Puccini’s longest and most ambitious evening of theater is a triptych of one-act operas that together present a unique overview of the human experience. Taking a cue from Dante’s Divine Comedy and its three-part journey from desperation to light, Il Trittico offers a modern look at ordinary people striving for happiness. The first opera, Il Tabarro, is a grim and powerful look at Parisian laborers “in the present day,” whose desperate desires are emphasized by a daring use of ambient sounds. The next is Suor Angelica, a Puccini-lover’s delight about a young nun’s journey from oppression to salvation, told entirely with female voices (except for an offstage men’s chorus in the final moments). The final opera, Gianni Schicchi, is a delightful ensemble comedy, whose story comes from the dawn of the Florentine Renaissance (it’s inspired by a moment in The Inferno) to evoke a world in which old hypocrisies are swept away by youthful energy. The opera seems to suggest that love and free thought are the real paradise for our times. Il Trittico has presented a logistical challenge to opera companies since its world premiere at the Met in 1918, as it requires three separate, first-rate casts in three very different settings. Shortly after the world premiere, the three operas began to be produced individually in combination with short works by other composers. But the full evening as Puccini intended it presents a profound and refreshing experience of opera’s most popular composer.

The Creators
Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) was immensely popular in his own lifetime, and his mature works continue to form the foundation of almost every opera company in the world. His operas are celebrated for their mastery of detail, their sensitivity to everyday subjects, their copious melody, and their economy of expression. Giuseppe Adami (1878–1946) provided Puccini with the libretto for La Rondine and would later work with him on Turandot. His libretto for Il Tabarro was adapted from a play, La Houppelande, by Didier Gold, which Puccini had seen in Paris, where it caused a sensation. Adami also edited Puccini’s letters for publication after the composer’s death. Giovacchino Forzano (1884–1974) was a stage director and playwright as well as a prolific librettist (he provided the libretto for Wolf-Ferrari’s Sly). His libretti for Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi are original creations.

The Setting
Trittico’s journey begins with Il Tabarro among laborers on the Seine River in Paris. The bleak lives depicted form an implicit critique of contemporary reality. Suor Angelica takes place entirely within an austere convent. Gianni Schicchi is set in Florence, cradle of ideas and an urban testament to the power of human creativity.

The Music
By the time he composed Il Trittico, Puccini was freely acknowledged as the world’s most popular opera composer, and he was free to explore new modes of musical expression. In Il Tabarro, the external sounds of everyday life (foghorns, taxi horns, passing singers in the street) reflect characters’ internal thoughts and motivations. In the baritone’s impressive narrative, for example, the character stares into the river while his mind descends towards violence, the swirling waters subtly depicted in the orchestra acting at once as scene-painting and psychological metaphor. Suor Angelica is a bold sonic experiment written exclusively for female voices. The title role is showcased in one of Puccini’s most organic, yet still heart-rending, narratives (“Senza mamma”). The score of Gianni Schicchi is the work of a mature genius: seamless music whose ideas form and vanish as blithely as thoughts. Puccini’s gift for irresistible melody remained in his maturity: the two discrete arias in Schicchi belong to the young lovers, in whose voices the tunes (including the unforgettable “O mio babbino caro”) become emblematic of youthful innocence and hopefulness.

Il Trittico at the Met
Puccini did not attend Il Trittico’s world premiere at the Met in 1918 owing to the difficulties of travel in that wartime year. The first performances, with a spectacular cast including Claudia Muzio (Il Tabarro), Geraldine Farrar (Suor Angelica), and Giuseppe De Luca and Florence Easton (Gianni Schicchi), were reasonably successful, but the work as whole was expensive and risky to produce compared with Puccini’s earlier sure-fire hits. Gianni Schicchi, always the most popular of the three, began a journey apart from its siblings in 1926, when it was paired with Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. Other (often curious) pairings remained the rule for that opera: with Richard Strauss’s Salome in six seasons through 1958, with Puccini’s La Bohème in 1936, with Strauss’s Elektra in 1938, and with Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle in 1974. Il Tabarro, with Licia Albanese and Lawrence Tibbett, was the curtain-raiser for Donizetti’s Don Pasquale in 1945. The complete Trittico was finally produced again at the Met in 1975, with Sixten Ehrling conducting a cast that included Cornell MacNeil in Il Tabarro and Gilda Cruz-Romo as Angelica. This complete Trittico was revived in subsequent years under James Levine, with such diverse talents as Hildegard Behrens (1976), Plácido Domingo, and Diana Soviero, (both in 1989). In 1981, Renata Scotto sang in all three operas, a feat repeated in 1989 by Teresa Stratas.