Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of the Florentine woman named Mona (Madame) Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo has inspired many tributes--most recently the revival of a century-old opera by the American Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall.
After the theft of the portrait from the Louvre in 1911, Leonardo’s painted lady became the most wanted—and written about—woman in the world. In the spring of 1913—months before the painting’s recovery—Beatrice von Dovsky presented a libretto to the German composer Max von Schillings, who worked on Mona Lisa during his military service.
Schillings presented his new composition on September 26, 1915 in Stuttgart. Richard Strauss conducted the first two performances in Vienna. Mona Lisa debuted at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1923. The opera was performed more than 1,200 times in the decade after its debut but then fell into relative obscurity.
Although I am still awaiting delivery of the audio CD (above), I am intrigued by the whimsical plot, which does indeed focus on Leonardo's Florentine muse and her overbearing husband. In the opera, Francesco del Giocondo is consumed with jealousy because in Leonardo’s painting, his wife—always somber around him— smiles in a way that she has never smiled at him.
In the first act, a messenger named Giovanni arrives on behalf to the Pope to purchase a pearl from Francesco's famous collection, kept in a shrine-like closet so air-tight that no one can breathe in it for longer than an hour. To preserve the pearls' luster, Francesco has Lisa wear them every night.
Opera being opera, it turns out that Lisa and Giovanni had been in love before her arranged marriage. Alone with Lisa, Giovanni persuades her to run away with him the next morning, when he will come back to collect the pearl.
When Francesco returns home, he sees the tantalizingly mysterious smile on his wife's face. Immediately suspicious, he locks all the exits from the house. Giovanni is forced to hide in the pearls' sealed enclosure.
Lisa cannot disguise her anxiety, which her husband deliberately misinterprets as desire for Giovanni. Lisa tries to reassure Francesco but asks for one wish: the only key to the pearls' reliquary. Accusing her of being jealous of the pearls, Francesco throws it into the river.
The next morning a distraught Lisa, although hoping for a sign of life from the closet, realizes that Giovanni has suffocated. Lisa's stepdaughter Dianora enters with the key, which had tumbled into her boat the night before. When Lisa presents Francesco with it, he assumes Giovanni must have escaped.
Lisa demands that Francesco fetch the pearls so she can wear them. With that now-infamous smile, she waits for him to enter the jewels' enclosure--and then locks the door behind him.
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