Opera Scotland

Tabarro 1944Sadler's Wells Opera

Read more about the opera Tabarro

Sadler's Wells Opera only gave their first performances of Il tabarro in 1935, and this was the first time they toured it to Scotland. It was given in a double bill with the far more popular comedy Gianni Schicchi. Unusually, they seem to have experimented with a different playing order, starting with the comedy, and finishing with the melodrama. This is not an experiment that seems to have been repeated, and now that the original centrepiece, Suor Angelica, seems to have been rescued from near-oblivion and found to make a perfectly satisfying programme as designed, such experiments seem less likely.

The review in the Herald, from which these abbreviated cast details are taken, praises Puccini's work in both operas. It says 'an important feature...in common with the best French films.... there are no minor characters.' Perhaps the critic was thinking of the work of Jean Renoir and, in particular, Jean Vigo's final masterpiece, L'Atalante, of 1934 - a superb film, also set on a canal barge, though with very different plotlines.