Premiered some seventeen years apart, Il segreto di Susanna and Iolanta might, on the surface, seem curious companions. Wolf-Ferrari’s marital comedy, first heard in German as Susannens Geheimnis in Munich in 1909, ostensibly inhabits very different territory from Tchaikovsky’s bittersweet fable about desire and spirituality, his last opera, first performed in a double bill with the The Nutcracker at St Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre in 1892. Yet the two works have much in common. Both are essentially pivotal, gazing retroactively at past traditions, while at the same time anticipating Modernist and Symbolist developments that were soon to come. The protagonist of each is a woman whose life is in some way constrained by the men who surround her. And both narratives are driven by the exposure of secrets and lies, which must be swept away if their protagonists are to find emotional fulfilment, and which resonate with their composers’ lives.

Wolf-Ferrari was first and foremost a reclusive man, careful of what he would reveal to the public beyond the immediate context of his works. We know little of his private life except that he was twice married, and that he divorced his first wife, the soprano Clara Kilian, shortly after the First World War. His second wife, Wilhelmine Funck, survived him at his death in 1948. The only periods in his life he was willing to discuss in detail were his childhood, adolescence and teenage years, which he regarded as formative of his career as a composer. Beyond that, he gave little away.

He was born Hermann Friedrich Wolf in Venice in 1876, the son of August Wolf, a German painter, and his Italian wife Elena Ferrari. Throughout his life, he was intensely proud of his dual cultural heritage. When he was 12, he heard Rossini’s Barber of Seville and later, at Bayreuth, Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal. These operas were to have a longlasting impact on his work, though there is considerably less of Wagner in Il segreto di Susanna than we find elsewhere in his output.

Though his father, August, initially encouraged him to follow in his footsteps as an artist, Hermann broke off his studies with the Hungarian painter Simon Hollosy in Munich, to enrol in composition classes at the Akademie der Tonkunst. Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari was the name he adopted when his work began to be published.

His career initially proceeded by fits and starts. His first opera, Irene, never made it to the stage. His second, La Cenerentola, failed at its Venetian premiere in 1900, though a production in Germany two years later was a resounding success. It was subsequently to Germany, where audiences were more appreciative of his music than their Italian counterparts, that he allocated most of his premieres. 

His breakthrough came in 1903 with Le donne curiose, an adaptation of a play by Carlo Goldoni, and the first of a series of comic operas that re-appraised 18th-century models though an early 20th-century sensibility. The bittersweet I Quattro Rusteghi, similarly based on Goldoni, was hailed as a masterpiece at its 1906 premiere. Il segreto di Susanna followed three years later.

Wolf-Ferrari dubbed the work an ‘intermezzo’, deploying the Baroque term which indicates a short, comic opera, performed as an interlude between the acts of a longer, more serious work. In both its vocal layout and structure, Susanna is modelled on the best-known example of such, Pergolesi’s La serva padrona, similarly written for soprano, baritone and a silent actor, whose presence is integral to the plot. The setting is contemporary, however. And in its portrait of a modern marriage, Susanna can be seen as prefiguring the abrasive humour of a group of Modernist works from the 1920s and early 30s – Strauss’s Intermezzo, Hindemith’s Neues vom Tageand Schoenberg’s Von heute auf morgen –all of which subject marital conflict to scrutiny.

Enrico Golisciani’s libretto has been criticised as slight, though it exposes contemporary sexual attitudes and mores with considerable subtlety. The basic situation is simple: the odour of cigarette smoke on Susanna’s clothes and in their house leads Gil to suspect that his wife is having an affair, when in fact she enjoys smoking when his back is turned. Possessive and hot-tempered, Gil forbids Susanna to go out on her own, even though he regularly spends evenings with his cronies at his club. Cigarettes, however, permit his wife access to a private realm of pleasure beyond his experience. Susanna describes smoking as ‘voluttà’ (voluptuousness) – with all the sexual overtones the word implies. Once her secret is out, Gil takes up smoking himself, effectively accepting her world rather than continuing to impose his own upon her, though Wolf-Ferrari’s allusive, eclectic score questions how far she permits him to enter it.

The sparkling overture suggests the influence of Rossini, as does the big duet for Susanna and Gil that dominates the first half, structured along bel canto lines, with expansive recitatives linking a slow, reflective melody, in which the couple recall past happiness, to an energetic cabaletta, in which Gil becomes increasingly irascible. Susanna’s cigarette aria, however, is all Impressionistic sensuality, as a solo flute, echoing Debussy’s Prélude à l’après midi d’un Faune, suggests the drifting smoke, while shimmering strings convey the ‘voluttà’ in which she immerses herself. Running through the score, meanwhile, is a wistful melody, associated with Susanna herself, and recalling ‘Ah, non credea mirarti’ from Bellini’s La sonnambula, whose heroine Amina is similarly under suspicion of infidelity.

We first hear Susanna playing this melody on the piano, while Gil frets and fumes suspiciously. Later, it forms the basis of the central interlude, as Sante restores order after Gil’s explosion of violence, and returns at the climax of the couple’s closing duet. As husband and wife light their cigarettes together to the principal melody of the overture, we realise we are in very different territory from the sensuous music to which Susanna smoked earlier on. That experience remains her secret to the end, and is one that Gil may never learn to fathom.

Iolanta is an altogether more complex work, exploring deeper layers of ambiguity. Its genesis was protracted. The opera’s source is the 1845 play King René’s Daughter by the Danish playwright Henrik Hertz, which Tchaikovsky first read in 1883, later admitting he determined at once to set it to music after being charmed ‘by its poetry, originality and abundance of lyrical scenes’. The composer’s interest was subsequently spurred by a production of the play in Moscow in 1888, though it was not until 1890, when he received a commission from the Imperial Theatres in St Petersburg for an opera and ballet to be performed together in single evening, that he was able to begin work on Iolanta in earnest.

The composition process was typically fraught with self-doubt. The subject of The Nutcracker had been foisted on Tchaikovsky, and he wanted to get the ballet out of the way first, completing the score in the summer of 1891. ‘I shall write music that will bring tears to everyone’s eyes,’ he told his brother Modest, to whom he had entrusted Iolanta’s libretto. When he began drafting the score, however, starting with the duet for his heroine and Vaudémont, he began to fret about similarities to his earlier opera The Enchantress (1887), and became concerned that he was unsuited to tackling a subject with a medieval setting, since ‘dukes and ladies capture my imagination but not my heart’.

At the double premiere, the opera was more warmly received than the ballet, and the two works soon went their separate ways. Iolanta held the stage in Russia and Germany until the years following the First World War, when The Nutcracker rapidly began to eclipse it in popularity. It was first heard in Britain in 1968, by which time the ballet had become one of the most familiar works in the world.

The secrets and lies that drive the opera’s narrative are by no means confined to the domestic sphere as in Susanna, but extend to form a vast conspiracy of which Iolanta, the daughter of King René of Provence, has become the victim. She has been blind from infancy, but her father has demanded, on pain of death, that she be brought up in ignorance of her condition, in a garden surrounded by what is variously described as a desert or a forest (consistency of detail was not, alas, one of Modest’s strengths.). Iolanta also has no knowledge of her royal status, having been told that her father is a simple knight, while an elaborate lie has been constructed to delude the world outside into believing she is living in a convent in Spain until the time comes for her to marry.

The opera depicts Iolanta’s passage from darkness and innocence to light, love and knowledge, as the conspiracy of silence that surrounds her unravels. Ibn-Hakia insists that Iolanta can literally will herself to see, provided she is told the truth about her condition – the thought of which fills the king with horror. Iolanta’s awareness of light, however, coincides with her first stirrings of desire for Vaudémont, who inadvertently reveals to her that she is blind and teaches her the meaning and nature of love.
Modest’s text is riddled with elaborate religious imagery, theosophical in its tacit assertion that spiritual experience transcends organised belief systems, and vaguely Platonist in its view of the sensual affording access to the divine. The Muslim Ibn-Hakia maintains that flesh and spirit ‘have been united in all manifestations of life by a superior will, just like two inseparable friends,’ and that the immortal soul must understand the meaning of light before it is fully manifested to the senses.

Sight is equated throughout with knowledge of ‘the light of God’, and Vaudémont tells Iolanta that ‘those who are unaware of the benefits of light cannot love a world plunged into darkness, nor glorify God in the shadows of their hearts’. Light and knowledge, however, bring the potential for suffering as well as joy in their wake. Fearing for Vaudémont’s life as a result of yet another of the King’s lies, Iolanta undertakes her cure self-sacrificially, ‘like the lamb of God,’ as René puts it. On finally being able to see, Iolanta first acknowledges she is in the presence of the ‘Creator of the universe, in the light of day’, before turning to the world of mankind that surrounds her.

Tchaikovsky’s closing chorus, with its shouts of ‘Hosanna’, has something of the abstract quality of a cantata. The opera opens, however, in a mood of profound unease, with a bitter woodwind prelude that glances back to the darkness of The Queen of Spades (1890) and anticipates the final tragic statement of the Pathétique Symphony, premiered shortly before Tchaikovsky’s death in 1893. The music throughout is compassionate and sincere, belying Tchaikovsky’s concerns that the subject had captured his imagination but not his heart. The King, observed with tremendous empathy, is seen throughout as misguided rather than monstrous. Ibn-Hakia’s aria, with its Orientalist flourishes, has been compared to the Arabian Dance from The Nutcracker, though its thematic repetitions, winding upwards and downwards in the voice, indicate moral certainty and fixity of will rather than languor.

At the work’s centre lies the duet for Iolanta and Vaudémont, one of the great scenes in Tchaikovsky’s operatic output. There is a moment of unbearable poignancy when Vaudémont, shocked by Iolanta’s blindness, briefly falls silent, and she begins to understand the depth of her feelings for him as well as her own emotional solitude. The final section has irresistible qualities of ecstasy and passion. It’s almost impossible not to be moved by it.

Though many have come to acknowledge the opera’s musical worth in the last few decades, there are conflicting opinions as to its meaning. Some have seen Iolanta’s blindness as a metaphor for Tchaikovsky’s conflicted attitudes towards his sexuality, a theory brought into question by the recent emergence of evidence to the effect that he came to accept that he was gay more readily than was previously thought after the breakdown of his marriage in 1877. ‘I have finally begun to understand,’ he told his brother Anatoly in 1878, ‘that there is nothing more fruitless than not wanting to be that which I am by nature.’ Nothing in his subsequent correspondence suggests that he was tormented by his sexual orientation in later years.

Iolanta has also been interpreted as a work in which Romanticism self-consciously tips towards the Symbolist movement, which dominated European culture at the fin de siècle. The medieval setting, the imagery of the garden as a false paradise (with red and white roses suggesting innocence and experience) and Modest’s sometimes nebulous language have invited comparison with the plays of Maurice Maeterlinck, whose Pelléas et Mélisande, the source of Debussy’s opera, was first performed in the year of Iolanta’s premiere. Certainly, Modest’s later libretto for Rachmaninov’s Francesca da Rimini (1906) is coloured by the movement’s values and decadent sexual thinking.

Though many might question the idea that Iolanta’s blindness is essentially psychosomatic, and dependent on shifts in mental perception for its cure, it should also be remembered that the opera was written during the years that saw the emergence of the psychoanalytic movement and the examination of hysterical symptoms as an expression of neurotic mental states. Indeed, its genesis coincided with a family crisis that brought Tchaikovsky and Modest into the orbit of the French neurologist Jean Martin Charcot, whose pioneering studies of hysteria profoundly influenced Freud.

Early in 1883, the year in which Tchaikovsky first read Hertz’s play, he was visiting Paris, where he was joined by Modest and their niece Tatyana (‘Tanya’) Davydova, the daughter of Tchaikovsky’s sister, Sasha. A morphine addict, Tanya was admitted to Charcot’s clinic for treatment, during which the brothers watched at her bedside on alternate days as her withdrawal took its course. Tanya, however, was also pregnant, following an affair with her music teacher Stanislav Blumenfeld, and had secretly taken Tchaikovsky and Modest, to whom she was close, into her confidence on the understanding that they would never tell her parents. Her son, Georges-Léon, was born later the same year. Tchaikovsky organised his baptism and early upbringing with his wet-nurse, before arranging for the boy to be adopted by his elder brother Nikolay.

Early in 1883, the year in which Tchaikovsky first read Hertz’s play, he was visiting Paris, where he was joined by Modest and their niece Tatyana (‘Tanya’) Davydova, the daughter of Tchaikovsky’s sister, Sasha. A morphine addict, Tanya was admitted to Charcot’s clinic for treatment, during which the brothers watched at her bedside on alternate days as her withdrawal took its course. Tanya, however, was also pregnant, following an affair with her music teacher Stanislav Blumenfeld, and had secretly taken Tchaikovsky and Modest, to whom she was close, into her confidence on the understanding that they would never tell her parents. Her son, Georges-Léon, was born later the same year. Tchaikovsky organised his baptism and early upbringing with his wet-nurse, before arranging for the boy to be adopted by his elder brother Nikolay.

Whether these events coloured Iolanta remains a matter for conjecture, but it is surely significant that it was in their wake that Tchaikovsky had the initial idea for his opera about a girl who undergoes treatment at the hands of a doctor who deals as much with the processes of the mind as the workings of the body. One also wonders what the impact on him of the Moscow production Hertz’s play might have been, just over a year after Tanya’s sudden death at the age of 25, in 1887. Though one can argue that the libretto is flawed by Modest’s verbosity, Iolanta remains a haunting and in some ways elusive work. An altogether darker and more troubling piece than Il segreto di Susanna, it doesn’t reveal its secrets easily, which ultimately is the source of its fascination.