Fedora was born a vehicle, devised by the playwright Victorien Sardou to showcase the talents of Sarah Bernhardt, who created the role of the impulsive Russian princess at the Theatre du Vaudeville in Paris in 1882. And a vehicle it has remained, in Giordano"s operatic adaptation of 16 years later, for a rare breed of soprano, able to approach both the verismo style and the larger-than-life character with the sort of conviction that makes the piece, and a whole school of popular theatre, live again. In the 1990s, Mirella Freni joined this select band when she took the part into her repertoire, and performed it in opera houses across Europe and the United States. From the moment Fedora appears - in this performance to a shower of applause that stops the music in its tracks - she barely leaves the stage. Her central position is further enhanced by the librettist"s ruthless cutting of the play"s minor characters and the dilution of radical political convictions to the level of a fashionable accessory sported by some of the characters, almost on a par with the revolvers, bicycles and telegrams that feature in the text. The onus is more than ever on the music to make the characters" impetuous behaviour believable, and Giordano takes the logic of the established verismo device of an orchestral intermezzo one stage further by making it a musical commentary on the heroine"s long silent scene alone in the middle of the second act, with the precise reasons for her inner turmoil plotted... Брайан Лардж