Hershey Felder’s Intimate Portrait of Puccini

By Eric George Tauber

You who are enclosed in ice, conquered by flame, you will love him too! ~from Turandot by Giacomo Puccini

CINCINNATI, Ohio — Lovers of opera know Giacomo Puccini as the composer of La Boheme, Tosca, Madame Butterfly and Turandot. Maestro Hershey Felder inhabits this persona in his latest film project: Hershey Felder Presents Puccini. Felder is world famous for his biographical portrayals of famous composers, sometimes drawing upon his own Jewish heritage for figures like George Gershwin, Irving Berlin and Leonard Bernstein.

Felder takes us to Puccini’s birth home in Lucca, Italy, which is now a museum. On a grand piano, he accompanies four accomplished opera singers, Nathan Gunn, Gianna Corbisiero, Charles Castronovo and Ekaterina Siurina. There are subtitles to help us understand what they’re saying, yet opera isn’t about the words so much as where the voices take us.

A small-town bambino, Puccini was groomed for church music like his father before him. But it was the theatre that enraptured his spirit. As a young man, Puccini walked the 20 kilometers to Pisa for a production of Verdi’s Aïda.

Puccini’s characters are not larger-than-life. They are simple, relatable human beings who struggle to survive and often die tragically. Cold and hungry himself, the threadbare artists of La Boheme were very familiar to him. And his own lover, Elvira, was as suspicious, jealous and possessive of him as Tosca is of Cavaradosi.

Critics of Puccini point out that his women suffer great tsuris at the hands of fiendish men. The way Felder tells it, Puccini wrote them thus to pull our heartstrings. When a man dies, his wife moves on. When a woman dies, everyone suffers. True that.

Opera houses, with their cost prohibitive grandeur, struggle to stay viable amidst the world’s ever changing musical tastes. And yet, opera endures because of where it takes us. We are elevated by the ecstasies of love, then plunges down to the depths of despair, ending in acts of murder and suicide. And we leap to our feet in rapturous applause.

Hershey Felder Presents Puccini is more than a night at the opera. Felder paints an intimate portrait of a musical genius with demons of his own- whose music left an indelible mark on the world.

This and other musical film projects can be viewed by going to www.hersheyfelder.net.

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Eric Tauber is a former San Diego theater reviewer now living in Cincinnati.  He may be contacted via eric.tauber@sdjewishworld.com