Opera Album Review: A Splendidly Engaging New Opera — “The Leopard”
By Ralph P Locke
I encourage anybody interested in the current state of opera to get to know Michael Dellaira’s The Leopard.
Kim Josephson (Don Fabrizio), Robynne Redmon (Princess Stella), Minghao Liu (Tancredi Falconeri), Margarita Parsamyan (Concetta), Yaqi Yang (Angelica), Frank Ragsdale (Father Pirrone), Kevin Short (Cavaliere Chevalley), Thandolwethu Mamba (Don Calogero Sedara).
Frost Opera Theater and Symphony Orchestra/ cond. Gerard Schwarz.
Naxos 669052053 [2 CDs] 121 minutes.
The Leopard (Il gattopardo) is the most famous twentieth-century novel in Italian. Published very soon after the death of its author, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896-1957), it quickly became a best-seller in many languages. A famously extravagant film was made of it, directed by Luchino Visconti and starring Burt Lancaster, with the latter’s dialogue dubbed. The film also exists in an English version, in which the other characters are dubbed. This 1963 film was trimmed substantially for release in theaters but can now be seen (on any of several streaming channels) in its full two-hour-and-forty-nine-minute splendor, complete with a long, visually virtuosic ballroom sequence.
Nobody until now, it seems, has tried adapting the work for the stage, much less for the musical stage. Along comes Michael Dellaira (b. 1949), a composer whose name I had never encountered, but at least three of his previous operas have been released on commercial CDs.
Delllaira’s opera The Leopard has had some previous partial tryouts, but now the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music has taken on the challenge of giving it a full production and releasing it on a commercial recording. At the helm is the renowned conductor Gerard Schwarz (longtime music director of the Seattle Symphony). Some major operatic performers take leading roles here, with experienced young professionals and some Frost School students picking up the rest.
The result is very engaging and approachable, except for the intense angularity of many of the vocal lines — do composers feel they have to write this way to be taken seriously? On the plus side, Dellaira seems to have avoided giving any role too extended a range: nearly all the singers seem to be able to encompass both the highest and lowest notes comfortably. (I complained of the opposite in regard to an opera by Scott Wheeler that I otherwise greatly liked, Naga.)
The staged performances were hailed by the prolific critic and historian Paul Du Quenoy because they were easy to understand (he did not complain about the vocal lines). They were a relief from, as he puts it, the spate of recent operas about minorities, the agonies of the creative class, and other, to his mind, fashionable topics. (Du Quenoy’s review of a performance appeared in The European Conservative.) I have been deeply stirred by some of the works that Du Quenoy seems to be alluding to. (See my enthusiastic review of Jeanine Tesori’s opera about police brutality against young African-American men: Blue.) But, setting aside his distaste for the librettos of other recent operas and my annoyance at the work’s incessant vocal up-and-downs, Du Quenoy is right to praise this piece. Dellaira’s The Leopard is one of the most accessible new operas I have encountered in recent years. And that is indeed something to hail.
The Leopard, in any of its manifestations, tells the tale of an aristocrat in mid-nineteenth-century Italy, Don Fabrizio Corbera, who is caught between the comforts of his life and family and the challenges posed by the Risorgimento, in the person of his own beloved nephew Tancredi Falconeri. The libretto was crafted by the renowned poet, critic, editor, and libretto-translator J. D. McClatchy (1945-2018; he died just as the opera was being completed). He used relatively straightforward language, peppered by occasional poeticisms that, unfortunately, border on obscurity (“At last, beloved Sicily will throw off the Bourbon rule and resign its mystery”—resign?).
The libretto is well structured. The main action-scenes take place in 1860, near Palermo, when Garibaldi’s small red-shirted army arrives in Palermo to promote the unification of Italy — a process that will greatly reduce the power and influence of landed families such as the Corberas. These scenes are framed by a Prologue and Epilogue in which women in the family, a half-century later, recall, sometimes bitterly, the events in the opera’s main scenes. There are also occasional moments when a character (the town priest Pirrone, the nephew Tancredi) will “break the fourth wall” — as one says in the world of the theater — in order to comment directly to the listeners on the events being shown on stage. The isolated Concetta repeatedly engages in self-revealing soliloquy, though this seems less novel, since soliloquy has been a mainstay of opera — as indeed of spoken theater — since its very beginnings.

Frank Ragsdale (Father Pirrone) and Kim Josephson (Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina) in The Leopard. Photo: courtesy of the Frost School of Music
The plot involves an operatic triangle: Don Fabrizio and his wife Stella, Princess of Salina, want their nephew Tancredi to marry their daughter Concetta, but the spirited young man is drawn to the beautiful Angelica, daughter of Don Calogero Sedara, described in McClatchy’s wonderfully detailed synopsis as “a self-made man and an opportunist.” Father Pirrone tells us that Don Calgero makes money partly by buying up land “in shady deals,” strategically raising the price of grain during periods of famine. He “has a wife of great beauty whom no one has laid eyes on. And,” McClatchy adds pointedly, “a daughter, Anglica, whom everyone has.”
The opera includes many of the famous scenes in the book, such as when the priest (Father Pirrone) comes to talk to Don Fabrizio and finds him in his bath — and is flustered (and perhaps excited) to see him naked — or, toward the end of Act 2, a ball, at which Don Fabrizio — who, somewhat sympathetic to Tancredi’s cause, has voted for Sicily to become part of Italy — watches as Tancredi and Angelica dance and remarks that young people in love are “blind to each other’s faults, deaf to the warnings of fate, thinking their lives will be as smooth as the ballroom floor.” The opera gives particular emphasis to the role of Concetta, beloved by her parents but left, by Tancredi, to live her life alone, as shown in the epilogue when she slashes a portrait of her father with a knife and collapses weeping. (He is known as “The Leopard” because that fearsome animal is on the family crest.)

Composer Michael Dellaira collaborated with librettist J.D. McClatchy on The Leopard. Photo: South Florida Classical Review
I find Michael Dellaira’s music in this work generally effective at putting McClatchy’s savvy, touching, generally plain-spoken text across. There are frequent brief allusions to musical styles associated with various aspects of late-nineteenth-century Italian life: church hymns, ballroom waltzing, a string-instrument village band tuning up, a guitarist outside the window playing Edgardo’s final aria from Lucia di Lammermoor. There are notable moments when, “over” orchestral music, the characters do not sing, but are seen doing ordinary (or “ordinary”) things, such as dressing, gathering, making shady business deals (Don Calogero), or (in the case of Tancredi and Angelica) chasing each other playfully and then kissing passionately. Here the listener, unlike an operagoer in the theater, needs to follow the libretto’s stage directions closely in order to imagine the crucial stage action.
Another reason to look at the libretto frequently: those incessant up-and-downs in the vocal lines sometimes make the words hard to grasp by ear. In the theater, one would probably, I guess, be glancing often at the supertitles. If opera composers want the audience to watch the singers, they should try hard to make the words come across directly, as in a good Broadway show.

The cast of the 2022 production of The Leopard at the South Miami-Dade Cultural Center in Cutler Bay. Photo: Mitchell Zachs
In general, the performances are vivid, creating distinctive characters in front of us. We hear some notable artists: Kim Josephson (who has sung major baritone roles at the Met) as Don Fabrizio; Robynne Redmon (likewise much heard at the Met and other notable opera houses) as Stella; the fine character tenor Frank Ragsdale as the family priest; a wonderful young lyric tenor named Minghao Liu as Tancredi (the man of the future who ends up becoming less idealistic over time); Margarita Parsamyan, an accomplished young mezzo, as Concetta; and the bright and alert soprano Yaqi Yang as Tancredi’s beloved but rather superficial Angelica.
The renowned bass-baritone Kevin Short (another Met singer: Masetto, Colline, Yamadori) lights up one scene as a delegate from the new government, Cavaliere Chevalley di Monterzuolo, who offers Don Fabrizio a lifetime seat in the Senate as the spokesman for Sicily. The tired and aging Leopard refuses, and curses Sicilians for wanting to rest undisturbed — half-aware that this is just what he is doing by rejecting an appeal for his support. Thandolwethu Mamba (a member of the Metropolitan Opera Chorus) projects well as the unscrupulous Calogero.
All strive valiantly, and often with success, to put McClatchy’s text across while maintaining a steady core of tone. I hardly heard a single wobble or moment of barking!
I encourage anybody interested in the current state of opera to get to know Michael Dellaira’s The Leopard. If you stream or download instead of using CDs, you can find the synopsis and the libretto (though not the performer bios) at Naxos.com.
Ralph P. Locke is emeritus professor of musicology at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music. Six of his articles have won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for excellence in writing about music. His most recent two books are Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections and Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart (both Cambridge University Press). Both are now available in paperback; the second, also as an e-book. Ralph Locke also contributes to American Record Guide and to the online arts-magazines New York Arts, Opera Today, and The Boston Musical Intelligencer. His articles have appeared in major scholarly journals, in Oxford Music Online (Grove Dictionary), and in the program books of major opera houses, e.g., Santa Fe (New Mexico), Wexford (Ireland), Glyndebourne, Covent Garden, and the Bavarian State Opera (Munich). He is part of the editorial team behind the wide-ranging open-access periodical Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal. The present review first appeared in American Record Guide and is included here by kind permission.
Tagged: "The Leopard", Frank Ragsdale, Frost School of Music, Gerard Schwarz, J. D. McClatchy, Kevin Short, Kim Josephson, Michael Dellaira