Opera Review: In San Francisco, a world premiere examines a little-known World War II horror

Act I prayer scene
©Cory Weaver/San Francisco Opera

Who: San Francisco Opera
What: Two Women by Marco Tutino
Where: The War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco
When: through June 30, 2015

New operas can be a crapshoot, but San Francisco Opera has pretty much rolled up a winner with "Two Women" ("La Ciociara"), running through the end of June. Based on the 1958 novel "La Ciociara" by Alberto Moravia (and "informed by" Luca Rossi's screenplay for De Sica's famous 1960 film, "Two Women"), the libretto by Fabio Ceresa and composer Marco Tutino could use a bit of fine-tuning, but the lush neo-romantic score is filled with wonderful stuff.

"Two Women" is the story of Cesira, a strong-willed widow and Roman shopkeeper, and her daughter Rosetta and their attempt to flee the increasing violence of the campaign to liberate Italy. After her shop is nearly destroyed by Allied bombing, Cesira prevails upon Giovanni, her supplier of semi-legal goods, to take her and Rosetta to Cesira's birthplace in the mountainous Ciociaria region outside Rome. The thuggish Giovanni agrees, but extracts payment in the form of a sexual assault during the bombing.

Cesira, Rosetta, and Lt. Buckley
©Cory Weaver/San Francisco Opera

In the mountains, Cesira encounters and falls in love with Michele, a young pacifist, and together they save the life of John Buckley, a downed American pilot. The intervention eventually costs Michele his life, thanks to betrayal by Giovanni, who opportunistically swears loyalty to the Fascists.

Cesira and Rosetta hit rock bottom at the end of the second act when, seeking refuge in the bomb-damaged church in the village of Sant'Eufemia, they are raped by Moroccan troops fighting for the Allies under French command. The assault badly traumatizes Rosetta and nearly destroys her relationship with Cesira. In the end the two women reconcile and find strength in their love for each other, but it's a hard road for both.

The rape, it should be noted, is an event drawn from historical fact. The Moroccan Goumiers, colonial troops of the French Expeditionary Corps, were, in fact, given carte blanche to loot, pillage, and rape by French General Alfonse Juin as a "reward" for their fierce fighting against the Nazis. By one estimate, as many as 7,000 women were raped and as many as 800 family members killed by the Moroccans for attempting to defend the women.

Cesira, Rosetta, and Goumiers
©Cory Weaver/San Francisco Opera

This is pretty strong stuff—verismo on steroids—and Mr. Tutino gives it the widescreen treatment with an unabashedly romantic and very dramatically effective score. Mr. Tutino has gotten some criticism for writing in an overly conservative style, but as someone who has heard far too much music in which the notion of melody has been ruthlessly suppressed, I found it refreshing.

You can hear Puccini's musical fingerprints here, but even more prominent, to my ears, was the work of the great Italian cinema composers of the late 20th and early 21st century. Nino Rota comes immediately to mind, but so do Riz Ortolani (best known for his "Mondo Cane" score) and Ennio Morricone.

There is, in fact, a strongly cinematic cast to the entire production. Video projections by S. Katy Tucker (whose innovative work has been featured at several St. Louis Symphony concerts recently) are used to create virtual sets as well as special effects like the Allied bombing of Rome in Act I, while excerpts from World War II documentaries serve as a stark reminder of the cost of occupation. Extended video sequences, accompanied by long musical interludes, are used for some of the scene changes. Not surprisingly, director Francesca Zambello, whose sure hand keeps everything flowing smoothly, describes herself in her program note as a great fan of the "Golden Age of Italian Cinema."

Mark Delavan as Giovanni
©Cory Weaver/San Francisco Opera

The cast for this opera is a strong one all the way around. Soprano Anna Caterina Antonacci is a force of nature as the formidable Cesira—a vocal powerhouse and deeply committed actress. As Rosetta, soprano Sarah Shafer radiates vulnerability and backs it up with a wonderfully expressive voice.

Baritone Mark Delavan has the unenviable task of giving life to the appalling Giovanni, a character that is part Iago, part Scarpia, and all sociopath. Giovanni is, according to Mr. Tutino, intended to be the personification of what he sees as the real villain of the piece: the institution of war. Playing a symbol is not the easiest of tasks, but Mr. Delavan manages to suggest that there may actually a human being in there somewhere, repellent as he may be. And his voice is impressive, with great low notes.

Tenor Dimitri Pittas's Michele is appealing and sympathetic, while tenor Joel Sorenson and mezzo Buffy Baggott provide some rare comic relief as the spineless lawyer Sciortino, who helps betray Michele to the Nazis, and his clueless mother Maria, who doesn't understand why her dinner guests keep disappearing. Other performers of note include baritone Edward Nelson as Lt. Buckley, baritone Christian Van Horn as an oily Nazi officer, and singer-songwriter Pasquale Esposito as a local lad who entertains the village during its liberation party with the popular Italian song "La strada nel bosco" ("The Path in the Wood")—bits of which are threaded throughout the opera's score.

Cesira and Allied soldiers
©Cory Weaver/San Francisco Opera

San Francisco Opera music director Nicola Luisotti conducts the seventy-piece orchestra with great authority and an obvious love for the music, and the musicians play exquisitely.

"Two Women" is certainly not without its issues. The misfortunes heaped upon Cesira and Rosetta feel, at times, so overwhelming that numbness begins to set it. And the character of Giovanni is almost devoid of any real psychology—the hazard, I suppose, of being more symbol than human. Still, it's one of the more potent and theatrically satisfying new operas I have seen lately, and the San Francisco Opera is to be commended for producing it.

"Two Women" has two more performances on Sunday and Tuesday, June 28 and 30, at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco. It was interesting to see it immediately after Berlioz's "Les Troyens" which, even in SFO's somewhat anti-war staging, still tends to treat war as a mostly heroic undertaking. "Two Women" is a reminder of just how little heroism there can actually be in armed conflict.

We'll always have Paris

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Who: The St. Louis Symphony conducted by Steven Jarvi
What: Casablanca
When: February 15 and 16, 2014
Where: Powell Symphony Hall

[Want to find out more about the music of "Casablanca"?  Check out my preview article!]

As often as I've seen the 1942 film "Casablanca," it wasn't until I heard Max Steiner's score performed live with the movie this past Saturday that I fully appreciated how important the music is in establishing the mood of key scenes and in advancing the story.

Everybody knows "As Time Goes By," of course.  Originally written by Herman Hupfeld for a 1931 Broadway show "Everybody's Welcome," the song is used in the film in various transformations to represent the ultimately impossible romance between Humphrey Bogart's embittered Rick and Ingrid Bergman's idealistic Ilsa.  Major, minor, fully realized or broken and fragmented, it haunts all their scenes and mirrors their thoughts.  It was always there in the background when I'd seen the film before, of course, but hearing it performed live made its importance that much clearer.

The same is true of the effective ways Steiner uses the Nazi anthem "Deutschland Über Alles" and the French national anthem "La Marseillaise" to symbolize the battle between the forces of fascism and the values fascists in general and Nazis in particular hated: liberté, egalité, fraternité.  The Nazi anthem, in one form or another, inevitably accompanies scenes in which the fascist threat is either on screen in the persona of the smirking Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt) or lurking as a presence in the plot.  "La Marseillaise" wins in the end, of course, as Rich and Louis (Claude Rains) stride off into the fog to carry on the fight.

And, of course, "La Marseillaise" figures prominently in one of the most famous scenes in the film.  A group of Nazi officers in Rick's Café have commandeered the piano and are giving voice to an aggressive version of the 1840s song "Die Wacht Am Rhein" ("Watch on the Rhine").  Sensing the rising anger in the room, Viktor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) signals the band to strike up "La Marseillaise" and the Nazis soon find themselves drowned out and silenced.  It's a powerful scene in its own right, but when backed up by the power of a live orchestra, it's simply overwhelming.

Many other moments in "Casablanca" take on added resonance when the music is heard this clearly.  American popular music figures prominently in all the scenes in Rick's Café Américain and Patrick Russ's ingenious live performing version of the score often has the live orchestra acting as a kind of back-up ensemble for the on-screen band, giving the music just a bit of extra punch.  I was particularly taken with the way the orchestra joined the "call and response" bits during M.K. Jerome and Jack Scholl's "Knock on Wood"—great fun.

Conducting for a live showing of a movie is, as I have noted before, a fairly specialized skill. It’s probably not part of the basic training of most classically educated conductors.  Nevertheless St. Louis Symphony Resident Conductor Steven Jarvi, aided by podium-mounted screens, did an excellent job and the musicians sounded as fine as always.  The expanded percussion battery—including multiple xylophones and marimbas along with piano and celesta—was kept especially busy.

If I have a criticism, it's that the balance between the voice tracks on the film and the live orchestra was rarely ideal, and important bits of dialog often got lost.  This seems to be a chronic problem with film events at Powell, either because of issues with the house sound system or hall acoustics, or both.  For people like my wife and me who practically have "Casablanca" memorized that probably didn't matter much, but I wonder if some of the younger folks knew what they were missing.

And that's a pity, because the dialog needs to be heard.  That's because, in my view, "Casablanca" is a film that still resonates today.  Nazi Germany may be a thing of the past, but home-grown fascist movements are flexing their muscles in far too many Western nations these days.  They hate liberté, egalité, and fraternité just as much now as they did in 1942.  Rod Serling said it best in the epilog to the 1963 "Twilight Zone" episode "He's Alive": "Where will he go next, this phantom from another time, this resurrected ghost of a previous nightmare - Chicago? Los Angeles? Miami, Florida? Vincennes, Indiana? Syracuse, New York? Anyplace, everyplace, where there's hate, where there's prejudice, where there's bigotry. He's alive. He's alive so long as these evils exist. Remember that when he comes to your town. Remember it when you hear his voice speaking out through others. Remember it when you hear a name called, a minority attacked, any blind, unreasoning assault on a people or any human being. He's alive because through these things we keep him alive."

The regular subscription season returns this weekend as Bernard Labadie conducts The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra with soloists Philip Ross (oboe), Andrew Gott (bassoon), Kristin Ahlstrom (violin), and Melissa Brooks (cello) in a program of music by Rameau, Haydn, and Mozart.  Performances take place on Friday at 10:30 AM, Saturday at 8 PM and Sunday at 3 PM, February 21-23, at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand.  For more information: stlsymphony.org.