Menotti and Bernstein take to the stage in Venice. An ironic take on the ‘en rose’ American 1950s

The pairing is less unusual than one might think, and not just because of their chronological proximity: Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Telephone or L’Amour à trois from 1947, and Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti from 1952. The former is a very brisk comic opera that draws on La Serva padrona and other 18th-century intermezzos. Ben would like to propose to Lucy, but she is perpetually on the phone: he will only succeed by phoning her himself. Bernstein, on the other hand, depicts the crisis of another couple – Dinah and Sam – who are always on the verge of breaking up but never actually do, whilst a jazz trio sings the praises of the middle-class American dream of the 1950s, in the imaginary happy town of Suburbia, where people go to the cinema to watch, precisely, Trouble in Tahiti.

Paired by La Fenice for an away run at the Goldoni (a theatre, however, that is as ‘deaf’ as can be), the two one-act plays were brought even closer together by the direction of Gianmaria Aliverta, who also designed the witty costumes. Menotti thus serves as a prologue to Bernstein, and the protagonists are the same, before and after the wedding. It remains to be seen why they have become so desperately unhappy behind the façade of success and respectability: Aliverta explains it through the loss of a young son, who indeed returns to unleash their anxieties. The usual refrain about ‘faithfulness’ to the libretto makes little sense: what matters is whether the idea ‘works’, and indeed it does. However, the best aspect of the show is the irony – wicked and therefore intelligent – with which Aliverta mocks the final era of innocence in the States between Truman and Eisenhower: a world of compulsory, and therefore fake, happiness that seems straight out of The Truman Show, where the women are dressed in pink or light blue suits with little clouds on them, and even Sam’s golf bag is entirely ‘en rose’. Elsa Zamparutti’s sets are delightful, as is Nicola Tazzi’s choreography. Overall, the production is thoroughly enjoyable.

That Menotti is so rarely staged is quite scandalous, especially today when one can have a good laugh at the fierce accusations and controversies regarding his failure to be avant-garde and his alleged slight on Darmstadt. To re-evaluate Menotti the opera composer, it would suffice to classify him as the foremost of the postmodernists, who roams the vast supermarket of music history, selecting from the shelves whatever suits him best, from dry recitatives onwards. The Telephone thus emerges as the miniature masterpiece that it is. Bernstein is more ambitious and perhaps less successful, because in its albeit eclectic language, the jazz trio blends less naturally with that of the singers, which is resolutely operatic. Dinah’s aria and the subsequent duet with Sam, however, are perfect in their poignancy, calculated with the cynical precision of a Yankee Puccini. Credit is certainly also due to Jacopo Brusa’s lively conducting, which is very much in tune with the stage: Menotti even transforms the turning of the telephone dial – which was, of course, a landline at the time – into arpeggios (the telephone, their voices: the fascination it held for post-war opera composers deserves an essay in its own right, and there are even those who claim that La voix humaine was in fact Poulenc’s ‘j’accuse’ against the appalling state of the Paris telephone network).

On stage are Elisa Balbo and Allen Boxer, a soprano and a baritone respectively. She, as well as singing beautifully, proves herself a true artist when she reveals the anguish of the woman behind the futile satisfaction of the ‘sciura’ who is so busy doing nothing; he is extremely fit, but unfortunately not when it comes to his voice. At the Sunday matinee, the theatre was unexpectedly not half-empty (let’s say half-full, really) but full of applause.