Of the three one-act operas that make up Puccini’s Il Trittico, which premièred in 1918, Suor Angelica has always been the least popular and is usually dropped, leaving the audience with a double bill of melodrama, Il Tabarro and hilarious farce Gianni Schicchi.
Nuns are a popular genre in novels, films, plays musicals and operas and Suor Angelica, conducted by Ryusuke Numajiri and directed by Jun Aguni, is all the better for being separated from the other two.
The music is religious. The setting is a 17th century convent. The set is designed by Atsumi Yokota and the nuns themselves decorate the cloisters with their presence, their groupings making for a pretty picture.
Angelica (Chiara Isotton) was punished by her aristocratic family when she had an illegitimate child. The boy was taken from her and she was packed off to a convent. She has waited seven years for the family to visit her. Her aunt (Junko Saito), a ramrod, severe princess without sympathy, brings her news that her lover is marrying her younger sister and that her son is dead.
Devastated, Angelica poisons herself in order to be with the boy in heaven, only to realise she has committed a mortal sin, which will take her to Hell. She prays to the Virgin Mary: “Madonna, save me!”
A spiritual story of sin, repentance and penance is told with compassion and mercy. The major surprise is that there is no miracle in Aguni’s production, no celestial vision, no Virgin Mary and no child on stage. How very odd.
The high spot is Chiara Isotton singing Angelica’s beautiful and powerful aria, “Senza mama,” addressed to her dead son.
Jun Aguni’s productions of Puccini’s Suor Angelica and Maurice Ravel’s L’Enfant et les Sortilèges were performed as a double-bill by Tokyo’s New National Theatre and both operas can be watched together free on the OperaVision channel.