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by Ruggiero Leoncavallo, directed by Marie Lambert

Opera Holland Park, Holland Park, London, GBR

July 18, 20, 22, 27 & 29, 2017

Zazà: “Noi siam le maledette!! il nostro cuore

alla speranza invano si aprirà” (Zazà, Act 3)

Today Ruggiero Leoncavallo (1857-1919) is known only for his one-act opera I Pagliacci (1892), perpetually paired as a double-bill with Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana (1890).  Yet, Leoncavallo wrote ten operas and up through the 1920s his full-length opera Zazà (1900) vied in popularity with Pagliacci.  Holland Park Opera’s insightful production featuring a stunning performance in the title role shows us why it was so popular and makes us wonder how such a beautifully scored work, filled with far more complex emotions that Pagliacci, could ever have fallen out of the repertory.

Leoncavallo himself wrote the libretto based on a play by Pierre Berton and Charles Simon.  Like Pagliacci, Zazà deals with the tragedy of a performer caught in a love triangle.  The central tragic figure is male in Pagliacci and female in Zazà but the more fundamental difference is that  Zazà is about that character not taking revenge.  In this way it presents a view of life that is less clichéd and more realistic.  Zazà’s motives for not taking revenge have nothing to do with the heat of the moment and everything to do with reflection on her own life and the lives of others. 

Zazà is the star of a variety show at the seedy Alcazar de St. Etienne (the kind of music hall where Leoncavallo himself first found work).  Much of the fun for the first two acts is Leoncavallo’s recreation of theatre life onstage and backstage during performances.  He cleverly has the music for acts onstage counterpoint the music for dialogue at the theatre’s café and in Zazà’s dressing room.  It’s really a tour de force representation of simultaneous actions and a mélange of several musical styles both high and low that never loses its focus on the the most important of the many ongoing activities.

We learn that Zazà and her mother were abandoned by her father for another woman.  Zazà was discovered by the older actor/singer Cascart and became his lover while her mother Anaïde has benefitted financially from the arrangement that has helped feed her alcoholism.  Zazà has an admirer in the businessman Milio, whom she successfully seduces.  But Zazà is not quite in control of her emotions as much as she thinks and falls in love with him.  When Milio tells her that he must leave for business in Paris, Zazà becomes distraught.  When Cascart tells her to forget Milio because he is married, she refuses to believe him until she finds out the truth for herself.

At Milio’s Paris address she finds that Milio is about to move away.  There she meets Milio’s daughter Totò and later Milio’s wife.  The meeting with Totò, a speaking part, is the most fascinating.  It is here that Zazà realizes that by pursuing Milio she would be placing the innocent Totò in the same situation that formed the basis of the unhappiness in her own life.  The opera ends with a great, true-to-life scene of recriminations, regrets and threats between Milio and Zazà that leaves the latter in an emotional collapse.  There is no death, no revenge – just a very human drama of love, self-deception and grief.

Director Marie Lambert has beautifully staged the work using the full width of the very wide Holland Park stage to represent the various simultaneous locations needed for the first two acts.  Stage right designer Alyson Cummins gives us a view from the wings of the small Alcazar stage with a glimpse of the first row of the audience.  She allows us to see a man on a bicycle who pedals to change the scenery that is on two giant vertical rollers.  Behind the stage-on-the-stage is a café for the artists, then two walls of Zazà’s dressing room with an exposed wooden staircase stage left that represents the back entrance of the theatre.  Lambert ingeniously manages to stage action in all four of these locations simultaneously while still keeping the focus on the main thread of the narrative. 

In contrast to the first two acts, the second two acts take place on a stage empty except for a front view of the scenery on rollers – for Act 3 depicting a rainy day in Paris, for Act 4 a complete blank.  Although an opera beginning with a stage-on-the-stage as described in Leoncavallo’s own stage directions might seem enough to bring out the inherent metaphor of life as theatre, Lambert goes a step further to blur the dividing line between reality and illusion.  In Acts 1 and 2, the two wall of Zazà’s dressing room are designed as two walls of a set with unpainted  plywood backs.  Lamber has characters enter sometime through the dressing room’s one door, but she also has them enter through Zazà’s closet and through what should be the corner walls of the room, thus undercutting its nature as a real room. 

In a final move that some may find a step too far, in the very last moments of the opera Lambert has stage hands peel off the 1920s costume that Zazà has been wearing to reveal her in a white kimono as Madama Butterfly underneath – i.e. another victim of a duplicitous lover. 

One justification for this is that the soprano Rosina Storchio, who created the role of Zazà would later create Puccini’s famous role four years later, the implication being that Zazà will transcend the desolation that engulfs her now to use it later to deepen her art.  The negative side of this addition is that in seeing a rarity like Zazà, why should we be reminded at all of a work that is standard repertory.  It seems to diminish Leoncavallo’s achievement.  The marvel of Leoncavallo’s opera is that Zazà is actually a more complex character that the ever-faithful Cio-Cio San.  Zazà seduced her unwilling male lover, not the other way around.  The discovery that he is married and has a child causes Zazà not to react with a sense of honour grown from tradition, but from a knowledge of her own past.

Zazà is filled with such strong arias for Zazà, Milio and Cascart that one wonders why they are not more often presented in recital.  The prime difficulty in staging the opera is finding a soprano who is both an accomplished actor and singer.  In Anne Sophie Duprels Opera Holland Park has found an ideal title character.  Though it took a while for her voice to warm up enough to travel clearly over Leoncavallo’s large orchestra, Duprels engages us from the very first with her humour, her dramatics and with her dangerous seduction of Milio – a seduction more dangerous for her than for him.  Her long scene in Act 3 with Totò where she effectively renounces her claim on Milio is beautifully played with Duprels revealing the pain for her self in the present of giving up Milio and how it is tied to her pain in the past of growing up without a father.  This pent-up emotion leads to the exceptionally realistic final act where futile recrimination fly as Zazà acknowledges her defeat.  Duprels gives a magnificent performance and one can only hope that other companies will mount Zazà for her in future.

Joel Montero wields an heroic Italianate voice as Milio.  Initially, he does not sing with much nuance, but by Act 4, he is fully engaged with his character and shows that he can communicate a wide range of emotions.  Richard Burkhard is consistently excellent as Cascart.  He gives us a man still in love with Zazà but who recognizes the unsuitability of their continuing the affair that brought them together.  Now Cascart shows his love for Zazà by his care for her in all other ways, especially in warning her not to get involved with Milio.  Leoncavallo has written him two sensitive, reflective arias that Burkhard sings in his deep, refined baritone.

Secondary characters include Zazà’s mother Anaïde, which allows Louise Winter both to sing well and to display her gift for comedy.  Winter’s Anaïde always wears an expression of slight inebriation, even as she tries to be morally authoritative and searches the room for undrunk glasses of spirits or open bottles to drain.  Ellie Edmonds is a bright-voiced Natalia, Zazà’s dresser, an image of happiness and normality.  Lambert adds the details of making Natalia visibly pregnant which helps to reinforce the theme of mothers and children by carrying it into a generation as yet unborn.  Joanna Marie Skillett is suitably cold as Milio’s wife who finds a strange woman in her apartment conversing with her daughter.  Through her acting Skillet suggests that she knows exactly who Zazà is and that this is not the first time her husband has strayed. 

Conductor Peter Robinson leads the London Sinfonietta in a rousing account of the score that brings out the wide palette of colour Leoncavallo uses in this work.  He expertly shifts modes when the composer incorporates other styles of music within his own.  When Milio loosens the cords of Zazà’s bodice, the slide downwards on the main violin brought a laugh of recognition of Leoncavallo’s cleverness.  When Zazà exits to the stage-upon-the-stage to parody a Wagnerian valkyrie, Robinson plays up Leoncavallo’s respectful imitation of the Wagnerian idiom.

Given how musically and dramatically rich the work is and how enthusiastically it was received, one left Holland Park completely dumbfounded that such a work as this with such a showpiece role for a soprano in the title role could ever have fallen into neglect.  One can only hope that the success of the Holland Park Opera performances will encourage other opera companies to follow and to enrich their programming.  The evening proved beyond doubt that there is much more variety to verismo opera in general and to Leoncavallo in particular than even regular opera-goers commonly acknowledge.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Anne Sophie Duprels as Zazà and Joel Montero as Milio; Anne Sophie Duprels as Zazà (in pink); Aida Ippoloito as Totò, Anne Sophie Duprels as Zazà and Ellie Edmonds as Natalia. ©2017 Robert Workman.   

For tickets, visit www.operahollandpark.com.