Why pull a rarely performed work like Giordano’s Fedora out of the back of the operatic wardrobe?
Well, first, quite simply because it’s a cracker of an opera, rich in lush melody and full of dramatic intrigue.
It’s based on a play by the French dramatist Victorien Sardou, who also wrote La Tosca, the literary source for Puccini’s famous opera. Sardou was renowned as an exponent of the so-called ‘well-made play’, a genre characterised by taut, compelling narratives. Fedora’s world is one of high drama, with its themes of adultery, revenge, assassination and suicide – the classic stuff of opera.
But it also contains some strikingly modern aspects: the sort of plot you might read in a tabloid newspaper story or detective novel, and characters who are clearly lovers in the physical as well as the sentimental sense. The play was written as a vehicle for the celebrated actress Sarah Bernhardt and the opera featured the star singers of the day, Gemma Bellincioni – the first Santuzza in Cavalleria rusticana – and the peerless Enrico Caruso. Fedora’s music has all the lyricism and no-holds-barred passion that are characteristic of turn-of-the-century Italian opera, which would go on to be such a strong influence on Hollywood film music. Recordings of the complete opera have featured Renata Tebaldi, Mirella Freni, José Carreras, Plácido Domingo and others, and just about every tenor you could mention has performed or recorded the short but gorgeous aria ‘Amor ti vieta’.
The second reason for reviving rarities like Fedora is that they were extremely popular in their day. This is opera for the masses, written for a wide, socially diverse audience. The so-called giovane scuola (young school) of composers who came to prominence in 1890s Italy – Giordano, Mascagni, Leoncavallo, Cilea and most famously Puccini – were no longer writing for the aristocracy. Many of their operas depicted the lives of the most deprived and disaffected in society, including Giordano’s own Mala vita (Wretched Life), a notorious work set in the slums of Naples, whose themes include prostitution and alcoholism. Fedora is set in far swankier environments – a Russian palace, a fashionable Parisian salon, and a villa in the Swiss Alps – but it treats its subject with self-conscious popular appeal. And its references to Alpine hiking and bicycling were designed to appeal to the Italian middle classes, newly affluent in the 1890s with plenty of disposable income and leisure time.
These operas were also wildly popular beyond Italy. The Germans were big fans of verismo. Here in the UK, too, audiences found these works refreshing and new. In 1922, Fedora was put on at Covent Garden with the celebrated Czech soprano Maria Jeritza. This brought out the worst snobbish impulses in critics, who dismissed it as a star vehicle for a diva. Some writers attacked the works of the giovane scuola as middlebrow, verging on lowbrow. Others expressed squeamishness at a repertory whose strong passions they declared alien to the national character. Were audiences put off by operas that were close to the world of popular culture and contained a frisson of decidedly un-English passion? You bet they weren’t.
The third reason for reviving works such as Fedora is because it’s arguably time for something new. The global operatic repertoire has shrunk drastically in recent years. The Danish opera director Kasper Holten estimated in 2020 that the number of ‘really safe titles’ an opera house could depend upon selling had, over the last decade, fallen from around thirty to just six, and half of those (the predictable La bohème, Tosca and Butterfly) were by Puccini. Since the pandemic the trend has accelerated as opera managers scramble to recoup lockdown losses by staging tried-and-tested hits.
But it isn’t healthy for the opera industry as a whole for the repertoire to be becoming so narrow – and I write that as a Puccini devotee. Things were not always like this. During the 1920s and 1930s, touring opera companies whose visit to a provincial British town or city was a highlight of the year put on a varied range of works. Audiences drawn from across the class spectrum lapped up whatever they were given, including the works of what one contemporary critic called ‘the “blood-and-thunder” Italian school’.
Later on, in the 1970s, ENO put on an array of obscurities by composers including Henze, Smetana and Ginastera, while Massenet’s Werther, Weber’s Euryanthe and Janáček’s From the House of the Dead – rarities today – were staple fare. At that time ENO had a loyal audience with adventurous tastes, which trusted the regular repertory company to surprise it with works that were unfamiliar but interesting. This is a model of opera we could do to revive in this country today. Italian repertory has always been seen as an obvious operatic ‘entry point’ for audiences. But there is no reason why someone new to opera should be any more attracted by a ‘classic’ than by an exciting, tuneful work that is equally unfamiliar to everybody in the audience.
There is such a thing as Bohème or Butterfly fatigue, and maybe the tide is starting to turn. Fedora, specifically, seems to be having a moment in the sun, being scheduled at both La Scala, Milan and the Metropolitan Opera in New York during their 2022-23 seasons, in the latter case returning to the opera house for the first time in a quarter of a century. If Opera is in good company in reviving this attractive operatic winner.
Find out more about our 2023 production of Fedora.
Alexandra Wilson is Professor of Music and Cultural History at Oxford Brookes University. Her books include: The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism, and Modernity; Opera in the Jazz Age: Cultural Politics in 1920s Britain; and Puccini’s La bohème.