Edgar (review)

Giacomo Puccini's initial stage work, the leggenda dramatica entitled Le villi (1884), was followed five years later by Edgar, a dramma lirico based on the play of Alfred de Musset, La coupe et les lèvres. Puccini chose the same collaborator, Ferdinando Fontana, who had been responsible for the Villi text. The commission came about through the enthusiasm of publisher Giulio Ricordi, who had become the young composer's greatest champion after hearing Le villi. On 21 April 1889 Edgar received its premiere at La Scala to a less than triumphant reception, despite the illustrious Franco Faccio on the podium and the presence in the cast of a celebrated prima donna, Romilda Pantaleoni. The composer revised Edgar, originally in four acts, into three for a Ferrara performance in 1892. Today the work is seldom encountered onstage, nor does it really deserve to be produced with particular frequency. Nevertheless, hearing it on disc considerably enhances one's frame of reference while increasing one's awe for the immense strides Puccini made between this work and his next opera, Manon Lescaut.

The tale is as follows: In a fourteenth-century Flemish village, Fidelia and Frank, brother and sister, have been raised together with an abandoned gypsy child, Tigrana. Now that they're grown up, Frank loves Tigrana, she loves Edgar, and he loves Fidelia. When the outcast Tigrana is menaced by the villagers, Edgar comes to her rescue, to Frank's fury. Tigrana leaves the village with Edgar to pursue a hedonistic existence. Edgar, however, begins to miss virtuous Fidelia. He leaves Tigrana for life as a soldier, encountering Frank once again (the two reconcile their differences). Presumed dead in battle, Edgar returns to his village disguised as a monk and observes his own funeral. The "monk" reveals to the villagers that Edgar was disreputable and a murderer, but he is defended by Fidelia. In exchange for an offer of jewels from Frank and the "monk," Tigrana informs the villagers that Edgar was a traitor to Flanders. When soldiers (eager to feed Edgar's body to the crows) open his coffin, they see that it is empty. Edgar reveals his identity and is reunited with faithful Fidelia, but she is stabbed by Tigrana.

End of story.

Puccini was at an enormous disadvantage: never again would he set a more purple text than this one, which surely no composer could have made convincing. (Edgar sings in act 2, "Orgy, you empty-eyed chimera, with a fiery breath that sets the senses on fire.") Not unexpectedly, given this particular libretto, he could not always create genuinely purposeful, dramatically apposite vocalism—he was still feeling his way and had yet to become a good editor of his own work. Every character seems awkwardly drawn; listen to the hero's lengthy, meandering monologue in act 2 (what progress the composer made between this aria and "Che gelida manina"!). That act's central episode—the confrontation between Edgar and Tigrana—lacks the forward motion and the clear dramatic intent Puccini would soon be able to give the magnificent second-act duet of Manon and Des Grieux.

On the plus side, the young Puccini already has a grasp of conversational dialogue that would prove one of his most essential assets. Often, if not invariably, he moves from conversation into arioso and back again with reasonably smooth transitions. Having said that, much of the text inspires an emotional overdrive in the score that can wear on the listener. Puccini is at his best by far in Frank's restrained but soulful "Questo amor" (one of the few excerptable baritone arias Puccini ever wrote, currently quite popular in auditions), and in the music for Fidelia, especially her two third-act arias. The first, "Addio, mio dolce amor," her soaring lament for the supposedly dead Edgar, is rather shamelessly exploited by the composer—we hear its main theme at least three times too often—but here is the true Puccinian fervor that will emerge in most of the heroines of his later operas. Just as effective is "D'ogni dolor," her declaration that she will...