‘Fedora’ Review: How the Met Toasted the New Year

Umberto Giordano’s 1898 verismo work has a creaky plot but an engaging score, beautifully delivered by soprano Sonya Yoncheva in a handsome new production at the Metropolitan Opera

Sonya Yoncheva

PHOTO: KEN HOWARD / MET OPERA

By Heidi Waleson

Jan. 4, 2023 5:26 pm ET

Umberto Giordano’s “Fedora” (1898) proved to be perfect New Year’s Eve fare at the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday night. It’s relatively short; the creaky plot is melodrama rather than tragedy; there’s a party scene; and it’s a splendid verismo showcase for the right soprano—in this case, Sonya Yoncheva. David McVicar’s handsome new production offered plenty of eye candy and kept the entertainment level high without cheesy overreach. With the early (6:30 p.m.) curtain, the crowd could head out at 9 for their own festive dinners and Champagne toasts after the heroine expired. 

Arturo Colautti’s libretto is based on a play by Victorien Sardou, who also provided the source material for Puccini’s “Tosca.” “Fedora” makes less sense. The title character is a Russian princess. In Act 1, which takes place in St. Petersburg, her fiancé, Vladimir, is murdered, supposedly by Nihilists (a violent political group of the period), and she swears to avenge him. In Act 2, at a grand party in Paris, she seduces the accused killer, Count Loris Ipanoff, into a confession. While Loris is off getting proof of justifiable homicide, Fedora dispatches a letter to St. Petersburg condemning him. Loris returns with a different letter (the opera has quite a few) that proves that Vladimir was having an affair with Loris’s wife and was marrying Fedora for her money. Shocked at these revelations, Fedora transfers her affections to Loris. Alas, that letter to St. Petersburg will return to haunt the lovers in Act 3, in which they have decamped to Switzerland. Things don’t end well. 

Ms. Yoncheva, elegantly swathed in sumptuous period gowns by Brigitte 
Reiffenstuel, managed to make Fedora’s questionable choices persuasive. In Act I, she was every inch the imperious aristocrat, her imposing soprano declaring rapturous adoration of a man who, it is clear, she barely knows. (We’ve already heard his servants briskly discussing his unsavory habits.) The seduction scene of Act 2 was perfectly manipulative, and her headlong tumble into passion, vigorously and idiomatically paced by conductor Marco Armiliato, made for a complete—and exciting—reversal. In Act 3, her voice turned lush and imploring as she begged for forgiveness, a convincing prelude to her inevitable suicide. 

As Loris, tenor Piotr Beczała had less to do—he doesn’t even appear until Act 2. His delivery was more stentorian than lyrical, which was particularly noticeable in the opera’s brief hit tune, “Amor ti vieta,” but he made a fine dramatic foil for Ms. Yoncheva. There were numerous other engaging musical moments as well, since Giordano and Colautti laced the melodrama with fun and novelty. The Act 2 party took off with a merry waltz; later, the French diplomat Giovanni De Siriex (Lucas Meachem) and Fedora’s flirtatious cousin Olga (Rosa Feola) traded teasing arias—he describes Russian women as tough Cossacks; she declares that French men are as ephemeral and headache-inducing as Veuve Clicquot Champagne. Both singers imbued their spotlight moments with élan. 

The party also features a Chopin-esque piano solo (performed by Bryan Wagorn, resplendent in a long blond wig, as Olga’s current paramour), which cleverly accompanies the Fedora-Loris seduction. Other notable soloists were Jeongcheol Cha, as Vladimir’s coachman Cirillo, offering halting, poignant testimony about the shooting, and Luka Zylik, as a peasant boy, who sang a hauntingly dissonant folk tune, accompanied by concertina, making a striking contrast to the volcanic emotional explosions of Act 3. 

Mr. McVicar skillfully balanced playfulness and histrionics. Charles Edwards’s detailed set designs combined grandeur with sleight-of-hand: Elements of each act’s set remained in the subsequent ones, reminders that the past is never gone. The ghost of Vladimir also haunted the production, both in his portrait, hanging on a wall at stage left, and in person. That physical ghost made for an effective staging of the dreamy Act 2 Intermezzo, giving Fedora and Vladimir—whom we never see together alive—a mimed love scene; Fedora’s subsequent switch to Loris was thus all the more startling. 

Adam Silverman’s atmospheric lighting emphasized the different tones of the acts: The gloomy, heavy reds of Vladimir’s sitting room in Russia; the breezy white curtains in Paris; the bleached-out mountain in Switzerland that faded into blackness for the denouement. Ms. Reiffenstuel’s costumes were always perfectly apt to the moment, be it somber or silly, from the coachman’s huge fur coat and hat to Olga’s blue silk lounging pajamas and the bloomers in which she sets off on a bicycling adventure. 

“Fedora” was last staged at the Met in the 1996-97 season as a vehicle for soprano Mirella Freni. It is symbolic of another age of opera production and attendance, when an unfamiliar title, featuring many of the favorite musical and dramatic hallmarks of better-known turn-of-the-century Italian operas, could be slotted into the subscription season and please the audience. Today, this production, even with its splendid cast and staging, seems like something of a dinosaur.

The Met recently announced that it will increase the percentage of contemporary titles in future seasons, since new works like “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” and “The Hours” have actually been outselling warhorses. Novelty matters, particularly now that the company depends heavily on single-ticket sales—subscriptions have dropped to less than half of what they were two decades ago. The Met’s brand has always been grand traditional operatic entertainment, performed for an audience that returned every year to see many of the same spectacles or related ones, and willingly paid premium prices. With that business model under heavy pressure, a pure diversion like this “Fedora”—if revived when it is no longer New Year’s Eve and with a less starry cast—might well show its C-list cracks. And in a repertory house that needs a lot of titles—23 this season—it’s hard to predict what might take its place. 

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).