The Italians Have a Word for It

Melodrama or melodramma? The distance from the first opera 400 years ago to the mature expression of its grand passions, from 17th century founding father Jacopo Peri to 19th century star Giacomo Puccini, might be measured by that extra M. Long Beach Opera this season looks at the many manifestations of melodrama in any spelling.

“It was complicated this year, coming up with this,” says Michael Milenski, general director of the organization’s festival season, devoted to unusual opera unusually staged. “I was doing an end-of-the-millennium wrap-up and discovered that less than 25% of our work has been Italian.

“This was a glaring hole in our repertory, and so I wanted to focus on Italian work: melodramma as essentially the Italian word for opera, and melodrama as greatly exaggerated passions.”

The word combines the Greek words for song and drama and was the term of choice for the revolutionary new form of musical drama throughout the 17th century. By the 19th century, it was also applied to spoken plays and poetry recitations with background music, where it acquired its English connotations of extravagant emotion.

At Long Beach Opera, the step from plugging a repertory hole to high concept was not a short one. Neither Peri’s “Euridice,” generally considered the earliest surviving complete opera, nor Puccini’s sensational “Il Tabarro” (The Cloak) was the starting point for Milenski’s thinking, although those are the defining poles of the melodrama concept.

Rather, Milenski began with Luigi Dallapiccola’s early 20th century “Volo di Notte” (Night Flight). Long Beach Opera pairs “Night Flight” with “The Cloak” on a double bill today and Saturday, at the Carpenter Center for the Performing Arts. Then, on Oct. 6--exactly 400 years after its premiere at the Pitti Palace in Florence--the company will present “Euridice” at the J. Paul Getty Museum, with additional performances the next two days.

Not immediately humming something from “Night Flight”? Don’t feel too bad--the opera has been performed only twice before in the United States, in college and conservatory performances in the 1960s, and good luck finding a recording.

“The operas came first, then the concept,” Milenski says. “The Dallapiccola was the motivating opera, something I’ve always been interested in. The question was, ‘What do you put with it?’

“Dallapiccola in fact considered ‘Tabarro’ to be a perfectly formed opera, and he patterned ‘Volo di Notte’ on ‘Tabarro.’ Dallapiccola is moving into mid-century and takes a much more philosophic approach, but Puccini has those great melodramatic emotions. And ‘Euridice’ is melodramma in its purest form.”

“Night Flight” was a pivotal work for the much-esteemed Italian composer, who died in 1975. In it, Dallapiccola asserted a personal combination of 12-tone techniques with more tonal and other atonal styles, an approach that became highly influential in the 1950s and ‘60s on composers seeking relief from more regimented applications of 12-tone rules laid down by Arnold Schoenberg and his disciples.

The one-act “Night Flight”--based on a story by Antoine de Saint-Exupery describing the heroics of early mail aviators crossing the Andes--had its premiere in Florence in 1940, 18 days before Italy entered World War II. It reveals, Milenski believes, some of the innocence of Saint-Exupery’s famous “The Little Prince,” as well as a worship of power, whether of man or machine.

“The Cloak” is both melodrama and melodramma; it presents a doomed love triangle in heated verismo fashion. Composed as one panel of the contrasting psychological portraits in Puccini’s three-part “Il Trittico,” it had its premiere at the Met in 1918. The libretto for “The Cloak” was based on a popular French play.

While you might consider matching the lush hummability of Puccini with the intellectual severity of a 12-tone composer--even one as undogmatic as Dallapiccola--as an act of wishful abstraction rather than sound theatrical judgment, the Long Beach brain trust has confidence in the bill.

“ ‘The Cloak’ is as close as you come in Italian to modernist pieces such as ‘Wozzeck’ or ‘Duke Bluebeard’s Castle,’ ” Milenski says. Dallapiccola himself recalled watching Puccini go up to meet Schoenberg at an early performance of “Pierrot Lunaire”--Schoenberg’s Expressionist melodrama--while most of the audience laughed.

Milenski also points out the practical connections between the Dallapiccola and the Puccini.

“These two seem almost made to be paired,” he says. “The cast is almost a crossover, and they can be performed on the same set. ‘Il Tabarro’ takes place on a barge with the lights of Paris behind it; ‘Volo di Notte’ takes place in an Argentine airport with city lights behind it. Both take place at sunset going into evening, and atmosphere is more important than location.”

“I like the combination because it is unusual,” says Andreas Mitisek, conductor of the double bill. “That’s why I like to come here; there is always an interesting concept.”

Mitisek is a harpsichordist who first came to Long Beach in 1998 to lead Henry Purcell’s “The Indian Queen,” which Long Beach Opera dragged from the 17th century into the high-camp fin de siecle 20th. He also led the avowedly modernist Vienna Opera Theater for almost 10 years, and returned to Long Beach last season for highly regarded performances of Bartok’s “Bluebeard.”

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The casts are not quite the crossover they could have been. In “Night Flight,” bass-baritone Victor Ledbetter sings the heroic Signor Riviere, tenor Scott Wyatt is the voice of the doomed aviator Fabien, soprano Susan Bullock is his wife, and tenor Matthew Kirchner is the young pilot Pellerin. Bullock is again the wife Giorgetta in “The Cloak,” and Kirchner is her young lover, but the other corner of the triangle, barge captain Michele, is sung by baritone Brent Ellis.

Both operas of the double bill are staged by Julian Webber and designed by Dick Bird. Webber directed Janacek’s “From the House of the Dead” and Berg’s “Wozzeck” for Long Beach Opera in 1997 and 1998. Bird’s assignments have ranged from the experimental theater company Primitive Science in London to a “My Fair Lady” in Argentina.

“Opera is a young form in America, and the staging in general is concerned with just telling the story as is,” Mitisek says. “In Long Beach you always get a different view of things.”

In Long Beach you also get context. On this past Saturday, Milenski was slated to conduct panel discussions of the various meanings of the term “melodrama” and screened three Italian film melodramas.

“By the time the term gets into film, it is very much this idea of a single, strong passion,” he says. “It is usually focused on a woman, as in verismo opera, a woman whose passions take her into error.”

And in Long Beach you also get opera in English. Both “The Cloak” and “Night Flight” will be done in translations by Amanda Holden, one of the editors of the Penguin Opera Guide. She did the Puccini for a 1997 English National Opera production of “Il Trittico,” and turned to the Dallapiccola at Milenski’s request.

“You sit there and look at the audience and wonder how many of them speak Italian, or German, or Hungarian,” Milenski says. “Interesting things have come out of this idea of singing in English. Some of our people here couldn’t bear ‘Wozzeck’ in English because the words are so trivial, although the emotions are anything but. It forces you to come to grips with what the piece is really about.”

“Euridice” in October will be an exception to Milenski’s English-only rule. At the end of the 16th century, Italians were intensely interested in discovering new dramatic relations between words and music--or, they thought, rediscovering ancient Greek models. Hence the use of Greek to create the new form’s name. In the earliest versions, they assigned the prime value to the text, set in a single harmonically colored line, with rhythm following syllabic stresses.

“The word itself is the music,” Milenski says. “Because it is all recitative, it would have to be basically recomposed to do it in translation. That is one reason why it [will be done] at a museum. It is a museum piece, not an opera theater piece. You need to come with the realization that you are looking at history. Obviously, it is a difficult work for contemporary audiences.”

Milenski is reluctant to discuss details of that production yet, although he does say that soprano Ellen Hargis, an early-music star who has a new recording of songs by Peri, will be singing some of the roles. The production will be entrusted to a new team.

“The idea is that here was a piece that was a discovery, so discover it,” he says. “We will have a first-time director and a first-time designer discovering a whole new art form.”

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Long Beach Opera, “The Cloak” (Puccini) and “Night Flight” (Dallapiccola). Carpenter Center, 6200 Atherton St., Long Beach (562) 439-2580. Today, 4 p.m. and Saturday, 2 p.m. $50-$95.