Programme Note

At the 2025 International Festival, we have commissioned a series of expert essays to help you Dive Deeper into your Festival experience.

This essay on Puccini's Suor Angelica explores how a story once maligned as too 'romantic' and 'trivial' is in fact heightened by its historical context.

Sharpened by Reality

“A nun that has had a ‘past’ before she renounces the world does not commit suicide after seven years of convent life because she learns of the death of her love-child,” wrote the New York Times following the 1918 world premiere of Puccini’s Suor Angelica. “It sounds too romantic, this story; a romance blurred by triviality.” The critic, James Gibbons Huneker, picked apart some of these “trivialities,” namely the scenes between the sisters of the convent that precede the arrival of Angelica’s aunt and the acceleration of the drama.  

In writing off these scenes as trivial, Huneker missed the heart of Puccini’s work. To be a heroine in a Puccini opera is, normally, to move through a world full of men with a target on your back. Suor Angelica is his only opera in which men don’t appear onstage, yet even within a cloister of nuns the shortcomings of sisterhood are still felt.

There are also the circumstances that lead Angelica to “renounce the world.” Her “past,” as Huneker euphemistically puts it, makes her a double-outcast in the world; first through her exile to the convent and then a second exile within the world of the convent itself. This is the real tragedy of Suor Angelica. But the tragic failings aren’t so much hers as they are the societies in which she lives.  

Community in the Convent

“We all long for loving community. It enhances life’s joy,” writes the feminist critic and theorist bell hooks. “But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”  

We get glimpses of this loving community within those “trivial” opening moments, moments where even when Angelica’s fellow sisters are reprimanded, they have some form of solidarity. The first solo lines of the opera, in which the Monitoress chastises two postulants who, like Angelica, were late for the evening service, serve to both create community among the sisters and isolation for Angelica: Unlike the two postulants, Angelica performed penance before entering the church. She is therefore spared punishment.

The postulants, like two sisters who committed infractions during the service, accept their consequences dutifully enough, yet throughout this we can feel a tension build musically and dramatically in the background. It spills over a few minutes later when, as other sisters confess to having earthly desires for the lives they left behind, Angelica says she has none. The sisters whisper amongst themselves: Angelica would know from desire, they say. They know why she’s really there.

This is a short, perhaps even “trivial” moment, but it’s one that could be read with hooks in mind. Indeed, Angelica seems to be the only sister who doesn’t fear being alone while her fellow sisters use their community as a means of escape.

Alone in Grief

Throughout all of this, Angelica remains an enigma to us. Her sisters think she really misses her life of privilege. Her estranged and aristocratic aunt, the Zia Principessa, thinks she’s a lost cause, a blight on the family’s reputation. Angelica, however, is happy to give up her family inheritance, her status, almost everything – except for her son, whom she loves. It’s almost as an afterthought to Angelica’s dramatic outburst hoping to learn something about him that the Principessa informs her niece that her son died two years ago.

We finally enter Angelica’s perspective at this moment, with a time-stopping inner-monologue of an aria, ‘Senza mamma.’ Angelica sings it as though addressing her dead son. Her grief is pure. We don’t learn anything about the circumstances of her son’s birth (an innocent first love? A more sinister sexual assault?), or how Angelica feels about being cast out of her family. We don’t even hear her grieve the loss in the abstract. What really undoes her, she sings to her son, “is that you died without knowing how much your mother loved you.”

Sisterhood Without Solidarity

Angelica can be alone, but the idea of continuing in this isolation now, both within and without a community, is what leads her to end her life. Her suicide isn’t a romantic gesture, it’s an act of desperation; of escape from a society where there is no sense of solidarity, even among those supposedly most committed to the idea of sisterhood. This would have been a significant statement even in 1918, when New York was already 70 years into the first wave of feminism – one in which “sisterhood” became a political concept. Without perhaps being aware of it, Puccini’s story wasn’t blurred by triviality but sharpened by reality.

Throughout the century to come, sexuality, shame, and isolation would be constants in subsequent waves of feminism while systems continued to fail women (including, notably, Magdalene Establishments which, while well-known in Ireland, also existed throughout the United Kingdom). Suor Angelica showed us the cost of loveless community — the tragedy isn’t too romantic, but too real.

© Olivia Giovetti, 2025