Il trittico

The composer himself preferred the name ‘triolet’  for his three one-acters, rather than Il trittico, the title proposed by his publisher Tito Ricordi — a title that is not mentioned in the piano scores, nor in the programme for the premiere on 14 December 1918 in the Metropolitan Opera House, New York. Even though the work was explicitly conceived as a trilogy, the first performance agreements were already offering the option of performing the individual one-acters separately. And it was not long before this option was being exercised. This is typical of this unusual work, which had difficulty for a long time in gaining a foothold in the opera repertoire but whose unique charms have regularly been rediscovered and are attracting increasing admiration.

As early as 1900, Giacomo Puccini had conceived the idea of composing a trilogy of three separate, independent works that would be performed together. However, his attempts to put this idea into practice were repeatedly frustrated by problems in finding the right material and, above all, the right combination. Puccini was fascinated by a concept that turned out to be incredibly difficult to realise: he wanted his three one-acters to have nothing to do with one another in terms of content or music; on the contrary, each should have its own ‘colour’ and mood. And that would constitute the unifying factor. Puccini took the three ‘colours’ from the Quartier Latin scene in his Bohème: tragic, sentimental and comic.

Il tabarro

After considering numerous possible sources and authors over the years for his first one-acter, Puccini eventually found inspiration in the theatre — as he had done with Madama Butterfly and La fanciulla del West (both based on plays by David Belasco). It was probably May 1912 when he saw the play La houppelande (The Cloak) by Didier Gold in Théâtre Marigny in Paris. The material seemed ideal for the ‘tragic colour’ he was looking for. After a couple of failed attempts to obtain a librettist, he found the perfect choice in Giuseppe Adami. With numerous interruptions — including to work on La Rondine  — Il tabarro became the first of the three one-acters Puccini composed.

Puccini's librettist Giuseppe Adami kept the basic structure of Didier Gold’s shocking Grand Guignol play, as well as many telling details. However, Adami tightened up the structure and the language, and he added depth to the psychology of the characters. By the end, the libretto for Il tabarro was a better drama than Gold’s original play, even if Puccini complained at first that the language was too ‘gentle’ and not coarse enough for the social stratum these people belonged to.

Il tabarro starts with the motif that will characterise the rest of the opera: the swaying ‘river motif’ that seems archaic thanks to the church-music tonality, despite that being repeatedly disrupted by dissonances. Echoes of Claude Debussy’s music can also be heard, such as the melody in the top vocal lines that is reminiscent of Debussy’s Cathédrâle engloutie. Puccini uses this motif to build up the overture, which is unusually long for him and presages the atmosphere in the opera as an ominous sign of what is to come, as explained in the detailed notes for the stage direction.

The ‘river motif’ recurs throughout the opera in various time signatures (6/8, 9/8, 12/8). It seems to create its own time continuum, more hypnotic than calming. It can be interpreted as a melodic expression of the hopelessness, which regularly turns into a threatening feeling with the jagged interventions of the solo voices. The gritty verismo passages in the score require a car horn and a ship’s siren, which have been included in the score as meticulously as the deliberately off-key barrel organ that Giorgetta and the labourers dance to. Puccini has skilfully composed secondary scenes and comic relief scenes where the music and libretto are played off against each another with almost horrible perfection. Three numbers in particular stand out in the musical score. Luigi’s complaint lamenting the exploitation of the workers – tempered in parts and passionate in others – comes just before his duet with Giorgetta celebrating life in the Parisian quarter of Belleville. And shortly before the end, Michele sings the deep, dark monologue ‘Nulla! Silenzio!’, which Puccini composed for a performance in 1921 to replace Michele’s ode to the ‘eternal river’, which was originally performed at this point in the opera.

Suor Angelica

Suor Angelica is the only opera in the triptych with a libretto that is entirely original. It was penned by the librettist Giovachino Forzano, who was a relatively unknown author then. Puccini’s enthusiasm for a story that takes place in a convent and ends with the mystical transfiguration of the main protagonist is surprising, given the topics he had previously chosen as material for his compositions. Biographers point to Puccini’s frequent visits, just before choosing the subject for his second one-acter, to his sister Iginia, two years older than him, who had been living as an Augustinian nun for forty years by then in the Monasterio della Visitazione, close to Lucca. While searching for suitable material, Puccini also asked the playwright Valerio Soldani to send him his Margherita di Cortona again, a work the composer had rejected as an option years previously and that had similarities in its subject matter with Suor Angelica.

The opening scene shows why Puccini thought this opera would be a suitable solution to link the sombre Il tabarro and the virtuoso comic opera Gianni Schicchi: a carillon plays a melody of six notes that the strings and celesta turn into a motif played quietly that takes the audience straight to the convent cloisters. The entire first part clearly projects the ‘sentimental’ colour that Puccini had already had in mind years earlier and that he may have experienced in his personal visits to monasteries and nunneries. The scene, reminiscent of chamber music, focuses on the characters of the various nuns and reveals the nature of convent life through dialogues. The orchestral approach changes with the appearance of Zia Principessa, whose treatment by Puccini is both very skilful and threatening — a latent ominous march underlies the confrontation between her and the title character. The aunt’s admission that Angelica’s child has died is interspersed with the calm motif of three ascending triads. This is soon followed by one of Puccini’s most famous arias, ‘Senza mamma’.

The opera’s mystical finale, with its grandiose orchestration featuring organ, brass and cymbals that rhythmically echo the refrains, is often given as the reason why Suor Angelica was the least popular of the three Trittico one-acters among the general public. The ‘musician of little things’, as Puccini once described himself, had strayed too far from his natural habitat with this subject matter and this musical treatment. Puccini himself made few changes to the work after its premiere. In 1921, he complained in a letter to Sybil Seligman about the publisher Ricordi consenting to a production of Il tabarro and Gianni Schicchi without Suor Angelica: “It truly saddens me to see the best of the three operas being rejected. In Vienna, it was the most effective of the three...”

Gianni Schicchi

Gianni Schicchi, the final work, soon became the most popular of the three Trittico one-acters and enjoyed a life of its own on the opera stage, much to the chagrin of the composer. More so than the other two works, Schicchi was performed alongside other one-acters. The Metropolitan Opera in New York, for instance, the venue for the triptych’s world premiere, was soon performing Schicchi together with Richard Strauss’ Salome. Even so, the ‘comic element’ was the hardest material for Puccini to find for his envisaged trilogy. The main source is Dante’s Commedia, specifically the thirtieth canto of his Inferno. Another important source for the opera is comments by an anonymous Florentine author of the fourteenth century that gives additional details on the Gianni Schicchi story.

Gianni Schicchi stays true to its origins in commedia dell’arte. Schicchi is the classic cunning and comic harlequin surrounded by a cast of similarly classic commedia characters, such as the amorosi Rinuccio and Lauretta, the vecchi Simone and Zita, plus a doctor and a notary. Musically, it is almost as if Giacomo Puccini had developed his own tailored form for his comic opera, so successful was he in composing an astonishingly amusing score.

Even the syncopated, wild ‘tumultuoso’ at the start seems irrepressible: when the solo violin seems to be calling for a moment of reflection with a ritardando, the flutes suddenly come in with a motif that is simply too exuberant to be played slowly. Only the snare drum manages to rein the orchestra in, but the funeral march it leads soon descends into a parody thanks to the rhythmic moaning of the family in a masterly rapid interchange of dialogue between the orchestra and the mourning relatives. This extremely demanding score, which constantly has the orchestra interacting with the scene and the characters, incorporates the solo numbers perfectly into the musical comedy. Lauretta's arioso ‘O mio babbino caro’ combines vocal gentleness with suicidal threats and challenges us to unearth the secret behind the desperation of Gianni Schicchi’s daughter with her pleas for “mercy” in A minor. ‘Addio Firenze’ is a masterpiece, sung mainly by Gianni Schicchi. The sentimental melody accompanied by cellos and emphasised by muted trumpets sounds like an ode to Schicchi’s birthplace, oscillating between melancholy and kitsch, but even if you were not paying attention during the short exposition, you cannot fail to hear of cherished Florence being waved goodbye “with this stump”. The song aims to remind the relatives of their complicity, which could lead them to losing a hand and being banished if the treachery were to be discovered. Indeed, the melody is intoned repeatedly as a kind of parodic leitmotif, and it is deployed particularly skilfully in grotesque fragmentation in the Will scene. This and the many other astoundingly comical musical ideas make Gianni Schicchi an exceptional work, and not just in the context of Puccini’s oeuvre.

By deciding to end his trilogy with a comic work, Puccini seems to be inventively mirroring the origins of European theatre: after all, it was customary during the great Dionysia festivals of Athens around 500 BCE to end the tragedy days with a light-hearted satirical work. 

Puccini’s concept of the one-acter is undeniably an explicitly modern theatrical experiment. In his Puccini biography, Dieter Schickling notes that the composer’s constant preference for an episodic dramatic treatment reached its high point with Il trittico. In that sense, the work is closer to Alban Berg’s Wozzeck than to one-acters like Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana or Richard Strauss’ Salome and Elektra. Of course, it is not sacrilege to combine Il tabarro, Suor Angelica or Gianni Schicchi with works by other composers if that is based on an inspired judgement; this has been done many times before and continues to be done. However, Puccini’s exceptional episodic mood drama deserves constant reassessment and now, over a hundred years after its world premiere, it has more than earned a permanent place in the opera repertoire.

Text: Nikolaus Stenitzer