White Stuff
According to our four-footed February weather authority, we have six more weeks of winter. Hmmm -- how many theatrical stages -- whatever the month or shadow-casting proclivities of their local woodchucks – have been frosty for at least one scene of a particular opera?
The first such opera to come to mind is of course Puccini's 1896 La Bohème. Act III takes place in February, near Marcello's tavern just outside Paris, and the snowy scene is set for us by customs agents warming themselves by a brazier as street sweepers demand to be let into the road, calling "Fiocca la neve...Qui s'agghiaccia!" -- It's snowing...we're freezing! Later along, we are given to understand that Mimi is so ill that, by acting offensively, Rodolfo has been hoping to drive her away from his unheated garret to some healthier environment -- he feels guilty that, by allowing her to live with him, he is killing her. He has a change of heart when Mimi comes forth from where she has been eavesdropping, and together they swear to stay together until spring. Why? "Solì l'inverno è cosa da morire...Mentre a primavera cè compagno il sol!" -- To be alone in winter is what kills...but in spring one has the sun for company. As the act ends, Mimi is so in love with Rodolfo that, despite the weather and her illness, she sings, "Vorrei che eterno durasse l’inverno" -- I wish winter could last forever.
Winter indeed lasts forever in Barber's 1958 Vanessa, which is set in some unnamed northern European country at the turn of the last century. It begins in early winter, and already a blizzard is raging outside. A curiously matriarchal household is all a-flutter with preparations for the arrival of Anatol, a man from Vanessa's past. When she frets that the snow has somehow delayed him, her niece, Erika, watches by the window, and sings the first aria of the work, "Why must the winter come so soon," a mournful summary of its effects upon nature. Erika is clearly depressed by their rural isolation paired with the arrival of the season in which "in this forest neither dawn nor sunset mark the passing of the days." Anatol then arrives in a rush of sleighbells and light, with a sparkling if somewhat slimy personality that brightens the household. The son of Vanessa's awaited former lover, he woos the older woman. He secretly seduces Erika, though, and during the New Year's party at which Anatol's engagement to her aunt is announced, she rushes out into the snow and loses (or has perhaps deliberately aborted) her unborn child. Anatol finds Erika, in a bloodied white gown, lying "in the snow like a Christmas rose." The opera ends where he goes ahead with the May-December marriage, and he and Vanessa leave for Paris mid-January, with another jingle of sleighbells...abandoning Erika to her icy gloom.
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