Suor Angelica

Suor Angelica is the middle panel of Il trittico, premiered with the other two at the Metropolitan Opera on 14 December 1918. Puccini's sister Iginia was mother superior of a convent at Vicopelago, and he went there to play the score to the nuns; the cast is entirely female, an unusual constraint he set himself deliberately. Of the three operas it was the one he loved best and the one that failed. The soprano's aria comes near the end, after she learns that the child taken from her seven years earlier is dead.