Il tabarro

Puccini’s bold idea for a triptych of one-act operas may have been born as early as 1900, inspired by the success of Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana. But it wasn’t until 1912 that the composer was able to start a project his publisher feared would be a box-office flop. The first opera in the Il Trittico sequence, Il tabarro (The Cloak), is the closest in spirit to Mascagni’s blood-soaked social realism. Michele and his wife, Giorgetta, have been driven apart by grief and silence over the loss of their child. But when Giorgetta begins an affair, it drives her husband to murderous revenge. Set in Paris, among the barge workers who live a precarious, itinerant life on the River Seine, this evocative opera churns and stirs with the uneasy rhythm of the water. Ships’ horns blurt through an orchestral texture that swells muddy with low woodwind, the surface of the water glinting and twinkling in harp and celesta. About Puccini's Il Trittico Premiered in New York in 1918, Puccini’s last completed opera (Turandot was left unfinished at his death in 1924) is also the composer’s most ambitious—and unusual. Il Trittico (The Triptych) is, in fact, three one-act operas: a sequence the composer designed to be performed in a single evening. A plan to base each opera on one of the books of Dante’s The Divine Comedy was soon abandoned; only the comedy Gianni Schicchi retains this link. The sharply bladed satire of this elegant ensemble farce is set against the lyrical tragedy of Suor Angelica and the gritty social realism of Il tabarro.