Gianni Schicchi

Dante put Gianni Schicchi in hell among the falsifiers — he impersonated a dead man and dictated a new will in his voice. Puccini found the comedy in that footnote. Our production moves the story into the present day, and almost nothing needs changing: the inheritance stays, the panic stays, the performance a family puts on for one another stays. What changes is how close it suddenly feels. How a minor sinner from the Inferno became Puccini’s only comedy is a story of its own — we tell it in Gianni Schicchi: Puccini’s Comedy Opens Our Season.

“Italian comedy has more to do with the humour of life.” — Thomas Hampson, baritone

Asked once to name the Puccini opera he most wanted to perform, the American baritone Thomas Hampson passed over Tosca and La bohème and chose this one — Italian comedy, as he put it, comes out of the humour of life rather than out of comic incident. That is why the transposition works at all. The score also includes O mio babbino caro, which most listeners recognise long before they can name it: thirty-two bars in the middle of a comedy, sung by a girl who wants permission to marry.

Puccini wrote this for the Metropolitan Opera, not for a university. The production is directed by Andrey Morozov. The vocal preparation has been led by Natalla Marozava, singer and vocal pedagogue, working with the cast on what makes the piece genuinely hard: long stretches where five or six people sing different things at once, at speed, and every line still has to reach the room. The orchestral score has been prepared and realised by the production team, with the piano part performed by Anastasiya Yafimava — how, exactly, is the subject of Bringing Puccini’s Orchestra into Our Rehearsal Room.

Both performances fall on a weekend and both begin at 5 p.m.: Saturday 26 and Sunday 27 September, at the KE Auditorium, CHRIST University, Hosur Road, Bangalore 560029. Sung in English, running about one hour without an interval — short enough for a first opera, early enough to leave the evening to you, and fast enough that “a first opera” turns out to be a poor description of what happens.

An hour of music about people who will do almost anything for money, written by a composer who knew exactly how funny that is and refused to make a villain of anyone.