Opera Club: “Gianni Schicchi”
All are invited to watch a dual comic-opera bill of Puccini’s “Gianni Schicchi” and Ravel’s “L’heure Espagnole (The Spanish Hour)” on Tuesday, Dec. 16, at 1:30 p.m. in the Learning Center of Clubhouse 3. These short and highly amusing operas will be introduced by knowledgeable club member Lucy Poropat, who will highlight the foibles of human greed and deception that seeps into social relationships everywhere.
Puccini’s ‘’Gianni Schicchi’’ is set in Florence of 1299, where Buoso Donati has just died leaving his entire fortune to a monastery and his greedy relatives are all bemoaning their individual disappointments. In walks Gianni Schicchi, a foreigner whose daughter is in love with Rinuccio Donati, a relative of the departed, and offers to impersonate the deceased so as to change the will. Everyone is happy to participate in this fraud with its assumed risk as the outcome may benefit all. A notary is summoned to authenticate the drafting of a Last Will. However, when Schicchi dictates the new terms of the Will, he leaves everything to himself, leaving the family unable to object and expose themselves as participants to the fraud, subject to its penalties. Schicchi then endows the proceeds to his daughter, Lauretta, enabling her marriage to Rinuccio Donati.
In Ravel’s “L’heure espagnole (The Spanish Hour)” we find Conception, the flirtatious wife of a clockmaker, planning to entertain two suitors while her husband is out for one hour checking the town’s public clocks. As the two suitors arrive, respectively a poet and a banker, she hides each inside a grandfather clock and instructs her husband’s friend, Ramiro, to haul each of the heavy clocks upstairs. When her husband returns, the suitors fall out of the clocks, revealing she is in fact interested in neither one, but actually more interested in the muleteer friend, Ramiro, who unquestionably followed her orders, The productions are in Italian and French with English subtitles. People are encouraged to wear masks indoors, if desired. No dues or fees are collected. For more information, contact Margaret Gillon at 562-370-3844 or Margaretgi@yahoo.com. —Sylvan Von Burg
