Great operas have the ability to thrive through constant reinvention. The masterpieces of the canon transcend the specifics of their original settings as new generations of directors, performers and musicians reimagine them for their audiences.
Directors can be motivated to update an opera from an original setting to something more contemporary out of a desire to find a world more comprehensible and vivid for today’s audiences. Or, a piece that caused a scandal when first performed may now be so well loved that only a revolutionary modern presentation can remind us of its original power to shock. Being able to transmit the world of an opera from a composer’s initial vision into a future they couldn’t even begin to imagine allows us to remember that many were the Young Turks of their day. Some would surely be surprised – and perhaps either delighted or horrified – to find out that they have become a part of an artistic establishment that in their time they were seeking to disrupt or overturn.
But sometimes an overwhelming resonance with modern tragedy demands the updating of a masterpiece for more than purely artistic reasons. As a female director born and raised in Ireland, this is true of my new semi-staged production of Suor (Sister) Angelica, an hour-long Puccini masterpiece that ENO are performing this week to mark the centenary of his death.
Puccini’s only all-female character opera concerns Angelica, a woman living as a nun who seven years previously gave birth to a son out of wedlock. Her family took the child from her at birth and she was consigned to a convent where, living with this secret, she longs for news of her child. The opera runs in real time as in the space of an hour one evening in May, a wealthy visitor arrives – her aunt, forced by an inheritance issue to make contact with her disgraced niece. Angelica finally learns of the fate of her son in the most heartless way, and the opera grapples with the complexity of faith and forgiveness in a musical world both beautiful and powerful.
Singers and audience alike are taken to an overpowering emotional world that only opera at its most dramatic can achieve.
Premiered in 1918 as part of a three-act evening called Il Trittico, and Puccini’s favourite of those short operas, the original story was set in the late 17th century, avoiding a modern setting for a shocking narrative that may have sat uncomfortably with conservative critics and audiences. As with the vast majority of Puccini’s work, Suor Angelica was for decades historically undervalued by the critical establishment as over-sentimental and melodramatic. ENO is presenting it as a standalone piece for one-night only as an opportunity for new and current audiences to experience it on its own terms as a powerful female centred story, a one-hour emotional rollercoaster of Italian verismo opera.
Suggested as a plot by his librettist Giovacchino Forzano, Puccini was instantly taken with the idea, perhaps because of his own knowledge of convent life – his sister Iginia was a Mother Superior in a convent in Tuscany.
But how imaginary Angelica feels in 2024 is debatable in the light of recent history in Ireland. The country is coming to terms with the horrendous abuse of at least 80,000 unmarried mothers, mostly from working-class backgrounds, who between 1922-1998 were abandoned by the fathers of their children and their families and forced to enter convent-run, state-sanctioned mother and baby institutions. These were often attached to the now notorious Magdalene Laundries. The vast majority of these mothers were separated from their children at birth and then forced to work for no pay in the laundries for years, some never escaping their convent prisons. As in Angelica’s case, some of these women then transitioned into vocations themselves, ending up as nuns in these same institutions, underlying the complexity there could be in relationships between the nuns and the confined women – bound by mutual experience and their voluntary or imposed vows of obedience.
Many of the children born in these places were adopted, either in Ireland or the US and had their birth stories hidden from them, untraceable by their mothers. Thousands of other infants died in these institutions – at least 9,000 from 1922 to 1998. Many of the children who lived and were not adopted went into the feared industrial orphanages or were fostered to hard farm labour.
If allowed to rejoin society, these so-called Magdalene women often hid their stories, even from their husbands and children, through shame and fear.
It cannot be underestimated how many Irish and Northern Irish families have in their pasts moments when fate brought their womenfolk into the world of Suor Angelica. My own maternal grandmother, born a Catholic, fell in love with my Protestant grandfather in Belfast in the 1930s and as many in similar situations did, married him in secret due to the opposition of both their families. Pregnant, she was lured home to her family in the countryside with false tales of a seriously ill mother. mother. Cut off from money and help, it became clear the intention of the local Catholic Church’s priests was to ‘rehabilitate’ her in an institution where she would have been separated from her child as a last ditch effort to keep her from a Protestant husband.. A neighbour helped her escape, but she and my grandfather were forced to move between numerous addresses in an effort to remain untraceable until the child’s birth.
As with all great human tragedy, art and artists are finding ways to confront this national shame (The Irish government in 2021 made a formal apology for the repercussions of this horrendous period of Irish history, pledging a fund of 800 million euros for survivors.) Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters (2002), Steve Coogan’s Philomena starring Judi Dench (2013) and the Ruth Wilson led-miniseries The Woman in the Wall (2023) grapple with the immensity of this tragedy in three very distinct ways. A film of Claire Keegan’s 2022 Booker-shortlisted novella on the subject, Small Things Like These starring Cillian Murphy and Emily Watson will be released in November.
Updating this production of Suor Angelica to 1960’s Ireland acknowledges that Puccini’s imaginary nun had many painfully real counterparts in Ireland at the time that he wrote it and in the decades that followed. His operatic genius allows a reinterpretation that throws a light on history and honours the unimaginable pain of the many real-life Irish Angelicas. Famously, one of the first audiences who heard Suor Angelica were the nuns of Puccini’s sister’s convent in Lucca. He travelled there to play them the piano score, singing all the roles himself and explaining the quietly revolutionary plot; that a so-called fallen woman could be the heroine of a story despite her – as it was condemned at the time – theologically unforgivable act of suicide. Puccini allows Angelica, perhaps the most tragic and sincerely religious of his heroines, the dignity on death of a vision of absolution, whether miraculously real or psychologically imagined.
“It was not easy,” said Puccini of his performance for the nuns. “Still, with as much tact and skill as I could summon, I explained it all. I saw many eyes that looked at me through tears. And when I came to the aria, ‘Madonna, Madonna, salvami per amor di mio figlio’ (‘O Madonna, Madonna, save me for the love of my son’) all the little nuns cried, with voices full of pity …” As we do in 2024, not only for Puccini’s Suor Angelica but all the historic ones too.
