Even the veriest opera expert — the adenoidal know-all who cohosts Live from the Met with Margaret Juntwait, for instance — might be hard pushed to say a great deal about Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s I gioielli della Madonna (The Jewels of the Madonna). And yet, according to the Guardian’s music critic Tim Ashley, in a programme note to the hugely entertaining revival by Opera Holland Park, this was the composer’s “most widely performed opera in northern Europe and the United States”.
It was especially popular in Chicago — I learn from Wikipedia, whose word I have rarely had cause to doubt — where the great Polish soprano Rosa Raisa made it a celebrated vehicle. Maria Jeritza (and, later, Florence Easton) triumphed in it at the Met, in a spectacular production in 1926.
The impact of this can probably be assessed in what is paraded before us in Holland Park. Building towards the climax in Act I (in an aural feast to rival what is achieved by Giacomo Puccini at the same point in Tosca), there is the tolling of bells, discharge of mortars, an onstage brass band and a swelling chorus of some 70 voices, plus children, as the jewel-bedecked statue of Mary is carried through Naples on the feast day of the Madonna del Carmine. Calm though he looked it its execution, conductor Peter Robinson — once Organ Scholar at St John’s College, Oxford — worked brilliantly as he kept these vast forces in order. Behind me, as we filed towards a much-needed interval glass of something cold and fizzy, a wag was heard to observe: “Wonderful stuff! And you have to admire its subtlety.”
It is all very . . . well, Italian (though Wolf-Ferrari was in fact half-German, with an artist father August Wolf who had met and married Italian orphan Emilia Ferrari in that European melting pot of Venice). I gioielli della Madonna was his one successful stab at verismo, most of his other works being pastiches in 18th- century style, many based on the works of Carlo Goldoni (the writer Richard Bean and actor James Corden, with their One Man, Two Govnors, aren’t the only ones to capitalise on the works of this Venetian master of comedy).
That it is a hugely melodic opera is likely to be assumed, correctly, by anyone familiar with the beautiful Act III intermezzo, still sometimes performed on the concert platform.
The opera was never popular in Italy, indeed was not actually staged there until 1953. This owed everything to content that was hardly likely to endear the work to the Vatican — blasphemy, the celebration (or at any rate uncritical depiction) of organised crime and its louche practitioners, and a sex scene of a graphicness unprecedented in a work of its day (1911).
This occurs when fun-seeking heroine Maliella (superbly sung for OHP by Natalya Romaniw) finally submits to the eager demands of her blacksmith ‘brother’ Gennaro (tenor Joel Montero). Brother he is not, in fact, she having been adopted for reasons we learn of during a glorious Act I duet between Gennaro and his mother Carmela (Diana Montague). Nevertheless, a taint of incest hangs over their coupling; as, indeed, does the intoxicating odour of incense — this being given off from the stash of jewellery Gennaro has stolen from the Madonna in order to prove his love for the girl.
How so? Well, Maliella was secretly rather thrilled by the daring promise of this blasphemous larceny which was made, with no intention of its fulfilment, by her vicious gangster admirer Rafaele (Olafur Sigurdarson) as the Virgin’s statue passed in the festival parade. But it fell to Gennaro, driven insane with love, actually to carry out the theft.
He gains his reward as Maliella swoons into a heavy ecstacy and permits the sexual intimacy he had devoutly (hardly le mot just) hoped for, “seeing in Genarro the image of the man who promised her the jewels”, as Gustav Kobbé put it in The Complete Opera Book (did someone mention verismo?).
The groping we are shown on the Holland Park stage (director Martin Lloyd-Evans) is eye-opening in its frankness, even today. Is it justified textually? Here is the slightly shocked, one suspects, Mr Kobbé (b. 1857) again: “The scene is described in the libretto with a realism that leaves no doubt as to its meaning.” My 1955 edition of The Complete Opera Book goes on to consider the work of such other 20th-century Italian composers as Italo Montemezzi, Ferruccio Busoni, Riccardo Zandonai and Ildebrando Pizetti, some of whose works have previously been aired by OHP. Next year the company is giving as ‘rarity of the season’ Francisco Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur, concerning a celebrated actress’s death by poisoned violets, which is widely considered to possess one of the most hard-to-follow plots in all opera, despite much revision.
These welcome revivals constitute a valuable enterprise, under the auspices of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chealsea, for which one should applaud the company and its generous donors (including the principal sponsor Investec Wealth & Investment).
The 2013 season ends with performances of Gaetano Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore tonight and Saturday and a last performance of I gioielli della Madonna tomorrow. Box office: 0300 999 1000.
Excellent road and rail links make Holland Park almost a suburb of Oxford. Don’t for goodness’ sake say this to its residents, though; they like to consider us the provincials!
