He's come a long way from the young man who left Juilliard to take a job with the Works Progress Administration. The WPA put some men to work building sewers. Others paved roads.
Anton Coppola? He conducted Samson and Delilah.
It's not how most think of the WPA, but Federal One — the arts arm of the Administration — employed 16,000 musicians, of which the man who would ultimately land at Opera Tampa, with more than a nudge from Judy Lisi, was one. Although Coppola had an early, bright start in opera — he sang in the children's chorus of Turandot at the Metropolitan Opera when he was 10 — he, like so many others, found himself in need of work during the Great Depression. He left Juilliard and took a job with a Federal One opera company in Staten Island.
Opera has been the Maestro's life. Puccini and Verdi, his wife, Almerinda, told the New York Times last year, are "his two gods."
Turandot — the Maestro corrects me when I pronounce it Turan-doh, pronouncing it to rhyme with spot ("You must pronounce the T, because Puccini himself pronounced it that way") — was Puccini's final opera. He died before finishing the final scene, and while his contemporary, Franco Alfano, finished the opera — and, while for 91 years, audiences have heard, for the most part, that ending, the happy ending, so unlike, say, the ending for La Boheme, Madama Butterfly, Tosca, or, well, you get the idea — Puccini excelled at tragic opera.
Which is why so many crave a less happy ending for Turandot.
"The other composers who wrote endings to this, none of them enjoyed the popular success of the one that was originally done by Franco Alfano," Coppola says "which is the one we all know, the one we all have enjoyed, and it's very fine — except I considered that another ending was possible."
Maestro Coppola's relationship with Turandot stretches back 90 years, to that stint in the Met's children's chorus in 1927. He has conducted this opera many times since, most recently in Tampa in 2004. With nine decades of Puccini in his life, who better, then, to compose a proper ending for this pageant-like opera?
Turandot is a princess obsessed with the atrocities inflicted upon her ancestor, Princess Lo-u-Ling, by an invading prince who raped and murdered her millennia ago. She beheads all men who try and woo her; nevertheless, an unnamed prince pursues her and, despite her protests, when he kisses her, she falls in love.
Yeah, it doesn't hold water for a lot of people. Maestro Coppola will present his ending Saturday night.
"My ending is completely different," Coppola says "My version is the unknown prince, even though he kisses her, it doesn't alter her attitude because this woman is psychotically obsessed with the feeling of vengeance, regarding the fact that ancestors of hers were brutally murdered by men thousands and thousands of years ago. You must understand, this is a fairy tale, and we're talking about legendary times."
Maestro Coppola worked on his ending "over a period of years, because all of my composing activities have to be interrupted by my conducting activities," he says.
If you find this ending more feminist than the happily-ever-after fairy tale, well, you're not alone.
"Well," he laughs, "some women hate men."
Coppola Conducts: 100 Years Young
Mar. 25: 5:30 p.m. cocktail reception; 7 p.m. concert; 9:30 p.m. gala
$48.50-$78.50
813-229-STAR. strazcenter.org
This article appears in Mar 16-23, 2017.