Based, like the Vittorio De Sica film, on the novel of the same name by Giorgio Bassani, “The Garden of the Finzi- Continis,” composer Ricky Ian Gordon and librettist Michael Korie’s new opera, tells a tale of the horrors of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, allied with Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany, which serve as backdrop for a couple of frustrated love stories, and all is memorably realized. “Garden of the Finzi-Continis” was given its world premiere by the New York City Opera, with the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, at the Museum of Jewish Heritage on January 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and runs for seven more performances, through February 6. With an eloquent libretto in English, Italian, and Hebrew, and an accessible score incorporating Fascist anthem “Giovinezza” and Jewish liturgy, with such prayers “Sh’ma Yisroel,” “L’cha dodi,” and “Hashkiveinu,” “Garden of the Finzi-Continis” probably requires several hearings to make its fullest impact.
Pre-World War Two Ferrara’s Jews suddenly find that they live in an Italy where Jews’ bankbooks and library cards are no longer valid, Christian maids and cooks will not work for Jewish employers, and Jews cannot enter tennis tournaments, graduate with honors, or worship in synagogues. The well-to-do Finzi-Continis, sheltered in a mansion that houses its daughter’s Murano ‘glass menagerie,’ with a venerable garden outside, are all but oblivious to the changes that their more average neighbors greet with foreboding and dread.
A tennis game on the Finzi-Continis’ court pits the principal couples against each other. Contributing vivid portrayals, they are the middle-class Giorgio (tenor Anthony Ciaramitaro) and his privileged friend Micòl Finzi-Contini (soprano Rachel Blaustein), and Alberto Finzi-Contini (baritone Brian James Myer), Micòl’s gay brother, and Giampi Malnate (baritone Matt Ciuffitelli), his non-Jewish heartthrob. There’s another coupling here that won’t be revealed until late in the opera. Alberto and the man that he longs for share a sexy sauna scene and Malnate also dances with his admirer to a swinging melody, not caring or acknowledging that his playful attentions tear Alberto apart. There’s a parallel misunderstanding between the lovesick Giorgio and Micòl, who wants no more than a faithful companion. When she makes him leave, is she intentionally freeing him up to escape the inexorable genocide without her?
At the family Passover Seder, Giorgio’s independent brother Ernesto (baritone Robert Balonek) turns “next year in Jerusalem” into a wish for a restored Italy. He urges his brother to forget the woman who does not love him and the brothers alone avoid extermination, thanks to passports and papers that their parents acquire for them. In scenes at the beginning and end, flanking the past action seen in flashbacks, Giorgio comes back to the ruined Ferrara synagogue 10 years later to learn that none of the city’s Jews have survived, not even the wealthy Finzi-Continis.
Mary Philips as Giorgio and Ernesto’s mother, Franco Pomponi as their father, Peter Kendall Clark as Micòl and Alberto’s father, Spencer Hamlin as the Rabbi, and Adam Klein as the Christian who guards the Finzi-Continis’ estate and sweeps the desecrated synagogue, but voices anti-Semitic sentiments, are among the others taking leading roles with distinction. James Lowe conducts the small orchestra and General Director Michael Capasso and Richard Stafford devised almost cinematic action for the opera. John Farrell designed the projections that depict the locations, and Ildikó Debreczeni and Susan Roth were responsible for costumes and lighting.