Saturday night’s opening performance of “Two Women” at the San Francisco Opera was billed as a world premiere, and strictly speaking that’s the truth. But it also implies that the audience might have heard music they’d never heard before.

They didn’t.

For anyone who has even a passing acquaintance with the work of Puccini, Mascagni or Leoncavallo —which is admittedly not everyone, but surely includes a large majority of the occupants of the War Memorial Opera House on any given evening — there is practically nothing in this score by the Italian composer Marco Tutino that doesn’t already seem perfectly familiar. The harmonies, the orchestral palette, the melodic formulas, the characterizations, even the placement of particular arias within the dramatic structure — they’re all drawn straight from the Puccini playbook, and it’s hard to avoid feeling that Puccini did them better the first time around.

I can’t recall encountering an ostensibly new creation that arrived onstage seeming so thoroughly predigested.

On the most literal level, “Two Women,” based on a novel by Alberto Moravia (“La Ciociara”) that became a 1960 film starring Sophia Loren in an Oscar-winning role, is a tale of the travails of life during wartime. In the last years of World War II, the title characters — Cesira, a headstrong Roman shopkeeper, and her teenage daughter, Rosetta — retreat to the mountainous countryside where Cesira was raised.

There they contend with air raids, food shortages, evil jackbooted Nazis and, after liberation, a horrific rape perpetrated by Moroccan troops fighting alongside the French (this is based in historical fact). As if those weren’t bad enough, Tutino and co-librettist Fabio Ceresa, working from a scenario by Luca Rossi, have added a new villain, Giovanni, who is a rapist, murderer, Fascist and opportunist rolled into one.


Committed to archaism

One doesn’t have to be a diehard modernist, or even much of a modernist at all, to appreciate the weakness of that position. Things have changed since 1900 — if nothing else, there have been two world wars — and plenty of musical ideas have been hatched in the interim. What possible purpose is served by turning one’s back on all of it?

That doesn’t mean there’s nothing to be gained by drawing on the artistic legacy of the past; even that archmodernist Arnold Schoenberg famously said there was still plenty of good music to be written in C major. In opera alone, the work of such composers as Carlisle Floyd, Jake Heggie and the late Daniel Catán are evidence of how vibrantly and inventively traditional tools can be put to new uses.

“Two Women,” by contrast, seems committed to archaism for its own sake. Throughout the two-act score, Tutino uses lush, rhapsodic orchestral textures and conventional tonal harmonies not so much as a way of advancing the story or establishing character, but as if these were the only musical modes available to him.

It’s telling, perhaps, that the most inventive and arresting segments of the score are the episodes during which that presupposition melts away. During an orchestral interlude between two scenes in Act 1, a predictable, surging Cinerama melody gets interrupted by angular bursts of percussion; near the end of the opera, a villager driven mad by Nazi depredations is briskly etched by unbalanced woodwind writing.

But for the most part, Tutino defers faithfully to his long-dead models. Giovanni, who has been expanded from a minor and not particularly wicked character in the original into a full-fledged ogre, comes with so many textual and musical allusions to Scarpia from “Tosca” that he seems like the Baron’s even-more-evil twin. The tenor is shot to death after singing a rewrite of “E lucevan le stelle,” and an old woman bustles around like the Sacristan in drag. There are harmonies lifted straight from “La Bohème,” and the rattling xylophones from “Turandot” appear for no clear dramatic reason.

Impassioned performers

“Two Women” may be an ultrathin invention, but the San Francisco Opera has built an undeniably attractive edifice out of tissue paper. Director Francesca Zambello’s production, with handsome sets by Peter J. Davison, strides confidently past the melodramatic cliches of the scenario to give the drama some heart and heft, and Luisotti deploys his mastery of the verismo style to deliver a musically impassioned performance.

The cast, too, sounded largely first-rate on opening night. Soprano Anna Caterina Antonacci’s Cesira was a dynamo of emotional and vocal majesty, singing with a full-throated urgency that made even the most conventional melodic outbursts seem affecting. Tenor Dimitri Pittas, making his company debut as the lovelorn intellectual Michele, struggled with the role’s high-test notes but otherwise delivered a lucid, shapely performance.


Mark Delavan as Giovanni and Christian Van Horn as the local Wehrmacht functionary divided the low-lying villainy between them capably. Adler Fellow Zanda Svede sang alluringly as two different village women, and so did Edward Nelson as a wounded American soldier whose final reappearance as a miraculous deus ex machina marks the screenplay’s most risible moment. Pasquale Esposito, a charismatic and dulcet-toned singer, showed up at the end to deliver a splendid account of the Italian pop song (“La strada nel bosco”) that runs like an earworm through the entire score.

Ultimately, such pleasures as “Two Women” can provide are the comfortable pleasures of familiarity. The piece is nominally new, yet it feels like a long-lost and not as successful cousin to “Tosca” or “Cavalleria rusticana.” Which of course raises the question: Why not simply revive “Tosca” one more time and be done with it?


San Francisco Opera: “Two Women,” through June 30, War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness Ave., S.F. $96-$384, (415) 864-3330,