Suor Angelica di G. Puccini e G. Forzano
Saturday 20 July ⤳ 9.00 pm
Teatro Sociale, Novafeltria
Free entry
Suor Angelica • opera in one act by Giacomo Puccini. Libretto by Giovacchino Forzano12 young international opera singers
pianist and concert pianist Sara Chiesa
directed by Robert Breault
scenes Tom Burch
costumes Aurdey Hamilton
lights David Navalinski
An international co-production of the Montefeltro Festival 2024
La Musica Lirica USA and Voci nel Montefeltro, International Lyric Academy, Novafeltria
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Suor Angelica is a one-act opera by Giacomo Puccini, with a libretto by Giovacchino Forzano. It is the second 'panel' of the Trittico which also includes “Il Tabarro” and “Gianni Schicchi”. The world premiere of this opera took place on 14 December 1918 at the Metropolitan in New York and, since then, it has been widely represented for its main particularity: it is among the few operas with exclusively female characters. The male voices appear only at the end, in the choir of angels who take Sister Angelica to heaven. Among the three works that make up the Trittico, it was Puccini's favourite. On 1 May 1917, Puccini wrote to his friend Pietro Panichelli (a Dominican friar who had already helped him with the religious sounds of Tosca): «I am writing a cloistered or monastic opera. I therefore need several ad hoc Latin words. My science does not reach up to… your heavens." Puccini had a sister named Iginia, who had become mother superior of the convent of Augustinian nuns in the Vicopelago district of Lucca. The maestro made them listen to the opera on the piano, leaving them deeply moved. Thanks to his sister, to whom he was very close, Puccini was able to learn what life was like in a female convent, which he portrayed with great realism in his work, managing through a few musical brushstrokes to also depict the individual characters of uniformly dressed characters.