Double Triumph for Long Beach Opera

The Long Beach Opera, for its annual June season on the Cal State campus, has chosen a double bill of short operas--one relatively well-known, the other more obscure. Both are Italian and represent the 20th century. “The Cloak” (Il Tabarro), written at the end of the First World War, is the first part of Puccini’s trio of unrelated one-act operas, “Il Trittico.” “Night Flight” (Volo di Notte), written at the beginning of World War II, is the first stage work by Luigi Dallapiccola and is based upon Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s famous novel.

Combining these works is a shock. “The Cloak” is conventionally viewed as the last and perhaps greatest example of the Italian verismo or realistic tradition of melodramatic opera. It revolves around a jealous husband, the captain of the barge banked on the Seine in Paris, who strangles his wife’s lover, one of his crew. With Puccini’s most carefully crafted score, it is as fitting a valedictory to Romantic Italian opera as any.

“Night Flight” might be considered the birth of modern Italian music and opera. Its 35-year-old composer had taught himself Schoenberg’s 12-tone method, which was not approved of by the Fascist-controlled musical institutions of the ‘30s, and applied it for the first time in “Night Flight.” Although it is a realistic drama about the mail run in South America during the early years of flight, it has ominous underlying political implications.

The double bill, directed by Julian Webber and designed by Dick Bird, is brilliant, among the finest productions this always venturesome (and sometimes wacky) company has mounted in its 21 years. They connect the two works in such a way that we understand, in Puccini, a sensitivity to his time disguised in convention, and, in Dallapiccola, the building of a new music out of recognizable Italian opera tradition (including Puccini).

Both operas revolve around a protagonist whose tragic flaw is seeing the world too simply. What has changed in the 22 years that separate these two works is the context. For Puccini, a murder is still only a murder, a singular, sensational event. For Dallapiccola, in 1940 Italy, the sending of a pilot to his death in bad weather symbolizes something larger, more frightening.

Webber stages “The Cloak” on an elevated strip of the large Carpenter Center stage, creating a claustrophobic letterbox effect. The barge is a complex of tubular scaffolding. It is striking to look at yet also has a way of disappearing (outstanding lighting by Adam Silverman helps) and focuses our attention directly on the characters and their raw emotions. There can be an underlying softness to traditional stagings of “The Cloak”--a twilit Parisian scene, and in the background the song of young lovers walking on the quay. Webber’s approach is stark, violent and brutal.

For “Night Flight,” the whole stage is used. The scaffolding now holds up the flight center as a strip at the top of the stage. Below is the dark, mysterious airfield. This time the set is soft and beautiful to look at, but it also projects an inexplicably ominous, Kafkaesque, mood.

In his 1931 novel, Saint-Exupery, a pilot (who also wrote “The Little Prince”), offered a nocturnal meditation on the mysterious sensations of flight and on the profound nature of duty. But by 1939, when Dallapiccola wrote his opera, “Night Flight” had become controversial. Riviere, the Buenos Aires airfield director, no longer seemed the hero he was for early readers, but rather a tyrant who treated each successful mail run as a personal victory, and needlessly endangered his pilots in his own need to feel mighty. Mussolini was a fan of the novel.

Dallapiccola, as a verismo composer might, and a political composer surely would, focuses on Riviere, not on flight. The flight director becomes a true Italian opera character, who disastrously sublimates his need for love with a devotion to service. Loveless and heroically dedicated, he steels himself against the emotional outbursts of Mrs. Fabien, the wife of a pilot Riviere sends out in a deadly storm. The pilot does not return. Riviere, his soul already shut down, insists that planes keep flying. But he is alone; the spirit of the fallen pilot has infected the airstrip. A powerful hymn ends Dallapiccola’s transcendent score, as the airfield staff now understands a higher calling.

Both operas are conducted with exceptional clarity and focus by Andreas Mitisek, who brings the works together by emphasizing the gripping sinew of Puccini’s score and the warmth and color of Dallapiccola’s. And by hearing two key singers appear in both operas, the stylistic differences between the operas are further lessened. The melodramatic intensity of “The Cloak” seems to naturally carry over into “Night Flight.”

The general style of singing is, well, emotional. Susan Bullock, as the barge owner’s wife (Giorgetta) and the pilot’s wife, employs her generous soprano to powerful effect when she sings full out, as she enjoys doing. Matthew Kirchner, her lover (Luigi) in “The Cloak” and the pilot Pellerin in “Night Flight,” has problems scaling down his large tenor, but he is a strong presence physically and vocally.

Brent Ellis made a blustery but believable Michele; Victor Ledbetter’s Riviere was carefully drawn, his official voice cool and unmodulated, his inner voice tremulous with insecurity, a complement to the passionate Michele. The operas are sung in English, yet the musical style makes many of the words hard to distinguish. In Ledbetter’s case, this proved a curious dramatic virtue; he was clear as a bell addressing others, but his monologues were unintelligible. Reliable young singers, with solid voice and a convincing sense of the stage, fill most of Long Beach Opera’s lesser roles; among them were Jon David Gruett, Michael Li-Paz, Cynthia Munzer, Javier Grajeda, Hyunjoo Lee and Scott Wyatt.

*

* “The Cloak” and “Night Flight” will be repeated Saturday, 2 p.m. Carpenter Center, 6200 Atherton St., Long Beach. $50-$90. (562) 439-2580.