1/ Just re-upped my thread from when this was last shown. Not a lot to add. When ppl ask me "What's your favorite opera," this is my answer, bc, a., ppl with so little understanding of opera-fandom deserve to be stuck with an answer they almost certainly don't recognize, but b.
https://twitter.com/MetOpera/status/1339707457740783616
2/ bc it wd certainly make my top-ten list (and that's what opera fans do: "desert island" lists). I wish I understood how FRANCESCA happened: I guess, the right conjunction of composer, librettist (D'Annunzio!), period (medieval setting, composed in florescence of late
3/ romanticism), and nation (both native and expatriate literature in Italy were experiencing troubadour-fever in 1st 2 decades of 20thc). There are other Zandonai works, and collaborations by D'Annunzio w other composers, that deserve revival; but somehow their combination
4/ was magical. Yes, I am giving more credit to D'Annunzio than to Dante here: Dante preserved the outline of the story, and its irl moral significance. D'Annunzio, as was his wont, saw the potential for a narrative of longing and violence. As a play, D'Annunzio's "Francesca" was
5/ successful as long as his lover Eleonora Duse starred in it; in a phenomenon B'way producers will recognize, its box office faded when she left. So D'Annunzio was probably elated when music publisher Ricordi brought him together with a hot young composer.
6/ I'm not sure how I first got hold of a copy of the videocassette in the '80s, but that's how I first saw it. What haunted my after the first hearing/viewing was the sound of Francesca's gaggle of courtly-love-crazed attendants, assembling in the courtyard in Act I at the
7/ approach of Francesca's suitor (as they take him to be). On second hearing/viewing, I rediscovered this and many more gems, and eventually I found in it a box of delights and terrors that never grows old. Decadent? Yes, of course it is. And I hope you discover that box of
8/ delights and terrors too. (Actually that last sentence cd be said of all of opera - not every opera, but the genre - so is Zandonai's FRANCESCA in some sense the concentrated essence of all opera? Or of the best of it? I'll have to think about that.)
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