Puccini's Il trittico, three one-act operas about death feared, mourned and finally laughed at, plays complete on the Royal Opera's Main Stage.
Puccini’s Il trittico, three one-act operas written as a single evening, returns complete to the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden on Friday 5 March 2027. The production is Richard Jones’s.
The first panel, Il tabarro, is a Grand Guignol on a Paris barge that ends in a murder. Suor Angelica is set in a convent and has no men in its cast; in it a woman learns her child is dead. Gianni Schicchi is a comedy about a family squabbling over a will.
Il trittico opened in New York in 1918 and was broken up almost at once. Houses found Schicchi easy to sell and Angelica hard.
Played together, the three make one argument about death: feared, mourned and finally laughed at. Schicchi loses some of its force standing alone, and Suor Angelica runs for an hour with no dramatic incident until its last ten minutes.
The run continues to Thursday 18 March 2027, with all three operas on each evening. It is the first of two Jones productions at the house this spring, and Káťa Kabanová is the second.