La Coupe et les Lèvres

World Premiere

Saturday, October 31, 7:30 pm

The Kaye Playhouse

at

Hunter College

695 Park Avenue, NYC

Tickets: $100 (preferred seating + extras),

$75, 50, 25 (students) (senior discount)

Box Office: 212.772.4448 or 201.863.8724

Giacomo Puccini’s opera, Edgar, is the only one of his otherwise successful and widely-acclaimed works to be largely rejected by worldwide opinion. The glaring weakness of the opera is the libretto by a mediocre poet, Ferdinando Fontana, who based it on Alfred De Musset’s “La Coupe et les Lèvres, “one of several drames de fauteuil. In his treatment, Fontana ignored or superficially glossed over the poem’s dark and cynical reflections of life and love, which is the core of the subject.

Instead of its being a drama about spiritual quest, it became a trite absurdity, concentrating on the melodramatic elements. In short, Fontana provided Puccini with the thankless task of creating suitable music to hackneyed verses. Despite this handicap, the composer did succeed with some truly inspired moments in several of the arias and in the Requiem.

It is with this in mind that I undertook to resurrect the score, discarding almost all of Fontana’s libretto. However, I retained the aforementioned pieces which, in fact, had stimulated Puccini’s creative powers. The opera contained so many felicitous pages of sheer beauty, that to condemn them to lasting indifference would unjustly deprive the world of opera in general.

All the thematic material is Puccini’s, but in order to accommodate some areas of Musset’s poetry as well as the structural changes generated by the stresses of the reconstructed libretto, it was sometimes necessary to employ extensions and modifications.

Anton Coppola brings many years of experience to the podium, having conducted for almost all of the important opera companies in the United States, including the San Francisco and New York City Opera.

He began his musical studies with Gennaro Papi and Paul Breisach, both of the Metropolitan Opera. As a pupil of Vittorio Giannini, he earned a master’s degree in composition. In addition to a symphony and chamber music, his works include two operas, of which his Sacco and Vanzetti received enthusiastic acclaim at its premiere in 2001.

After serving for four years as an Army bandmaster during World War II, he moved on to conduct at Radio City Music Hall. For over 15 years, he was the director of the symphony and opera departments at the Manhattan School of Music, where he instituted the master’s program in conducting.

Known for his wide range and versatility, Coppola conducted a number of musicals, including New Faces of 1952, The Boy Friend, Silk Stockings, and the first national tours of My Fair Lady and The Most Happy Fella. For his nephew, Francis Ford Coppola, he conducted the music in the films Godfather III and Dracula. In opera, he conducted the world premieres of Lizzie Borden, Of Mice and Men and several others.

Spanning the last six decades, Coppola conducted many of the important singers of the 20^th century, ranging from Stignani and Kirsten to Merrill, Milnes, Del Monaco and Pavarotti. He recently collaborated with Angela Gheorghiu in a highly-praised recording of Puccini arias. He is also the recipient of honorary doctorates from the University of Tampa and Quinnipiac University, besides having received the Lasting Achievement Award from the Puccini Foundation.

The conductor remains actively engaged with regional opera companies in addition to his duties as conductor and Artistic Director of Opera Tampa.

Michael Philip Davis made his operatic debut as Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly with the New York City Opera National Company, his New York City Opera debut in the title role of The Student Prince, and his European debut as Tamino in the Magic Flute at Cologne Opera. He recently directed Yours, Anne for the New York State Theater Institute. In 2006, he made his directorial debut at TodiMusicFest with the Tragedy of Carmen, followed by Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti. He also staged Kurt Weill in Berlin in Graz, Austria, Bach’s Coffee Cantata, Weill’s Down in the Valley and Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, Madama Butterfly and Il Tabarro for the California Opera Association, and Madama Butterfly and The Merry Widow at Opera in the Ozarks.

La Coupe et les Lèvres will be produced by Leonard and Carmela Altamura, founders of Inter-Cities Performing Arts, Inc., a New Jersey/New York-based philanthropic arts organization created for the purpose of improving ethnic, social, professional and cultural relations in the world through the arts. Among Inter-Cities’ programs are the bi-annual Altamura/Caruso International Voice Competition, the Cappuccino Concert Series and the Summer Institute “Encounter with the Masters,” conducted by Anton Coppola, which take place at the Altamura Center for Arts and Cultures in upstate New York. The world premiere of Puccini’s La Coupe et Les Lèvres is being produced under the aegis of Francesco Maria Taló’, Consul General of Italy, Renato Miracco, Director of the Italian Cultural Institute, and Andrea Barbaria, Consul of Italy in Newark, New Jersey.