Out into the Universe….
If you live in San Francisco or the Bay area as I do, crossing the span of the Bay Bridge allows you a panoramic view of the Port of Oakland. To the south, the tall cranes reaching skyward are an unmistakable hommage to the ongoing movement of goods from place to place – seen in a certain mood or through the dense fog that often seems to lurk over the bay, these majestic arching mechanisms could be interpreted as a new race of aliens or machine invaders from another world – they are said to be what inspired George Lucas to create Star Wars.
Which brings me to Giacomo Puccini’s darkest opera: one of three from his famous trilogy that is performed the least.
At least on its own. It is, without doubt, the one I love best.
In it’s pure form, Puccini’s Il Tabarro takes place on a working barge, the kind that carries products of one type or another from town to town along a river thoroughfare with an itinerant crew that changes depending on the work. Moored along the river Seine in Paris, the protagonists live out the daily grind of their hardscrabble existence and survive and take pleasure in whatever way they can.
It’s not too difficult to imagine a love triangle occurring in a situation like this. The wife of the barge owner, Georgetta, longs for the bright, carefree life she enjoyed in her home town before she married Michele (the owner/captain) and took on the drab, vagabond world of a working barge wife! It is no surprise that her attraction for the physically powerful, passionate Luigi, the handsome longshoreman who works the barge for Michele and shares her memories of the town they both grew up in, would prove to be a powerful, irresistible attraction.
So, in the case of our particular vision of Puccini’s dark masterpiece, a nearly dry water planet with the protaganists carrying goods from place to place on what’s left of a dying world, seemed to me a natural, inevitable setting.
The Life we Dream, an intergalactic love triangle
(based on Puccini’s verismo opera – Il Tabarro)
-July 26, 2023
Vismaya Lhi
Artistic Director
