Almost as often as Giordano is written off as a one-opera composer (if that), Fedora is dismissed as a one-tune opera, the tune in question being the tenor Loris's ''amor ti vieta''. Pish-tush, it is a three-tune opera. Loris is the second man in Fedora's life; the first, Count Vladimir, is murdered (by Loris) half-way through Act 1 and before he has had a chance to sing a note, but not before a wide-spanned lyrical melody has become associated with him, or rather with Fedora's illusory image of him as noble, virtuous and worthy of her love: he turns out later to have been a thoroughly unpleasant character and he casts a long shadow, symbolized by references to 'his' melody, over the remainder of the opera. Fedora, who has not yet met Loris nor learned the truth, desires revenge and vows that she will have it in a solemn, chorale-like phrase that is intended to recall Orthodox chant. Vows of vengeance (and the melodies accompanying them) have a way of coming home to roost and that tune, too, becomes something of a leitmotiv.
Three tunes do not an opera make, of course, and there are lengthy passages between the pretexts for their recurrence during which Giordano can find little for his singers to do but declaim at each other. He therefore sends the entire cast, in search of local colour, firstly to Paris (cue for a frothy waltz, for a lively song in praise of Russian women—the tune here, to be sure, is not by Giordano, who pinched it from Alabiev—and, less expectedly, for a polacca and two piano solos—a nocturne and a bravura study—the latest lover of one of Fedora's friends being a Polish pianist, ''the nephew and successor of Chopin''), and then to Switzerland. The drama by now is moving faster than the music, and thee is a dispiriting quart d'heure during which Giordano absently writes a mock-folk-song for a chorus of female peasants, two or three largely irrelevant and not very interesting solo numbers, a tea-drinking ensemble and even, heaven help us, a bicycle aria before getting on with the plot. And when he does get back to the story his invention is not always up to it: the potentially heart-rending scene, in which Loris receives news of his mother's and brother's deaths and Fedora realizes that she is responsible for them, is sketched with no more than a couple of anonymous vocal phrases and a scrap of would-be pathetic violin obbligato.
Those three tunes, in short, are stretched well beyond breaking-point, and the rents are often patched (when they are not left gaping) with threadbare material, but Fedora, for all that, is more than three tunes and a lot of padding. The timing of ''Amor ti vieta'', to begin with, is quite stunning, and tells you immediately that Giordano is something more than a tunesmith: it arrives with almost appalling abruptness, like a bolt of lightning (or like love at first sight, indeed), and its impact keeps one listening through the longueurs of Act 3 in the confidence that at the crucial moment Giordano will produce the goods. And he does: his recipe for Fedora's death-scene sounds appallingly artificial and no doubt is so, but my goodness, how satisfyingly sad it is! As her life ebbs away in broken phrases we hear firstly a recollection of the Orthodox chant theme, then from off-stage the voice of a child (first cousin to the shepherd-boy in Puccini's Tosca) playing a concertina, lastly the pathetic ghost of ''Amor ti vieta''. Enough: you will know by now whether this is the sort of thing that you will like. I sneer at it myself in my severer moments, but then I play that sotto voce duet in which Fedora learns the truth about Vladimir (no accompaniment save ersatz Chopin from off-stage) or the ensuing wordless scene of her indecision (a wandering string line suggesting that Giordano had heard the Pimen scene in Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov; then Loris's and Vladimir's themes weighed against each other) and I say ''Crude, undeniably crude, and vastly inferior to Puccini, but what a reek of the stage!''
And it is the stage and its over-life-size gestures that Eva Marton's performance of the title-role immediately evokes. She is not an especially subtle artist and hers is the voice of a Turandot rather than the Tosca that I suspect Giordano had in mind, but she has the declamatory fearlessness and the flamboyance that the character demands. Carreras, too, enjoys every opportunity for full-throated 'can belto' that the opera offers, and he is in burnished, Italianate, risk-taking voice. The supporting roles are only so-so (an Olga who manages to be both plummy and shrill; a de Siriex who sings ''La donna russa'' loudly, very fast and with not a trace of charm), but Giuseppe Patane expertly plays up such subtleties as the score contains and the recording is lively and reasonably spacious.'