Agony and ecstasy | 28 March 2013

For its penultimate HD cinema relay this season the New York Met enterprisingly put on a revival of its production of Zandonai’s Francesca da Rimini, with enormous solid sets necessitating three intermissions, and clothes that are a cunning blend of 13th century and art nouveau, and quite ravishing.  The audience applauded the Act I set; it is that kind of show. The text is by D’Annunzio, the arch-decadent poet and warrior, and airs some of his gamey obsessions, doomed love and physical grotesqueness among them.  Zandonai’s idiom is perfectly suited to this medieval farrago, and if only he could have thought of a memorable melody, a single one, Francesca would have less of a fringe place in the repertoire than it does.

Zandonai, writing in the early years of the 20th century, at the height of international Wagnerism, with Richard Strauss as the towering German presence, and Mascagni and Puccini the chief Italian influences, produces lush harmonic textures and sumptuous orchestration, though he is also capable, in some of the opera’s more striking passages, of great delicacy, where he is at his most individual.