Word: nier
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...toreador from the bull into the prize ring and turned the words from Spanish-flavored French into minstrel-show English. With all these modern wonders, the Metropolitan Opera dared to compete, by staging a revival of Umberto Giordano's opera of the French Revolution, Andrea Chénier, a work it has not done in 21 years...
...Groove. Giordano's 58-year-old opera, loosely based on a true episode, tells how the young Poet Chénier becomes successively enamored of the French Revolution and a French beauty, only to lose both his love and his own head to the guillotine. Also swept up in the swirling action is a servant who turns revolution ary and finds his new power as bitter as his old servitude. The Italian libretto is full of mysterious letters, whispered warnings and preposterous melodramatics. Nevertheless, the opera does convey tremendous theatrical excitement and a sharp sense of the great revolutionary...
Composer Giordano (1867-1948) made his most successful effort with Chénier (others: Fedora, Madame Sans-Gene). The opera's melodies may sing a little too much like Verdi's without Verdi's dramatic thrust; its flow may be as slippery as Wagner's without Wagner's soaring sense of continuity. But it has a ravishing choral addio (Act I), a roof-raising farewell duet, and cannily applause-getting arias for all of its principal singers...
Angel-voiced Soprano Milanov, as Chénier's aristocratic amour, and archangel-voiced Baritone Warren, as a servant turned revolutionary, helped make the Met's Chenier a solid success, but the hit of the evening was Tenor Mario Del Monaco, in the powerful title role. When his time came, he stood back, heaved an enormous breath, spread his arms and let fly with a stunning high B flat that he held until it began to sound as if a phonograph needle was stuck in the groove...
...real life, Poet André de Chénier (1762-94), called by French Critic Sainte-Beuve the greatest writer of French classic verse after Racine and Boileau, spoke out against the revolutionists' bloody excesses, was eventually executed for conspiring while in prison...