focused than that of the rowdy crowd. He could do Rigoletto if he’d work on his limp.

Photos: Jessi Franko

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