It’s September 1, 1299, in Richardson Auditorium, and we are treated to vistas of Florence. Terracotta roofs cluster under the Duomo, framing a quaint apartment scene. At 7:30 p.m., the crowd hushes and the orchestra begins: a group of precocious students in casual attire rush onto the stage, singing in a technique that pre-dates them by a few centuries.
The Princeton Opera Company made its triumphant return to the big stage on March 27 and 28 with Gianni Schicchi, an hour-long opera that is, plot-wise, “half-Knives Out, half-Romeo and Juliet,” as Yizhe Sun, the production’s conductor and music director, told me.
Gianni Schicchi (pronounced Jah-nee Skee-kee) is the first fully-staged student-run opera that’s been performed on Princeton’s campus since before COVID. Princeton Opera Company (POCO) was founded in 2011; the company went through a period of dormancy and was briefly run alongside Princeton Glee Club. But this past summer, POCO president Gabrielle Liberman ‘28 and treasurer Yehyun Hong ‘28 worked to revive the group.
Schicchi is based on a musical composition by Giacomo Puccini—the Italian composer famous for La bohème (1896) and Madama Butterfly (1904)—and a libretto (“little book” in Italian, referring to an opera’s lyrics) by Giovacchino Forzano. The basic plot is inspired by an episode of Dante’s Divine Comedy: a family enlists a man named Gianni Schicchi to forge a will after their uncle disinherits them. Antics ensure. (On the night I went, I noticed that as the family scours their dead relative’s house in search of the will, a copy of Inferno is tossed off a shelf.)
Choosing the opera itself was difficult: the project had to be manageable for the cast and enjoyable for the audience. There are few operas suitable for college-aged students to perform: opera singers don’t vocally mature until their late 20s or 30s, and singing overly complicated pieces could damage their voices. Not to mention, their careers—few singers below the age of 30, I am told, should be singing the most famous Wagnerian arias.
David Kellett, who serves as POCO’s faculty advisor and gives voice lessons to many of Gianni Schicchi’s stars, helped advise the group throughout the process. When we met on Zoom, Kellett—who looks like the seasoned singer he is, with his salt-and-pepper beard and newsboy cap—apologized that he had to rush into the city for an early evening rehearsal (he’s a tenor, with an extensive professional career).
“No one’s doing opera in high school,” Kellett said. This creates technical issues: while some may have a background in musical theater and some may have classical singing training, few have experience staging an entire opera.
To make the project feasible, Sun had to strategize shrinking an orchestral score meant for an 80-piece set to one that could fit in Richardson. Puccini operas are musically complex—the score is technically demanding, with frequent tempo changes.
The production’s set was makeshift: “We were scrounging. But it worked!” said Kellett. The armoire on stage came from Kellett’s basement; the steamer trunk came from his attic. The group bought the bed on Craigslist; Giovanni Nigro ‘28, the executive producer, bought the oxygen tank on eBay. POCO’s budget was small. And their practice time was limited: normally, Kellett said, staging a production of Gianni Schicchi would take around 70 hours of intense practice. He spent around 16 hours with the group prior to the performance. (They also practiced for several additional hours each week, but still—an impressive feat for a short time frame.)
Earlier this year, POCO was granted student group residency in Richardson for 2026—an honor which made staging the opera feasible. Over the two nights, they sold 600 tickets.
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Sun, a slim Shanghai-born Physics PhD candidate at Princeton, told me he thinks of opera “as sort of the quintessential interdisciplinary field in the humanities.” Between the libretto and the score and the singers and the acting and the set design and the languages (most operas are in Italian or German or Russian or French), operas are essentially microcosms of the Western canon.
Singing opera is an art and a science. Opera singers are grouped by voice type: women are cast as sopranos (highest range), mezzos, or contraltos (lowest range). Men are countertenors (highest), tenors, baritones, and basses (lowest). But these aren’t neat categories, either—a male singer can be, for example, a bass-baritone.
“Some voices are just better suited for a higher or lower register. But, with good technique, you can train to get better at a certain fach,” Liberman told me, using the German word for voice type. Operatic roles are written for particular fachs (the title role of Gianni Schicchi, for example, is meant for a lyric baritone—Lukas Palys, a first-year, took on the role in POCO’s production.)
Voice training is not for the faint of heart. I met with Arturo Cruz Urrutia, the production’s lead tenor, the afternoon before the show’s opening. We sat in an eating club backyard, pop music playing in the background—child’s play, vocally. As he spoke, Arturo, who’s from Puerto Rico, gesticulated with his hands in a way I could only describe as Italian.
“Operatic singing is not natural. You optimize for sound and projection with your body,” he said, reminding me that opera singers are unmiked. “One of my main obstacles that I’m still dealing with is releasing jaw and tongue tension.” He slackened his jaw and gestured around his face, explaining the acoustics of the mouth:
“Have you ever played a bell before? If you put your thumb on the bell, it’ll dampen the sound. The same thing happens with the voice. You’re pushing air out, but if you have tension in your jaw or in your tongue, it reduces the way the voice carries through and floats above an orchestra. So you have to learn how to release your jaw, your tongue. I kind of think: hot food in your mouth.”
When singing in practice rooms, Arturo sometimes squats or carries large objects to activate his abdominal muscles—all, of course, to optimize “his instrument.” But learning arias requires more than singing: knowing every word of the libretto is crucial. After all, opera requires acting: “I’ve had to convince myself that my love for Lauretta is so strong that it allows me to shift my moral compass,” Arturo emphasizes. At one point, his character must beg Schicchi to forge the will—if he doesn’t, then he won’t be able to marry Schicchi’s daughter, Lauretta. Arturo raps off his lines to me—he’s currently in Italian 101, but he speaks faster than my Italian cousins.
“The most important thing about opera is ultimately about telling the story—the text—but doing it, in old terms, in bel canto, which means beautiful singing,” explained Kellett. The effect they’re going for is called chiaroscuro, Liberman said: Italian for light-dark. (It’s also a concept in visual art: look up a Caravaggio painting).
“The idea of chiaroscuro is the ability to color your voice to match the text,” Kellett continued. “If you’re angry, there’s a certain edge to the thing. If it’s a beautiful love song, you’re able to bring in softness, a certain color to the text.”
“The cover is a way to find that perfect balance technically,” Liberman said, referring to a core principle of the bel canto tradition that helps singers maintain resonance and projection. As they progress up a scale, opera singers subtly modify vowel sounds in their mouths—rounding out an “e” into a “ü” (a German umlaut u), for instance—so the tone remains across a range. “The light is the ring and the point of the sound that allows you to cut through the orchestra, whereas the dark is the dome and the fullness of the sound that allows it to be rather beautiful,” she continued.
It strikes me that this dialectical tension is at the heart of Gianni Schicchi, too. Several parts are hilarious; the theater burst into laughter as the family quickly turned on their dead relative after learning he left his money to the Church. But others are tragic—the room grew silent as Lauretta (played by Talia Czuchlewski, a senior at Princeton and a soprano) sang “O Mio Babbino Caro,” the opera’s most famous aria. (Musically, I could even recognize it, which is saying something.) Laruetta begs her father to let her marry her love. The Italian lyrics were translated on set: “I would go to the Ponte Vecchio, / And throw myself in the Arno.” When Czuchlewski finished singing, applause echoed in Richardson. (The role of Lauretta was shared; graduate student Sanjana Kamath played her on the second night.)
Before Gianni Schicchi, I had seen three operas—all for class trips—and I had, accordingly, fallen asleep at three operas. Having no musical training or knowledge of Italian or German or French, I am woefully opera-illiterate. I am not even much of a fan of musical theater, opera’s bastardized younger sister. But even I found Gianni Schicchi thoroughly, wonderfully enjoyable.
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When I met Sun, in the Rocky Common Room—he wore a maroon button-down shirt and a scarf—he told me multiple times he was a “pushy person.” I read him as passionate.
At Harvard, where he studied as an undergrad, Sun realized his love of opera, participating in multiple fully-staged productions. His commitment to the art form is obvious: when he was conducting live, elegantly gesturing in a language foreign to me, I noticed he mouthed the libretto in Italian. “It’s a collaborative process,” he said, of conducting. “It’s important to sing along, mentally, with the singers.”
Sun’s love of music has influenced his academic focus: he’s interested in collective behavior, in how “microscopic interactions lead to macroscopic phenomena.” And when he spoke about physics, I couldn’t help but think of all the microscopic elements that went into Gianni Schicchi:
“When you go an order higher up in an organization—the organism or the system you’re looking at—new laws emerge. And so, for instance, at the most basic level of atoms, you have the laws of physics. And then a level above, you have molecules, and chemistry, and then all these molecules come together, and you have biology. There’s this somewhat arbitrary division between science and the arts and humanities that we have in our modern thinking. But in fact, one way to look at it is that the arts and humanities are just the highest level—there’s just something fuzzy in between that we don’t understand yet.”
Sofia Cipriano is a contributing writer and section head for Second Look.