It is easy to dismiss Adriana Lecouvreur as a hopelessly old-fashioned piece of kitsch melodrama (although written in 1902 it is based on a play by Scribe dating from the 1840s); as an outdated vehicle for that outdated phenomenon, the larger-than-life prima donna; even as a cynical exercise in operatic merchandising (formula: make sure that the punters are knocked off their feet by a thumping good tune near the start of Act 1; send them home happily tearful with another near the end of Act 4; they won't notice—and who cares if the critics do?—if not very much happens in between).
There would be no point in defending Adriana against these strictures if it did not incontrovertibly work on its own terms. The heroine's first aria, ''Io son l'umile ancella'' is familiar enough from recital records: a luscious melody, expertly scored and paced, superbly tailored to the soprano voice. But why is it more than this in context: evocative, stagily effective, even moving? It has something to do with skilful contrast: the aria is preceded by a brilliantly swift opening ensemble of backstage hubbub, by the quiet string chords and silvery harp of Adriana's entrance music (one can almost see her magnificent costume as she prepares to go on stage as Roxane in Racine's Bajazet) and by a spoken passage in which she runs through a few of her lines. A milieu is defined, a raffish professional background against which she is set in glamorous relief. The use of speech establishes her profession, but also introduces an element of artful ambiguity: when the prima donna portraying a prima donna of the spoken stage announces that she is but a modest handmaiden of her art, is it Adriana speaking or the soprano covertly addressing her adoring public (in much the same way that the 'real' Edith Piaf avowed through her stage persona that she regretted nothing)? Similarly, in the crucial scene of Adriana's confrontation with her rival, the Princess deBouillon, it is characteristic that the actress/Soprano should taunt the aristocrat/mezzo with a speech from Racine of which only one line is sung. We are invited simultaneously to admire her spirit, the artifice of the melodrama (in both senses of the word), the soprano's powers of declamation and Cilea's daring: he confines the musical eloquence (at such a moment!) not to the soprano but the solo violin that accompanies her.
This is very close to what we now call high camp; indeed, some of the opera's scenes have a lot in common with Garbo's best-remembered moments as Queen Christina, or Gloria Swanson's in Sunset Boulevard, and in just the same way one can be genuinely enthralled by them while smiling at their perilous proximity to bathos. But that confrontation with the Princess is most cunningly and adroitly prepared, by an elaborate mock-eighteenth-century ballet de cour whose ironic relationship to the 'real' plot becomes more and more pointed until the two converge. One might also smile at the elaborately contrived scene in Act 2, where Adriana, for her lover Maurizio's sake, assists an unknown woman (her rival, of course, though she does not know it) to escape from a compromising situation. Wordlessly, one by one, she blows out all the candles, registering apprehension and indecision as she does so until, standing in a shaft of moonlight, she finally makes her resolve. Preposterous, of course, but while we are laughing Cilea's orchestra has told us things (sentimental things, if you like, but things that music is rather good at telling) about Adriana's trust and love. His orchestral writing, in fact, together with the adroit pacing of his dialogue (which rises usually to brief moments of lyrical expansion rather than to static arias) ensure that there is usually somewhat more to such moments (and there are many of them) than Hollywood plus Puccini-and-water (and in any case Cilea shows himself, in both these areas, to be a closer student of Massenet than of his Italian contemporaries).
High camp is a style as distinct (and at its own level demands as much authenticity) as the baroque: like a baroque opera, Adriana Lecouvreur is incomplete until performers who are at home in its style flesh it out or 'realize' it. Kabaivanska evokes that style admirably in her spoken scenes and in some of the dialogue, but her now slightly tremulous voice lacks the necessary grand manner for the arias: they have pathos, but not high pathos, and there is a sense of strain at the extremes of her compass: a prima donna, unmistakably, but on reduced voltage. Cupido makes a convincingly young lover, but there is a hard edge to his stylishly used, rather strenuously produced tenor, and too little warmth or amplitude for real ardour. In the Bette Davis role of the Princess, however, Milcheva's throaty vehemence is the precise vocal equivalent of a piercing, baleful stare, and all her scenes come off splendidly. Those involving Attilio D'Orazi's Michonnet, the elderly theatre director who loves Adriana in vain, work well also: he has a nice mingling of brusqueness and awkward sincerity. And Maurizio Arena's direction is wholly successful: the ensembles and dialogues briskly paced and discreetly clarified, each act thought through as a unified structure, the many passages of orchestral drama expertly characterized. The donna may not be quite prima, but Arena, Milcheva and D'Orazi demonstrate that Adriana Lecouvreur cannot be dismissed as a prima donna opera, after all. The sound is as realistic as one would expect from a recording producer called Francesco Miracle.'