Agony and ecstasy | 28 March 2013

For its penultimate HD cinema relay this season the New York Met enterprisingly put on a revival of its production of Zandonai’s Francesca da Rimini, with enormous solid sets necessitating three intermissions, and clothes that are a cunning blend of 13th century and art nouveau, and quite ravishing.  The audience applauded the Act I set; it is that kind of show. The text is by D’Annunzio, the arch-decadent poet and warrior, and airs some of his gamey obsessions, doomed love and physical grotesqueness among them.  Zandonai’s idiom is perfectly suited to this medieval farrago, and if only he could have thought of a memorable melody, a single one, Francesca would have less of a fringe place in the repertoire than it does.

Zandonai, writing in the early years of the 20th century, at the height of international Wagnerism, with Richard Strauss as the towering German presence, and Mascagni and Puccini the chief Italian influences, produces lush harmonic textures and sumptuous orchestration, though he is also capable, in some of the opera’s more striking passages, of great delicacy, where he is at his most individual. In the opening scene, and at the start of Act III, the music for Francesca’s friends is exquisite, all the more so for the Christmas-pudding richness of all the rest.

The opera contains one of the most peculiar, and effective, love duets in the whole genre: when Francesca and Paolo meet — she is tricked into thinking Paolo is his brother Gianciotto, whom it is arranged that she marry — they are speechless, and there is a long orchestral passage that depicts the growth of their instant passion in a most touching way, until the curtain comes down on Act I. That is far more effective than their vocal effusions, though they, too, contain lovely things; but after Act I, Francesca does tend to overheat and to stay that way, so that by the time we reach the cataclysmic Act IV the idiom of ecstasy, frustration and fury has become merely exhausting.