Leonora's Last Act: Essays in Verdian Discourse 9781400866687

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
CHAPTER ONE. On Reaching the Beguiled Shore
CHAPTER TWO. "Va pensiero" and the Insidious Mastery of Song
CHAPTER THREE. "Insolite forme," or Basevi's Garden Path
CHAPTER FOUR. Leonora's Last Act: La forza del destino
CHAPTER FIVE. Falstaff and Verdi's Final Narratives
CHAPTER SIX. Reading the livrets, or the Chimera of "Authentic" Staging
CHAPTER SEVEN. Lina Kneels; Gilda Sings
CHAPTER EIGHT. Leonora's Last Act: It trovatore

Citation preview

Leonora's Last Act

PRINCETON STUDIES IN OPERA CAROLYN ABBATE AND ROGER PARKER, SERIES EDITORS

Reading Opera, edited by Arthur Groos and Roger Parker Puccini's "Turandot": The End of the Great Tradition by William Ashbrook and Harold Powers Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century by Carolyn Abbate Wagner Androgyne: A Study in Interpretation by Jean-Jacques Nattiez, translated by Stewart Spencer Music in the Theater: Essays on Verdi and Other Composers by Pierluigi Petrobelli, translated by Roger Parker Leonora's Last Act: Essays in Verdian Discourse by Roger Parker

Leonora's Last Act ESSAYS IN VERDIAN DISCOURSE

Roger Parker

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright© 1997 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Parker, Roger, 1951Leonora's last act : essays in Verdian discourse I Roger Parker. p. em. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-691-01557-0 (cl: alk. paper) 1. Verdi, Giuseppe, 1813-1901-Criticism and interpretation. 2. Opera-Italy-19th century. I. Title. ML410.V4P155 1997 782.1'092-dc21 97-5487 CIP This book has been composed in Saban Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources http://pup. princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For Edward, Meg, and Pierluigi

Thus ornament is but the guiled shore To a most dangerous sea; [... ] in a word, The seeming truth which cunning times put on To entrap the wisest. The Merchant of Venice, Act III, scene 2 But what have I said, what can I say, of an Italian opera? -Only, little to the Purpose as it is, I wonder how I have been able to say so much: For who can describe Sound? Or what Words shall be found to imbody air? Pamela 4.111-12

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

XI

CHAPTER ONE

On Reaching the Beguiled Shore

3

CHAPTER Two

"Va pensiero" and the Insidious Mastery of Song

20

CHAPTER THREE

"Insolite forme," or Basevi's Garden Path

42

CHAPTER FouR

Leonora's Last Act: La forza del destino

61

CHAPTER FIVE

Falstaff and Verdi's Final Narratives

100

CHAPTER SIX

Reading the livrets, or the Chimera of "Authentic" Staging

126

CHAPTER SEVEN

Lina Kneels; Gilda Sings

149

CHAPTER EIGHT

Leonora's Last Act: It trovatore

168

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ALTHOUGH ONLY TWO of these essays have previously been published in anything like their present form, they were written at various times and in various circumstances during the last several years. At one point the book even included a chapter hailing back to the misty past of my doctoral dissertation, gaining inclusion only by accruing (somewhat to my surprise) an ironic dialogue between the author and his younger shade; but it had to go, superseded in attitude and then, worse still, by more thoughtful research done by others. Most of what remains started life either as a conference paper or in much abbreviated form as a program book for a recording or performance, though all were more-or-less consciously thought of as eventually finding their place in a volume such as this. The collection thus inevitably involves complicated intellectual debts, and the fact that I should like to acknowledge some of them is itself not easily disentangled from other, more personal matters. But at least in my case the fact that acknowledgments traditionally come at the front rather than the back of a book is fitting. In one important sense, I finished the thing in order to publish the acknowledgments: they are anything but an afterthought. Practical matters first. The book gained its initial impulse from the freedom from teaching allowed me by a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Along the way, able assistance has come from the staff of several libraries, especially the late Carlo Clausetti and others at the Archivio Ricordi in Milan; the staff of the Museo teatrale alla Scala; Marisa Di Gregorio Casati and Lina Re at the Istituto nazionale di studi verdiani; Lenore Coral and James Cassaro at the Cornell University Library; and John Wagstaff and his staff at the Music Faculty Library in Oxford. I am lucky enough to be long part of a nurturing Verdian family. Some composers attract an oddly antagonistic bunch, but the Verdians seem by and large to get on rather well. In particular, thanks to Julian Budden, Marcello Conati, Francesco Degrada, Fabrizio Della Seta, James Hepokoski, Joseph Kerman, David Lawton, Harold Powers, and Gary Tomlinson: I've quoted them, sometimes argued with them at length, probably stolen from them at times; I remain grateful for what they have taught me and shared with me. Special mention should go to two further verdiani distintissimi: Philip Gossett, who taught me how to edit nineteenth-century opera and-even more important-encouraged me by his example to be passionate about what truth we can find; and my ex-colleague at Cornell, David Rosen, who over the years read many portions of the typescript,

xii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

occasionally threatened to reach for his revolver, and saved me from numerous errors, embarrassments, and excesses. Alison Latham stimulated the program-book beginnings of several of these essays, frequently helping to deflate my too-serious prose; Arthur Groos and Kofi Agawu were sometimes constructively irreverent about the interim results. My considerable debts to Gabriele Datto are both scholarly and personal, not least because part of his Italy has become mine. William Ashbrook, bless him, sat me down in his bilges, put a glass in my hand, and asked, "But have you heard [unpronounceable] sing it?" And thanks above all to Carolyn Abbate: our years of sometime operatic collaboration set me on the way toward this book, and the influence of her extraordinary intellect and musical imagination will I hope be evident on at least a few of its pages. No one could be luckier than I in the way of students now become friends and colleagues. The experience of working with the likes of Katherine Bergeron, Julie Brown, Heather Hadlock, Emanuele Senici, Anya Suschitzky, and many, many others has been indispensable, influencing the ways I think in countless ways. And two ex-students, both now scholars in their own considerable right, are central to this book's development. Elizabeth Hudson started me thinking about Verdian narrative, and never let me win an argument too easily. Mary Ann Smart has been a continuous source of intellectual companionship over the last few years; she has read critically every page of the typescript except this one, and in the end it was she who shamed me into finishing. My three dedicatees will find themselves in curious company, but there is method in my choice. I don't think I would have been in the position to write this (or any other) book without their various acts of intellectual faith. Thanks, then, to three mentors: Edward Stead; Margaret Bent; and above all Pierluigi Petrobelli, who started me on the Verdian trail and has been with me the entire journey, a constant model of scholarly integrity and a constant reminder of the values of friendship and intellectual exchange. Last, I want to mention Lynden Cranham. She was in another country when much of the book was written and (I'm proud to say) has read hardly a word of it. She did, though, occasionally offer to read a page or two, and for that I am grateful. Oxford-Havant, 1996

Leonora's Last Act

Chapter One ON REACHING THE BEGUILED SHORE The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and the landscape, and why not: Good and Evil, desire and its object: dualities we can conceive but not perceive. -Roland Barthes, Camera Iucida

THE FINAL STAGES of this book were completed in a tiny third-floor room on the south coast of England. I look out onto a suburban landscape, a busy road, a tennis club beyond. As I stare from the windowwhich I do all too often-my sense of two peripheral objects alters the view. Even though it is just invisible, I know that the sea is very close: its beguiling shore, hesitant and sprawling, begins no more than a mile away, and for me its unseen presence seems often to invite migration, or at least a journey-travel south, travel west. The other object is a photograph of Verdi in old age-the felt hat, frock coat, and cravat (see figure 1.1). I picked it up on one journey south, and now, in suitably severe dark wood frame, it occupies the space between window and ceiling. The sea is invisible and alluring; Verdi, on the other hand, looks out from his frame with a minimum of fuss: unassuming, gently mocking, in certain lights perhaps even slightly sinister. "Your granddad, is it?" asked someone installing my latest electronic gadget. I hesitated for a second; but of course I had to tell the truth, admit that he was a text from History, but that I nevertheless felt his presence, that his views were important to me. I begin with these two very different images by way of introducing what seems to me a significant connective among essays that, though obviously linked by a common subject, in other ways range rather freely. They were written over a period of about ten years and, placed as they are now in roughly chronological order, show certain progressions, notably a tendency to engage less extensively with analysis as the nineties rolled on. However, all of them are fueled by what may seem to somehas on occasion seemed to me-internal warring factions. On the one hand is

4

CHAPTER ONE

Figure 1.1. Verdi in old age. Photograph, Archivio Storico Casa Ricordi. Reproduced by permission.

the guiled shore To a most dangerous sea; [... ] in a word, The seeming truth which cunning times put on To entrap the wisest.

On many pages of this book, it will be clear that I have-looking ever westward-willingly succumbed to the traps that today's cunning times put on. A good number of musicology's current interdisciplinary enthusi-

ON REACHING THE BEGillLED SHORE

5

asms will here make an entrance, and although I've tried to keep the fanfares muted, some in our divided discipline will probably see the muting as merely pusillanimous. On the other hand, though, is that photograph of Verdi, the old man in the felt hat, looking out wisely at the world and its follies. Of course its seeming simplicity and directness of expression mask layers of contradictory meaning, some of which I think I can divine, and some of which I have tried to unravel. But its real and sometimes unsettling presence nevertheless serves as a reminder of the intense pleasures that can come from proximity to historical objects. To put all this another way, what principally connects the manner of these essays may be the way in which fashionable, mostly postmodern approaches "brush history again the grain" (Benjamin's resonant phrase): continually come into contact with details of the Verdian text, whether musical or verbal or scenic, details that commonly give rise to close reading, sometimes from a narrowly philological point of view, sometimes from a stance more obviously analytical. In a period when competing musicological camps regularly issue separatist or hegemonic claims, some of them quite strident, it would be impressive to claim that this attempt to display an unlikely cohabitation, a melding of the "old" and the "new," is itself a manifesto. Alas, I had little choice: the balance of issues merely reflects the fact that I grew up musicologically in the heyday of modernist analysis; that I have spent a great deal of the last decade on editing and archival research in an institutional environment increasingly dismissive of such activities; but that I am also deeply in sympathy with many of the aims (perhaps fewer of the methods) of the "new" musicology. Divided aims become perilous; one is vulnerable to snipers from two directions. Far from some latter-day colossus, bestriding the two sides of a mighty divide, I have often felt myself one of those too-loquacious Metastasian characters, adrift on a hermeneutic sea, with only metaphor to help make sense of the world: Qual nave smarrita Tra sirti e tempesta, Ne luce, ne porto Gli toglie il timor;

Of course, the abrupt juxtaposition of two modes that are often thought antithetical has not been without its ironic possibilities, and can sometimes even end in humor (the complete absence of which improves few types of human communication). But are there more substantial mutual benefits? Unless one wishes to profess a distrust of knowledge, it is hard to see how, to take the first of my "close reading" modes, textcritical activity cannot enrich postmodern theory of many persuasions. Of course, accommodations will be necessary, not least an acceptance on

6

CHAPTER ONE

the part of text critics that their decisions are historically contingent, thus betraying ideological assumptions about the object under scrutiny. Even supposing this level of agreement, my suggestion of possible rapprochement might nevertheless seem blithely utopian. After all, recent cultural criticism, particularly in the field of literary theory, has seen a general shift of emphasis from historical concerns (in particular those of the "author") to contemporary ones (in particular those of the "reader"), and with it a tendency (some would say a do-it-yourself license) to ignore the work of text critics. But it is, I think, becoming more generally recognized that some level of text criticism inevitably occurs whenever we read, and that critics who uncritically choose to deal with whichever text comes to hand run the risk of linking themselves unknowingly to an accident of history. 1 It hardly needs stressing that nowhere is this more flamboyantly true than for students of nineteenth-century Italian opera, a genre in which one trips over the accidents of history almost as often as one confronts a text.2 More than this, at least in my experience, is that when looked at closely, texts tend to become spiky; they present all kinds of anomalies that will resist too easy assimilation into this or that orthodoxy. One of my greatest difficulties in using a range of contemporary approaches is not that they are too complex (a frequent complaint, after all), but rather thatdespite the promise of liberation from orthodoxy-when applied to the musical object they can too easily collapse into a set of simple and familiar oppositions-equations that, in part through the alluring power of their newness, seem to resist elaboration, admit only of restatement. Theory can then become merely another way of domesticating texts, whether arriving at the umpteenth critical aporia, or by revealing yet again the inevitable silencing or empowerment of the umpteenth prima donna, or by laying bare the covert imperialism or homophobia of the composer. Such difficulties are for the most part inevitable, and should not be used too enthusiastically as a stick with which to beat those who essay "new" musicological approaches. And they are inevitable because our academic discipline is, like all others, essentially reactive: we write about writing far more than we write about music. New methodologies thus need to acquire a body of literature, a discursive environment in which to live and breathe, in order to realize their full potential as ways of reading; and one of the main ways they acquire this environment is through an interaction with, or confrontation with, other, older ways of reading. t I borrow this point from G. Thomas Tanselle, A Rationale of Textual Criticism (Philadelphia, 1989), 34. 2 The issue is explored at some length in my "A Donizetti Critical Edition in the Postmodern World," in Francesco Bellotto, ed., I.:opera teatrale di Gaetano Donizetti (Bergamo, 1992), 57-68.

ON REACHING THE BEGUILED SHORE

7

But what interests me at least as much, so far as this book is concerned, is the opposite flow of influence: the extent to which the various approaches essayed in this book can serve to question (or at least enrich) a rhetorical fabric basic to the philological enterprise. Central to this fabric is of course the notion of authorial intention, which contentious topic snakes its way through my text, assuming various guises en route. It is, I think, much easier today than it was, say, thirty years ago to call into question the whole idea of a "definitive" version of an opera, one that approaches as nearly as possible the "creator's" (read: "composer's") intentions for the work. Perhaps we now have readier models for dealing with the idea of opera as a multiple text not just with competing "systems" 3 but, more challenging still, with competing and often destabilizing authorial intentions: between librettist and composer, composer and impresario, even composer and his younger self; the oppositions could continue by allowing into the lists those figures who stand tantalizingly on the margins of creation and reception, in particular the set designers, regisseurs, and, perhaps most important, the principal singers (often with good reason called the "creators" of their roles). Once all these various creators are given their due, the operatic text is bound to have enfolded within it insoluble textual problems. Need this be merely a matter for lamentation? Even on the strictly textcritical level it may not be damaging occasionally to measure the aesthetic distance between our present condition and that which obtained when most modern-day critical editions were set up. Such ruminations might, for example, lead us to question why critical editions of operas routinely ignore aspects of the work that betray little or no trace of composerly control (most often the visual element), essential though those aspects might be for performance; they might also encourage us to take a more liberal attitude to including as "text" aspects belonging to a work's reception history, of what it has become as well as what it was. This is not to deny that we will of course continue to need to fix texts as a basis for performance; but the manner, both physical and rhetorical, in which we present them may alter considerably if we agree that they cannot be definitive and that we will always have to ignore certain bodies of evidence in order to accommodate others. Most significant in the present context, however, are the interpretive possibilities that such an attitude can stimulate. As I've tried to suggest in several of the chapters that follow, awareness of a multiple operatic text, one that continually escapes a single, controlling authorial hand, can in3 This idea of opera as a series of "systems," each with its own laws and priorities, has been most comprehensively and persuasively explored by Pierluigi Petro belli in his Music in the Theater: Essays on Verdi and Other Composers (Princeton, 1994).

8

CHAPTER ONE

deed be critically productive, in some way releasing us from having to demonstrate a compatibility between an author's vision of the work and ours. Of course, this is an unsteady path to tread, one that can encourage interpretive capriciousness or act as a smoke screen behind which to hide sheer ignorance. More serious still, though, it can undermine the basis we need in order-as we must-to argue about and discriminate between various interpretations, to be able to declare and defend the fact that (at least within the academy) one interpretation is more firmly based in knowledge than another. It is also true, though, that our immediate musicological past has often tended to be rather narrow in what it will admit as legitimate "knowledge," and has in extreme cases-one thinks of certain calls to arms made from the ramparts of "Music Theory" -defined the word as virtually synonymous with The Music Itself. What is more, it is at least arguable that we continue to be concerned with Verdi's (or anyone else's) operas precisely because they continue to be, in Frank Kermode's words, "patient of interpretation."4 Far from granting access only in measure to the extent that readers or listeners strive to understand the intention of the author, such works have survived in part through their power to communicate in wildly different ways to different groups. I have so far been silent about the second of my "close reading" modes, which might broadly be called that of "analysis." Had I published a collection such as this only a few years ago, it might well have boasted its modernity, and probably its attempt to bring Verdi into the musicological "mainstream," by being decked with voice-leading graphs and other illustrative bibelots. Some of the earlier essays still show traces of these operations, though they have gradually fallen away in the process of revision, to be replaced for the most part by simple, unadorned musical examples. Even so, there is probably enough "close reading" of the vaguely analytical kind to sound warning bells for some. For example, in a much-discussed andgiven the relative closeness of their positions-surprisingly boisterous exchange with Lawrence Kramer, Gary Tomlinson has come straight out against such activities: We need to move away from the whole constraining notion that close reading of works of music, of whatever sort, is the sine qua non of musicological practice. . . . It is not enough to cast our close readings in the light of new methods-narratological, feminist, phenomenological, anthropological, whatever. For it is the act of close reading itself that carries with it the ideological charge of modernism. These new methods, instead, need to be linked 4 The term comes from Kermode's The Classic: Literary Images of Permanence and Change (New York, 1975), a monograph whose influence on this book will be obvious more than once.

ON REACHING THE BEGUILED SHORE

9

to new approaches to music that have distanced themselves from such analytically oriented reading. They need, indeed, to be allowed to engender such new approaches.s

This is a bold program for the new millennium, but I'm not convinced that it is entirely workable as an immediate way forward. For one thing, I'm suspicious of purges, of imagining that there can ever be such a thing as a clean slate: if we learn anything from history, it is that radical change seems the more surely and swiftly to lead to new orthodoxies. But mostly I come back to a point made a little earlier: that the surest way for "new methods" to prosper is if they strive to establish an elaborate discursive space, marshaling to their cause the greatest number of skills that the academy can command. One way this space might emerge is when the "new" comes into contact with methods that the institution has trained us over generations to use with (we hope) discrimination and sensitivity. As for carrying "the ideological charge of modernism," perhaps that is a charge that can be borne with some patience, at least if there is room on the lapel for other badges. The moral high ground of musicology is an obscure rocky space, and although we should never deny its existence, we will do well to lay claim to it only in exceptional circumstances. But I should like to follow the lead of Joseph Kerman, certainly the gentlest and most stylish of Tomlinson's interlocutors, in pausing for a moment over one of the methods Tomlinson suggests for evading the sinister pull of "close reading."6 Tomlinson asks that "we might begin to interrogate our love for the music we study ... dredge up our usual impassioned musical involvements from the hidden realm of untouchable premise they tend to inhabit, and ... make them a dynamic force-to be reckoned with, challenged, rejected, indulged in, whatever-within our study." 7 This project appeals to me; so much so that I'd like to try it here and now. Let me for a moment, then, interrogate my love for Don Carlos, an opera hardly mentioned in the main body of this book, but closer to me at present than any other. Of course, part of the reason for the closeness-in all likelihood the greatest part-is too personal to be of 5 Gary Tomlinson, "Musical Pasts and Postmodern Musicologies: A Response to Lawrence Kramer," Current Musicology 53 (1994): 18-24, here 22, which is a response to Kramer's "The Musicology of the Future," repercussions 1 (1992): 5-18. Kramer and Tomlinson continue their exchange in the same issue of Current Musicology, 25-40. For a piquant response from a feminist perspective, see Mary Ann Smart, review of Ruth Solie, ed., Musicology and Difference, in Journal of the American Musicological Society 48 (1994): 541-49, esp. 541-43. 6 Joseph Kerman, "Close Readings of the Heard Kind," 19th-Century Music 17, no. 3 (1994): 209-19; see esp. 217-19. 7 Tomlinson, "Musical Pasts and Postmodern Musicologies," 24.

10

CHAPTER ONE

much general interest: in the month before writing this, I have seen two extremely good performances of the opera, one in French, one in Italian, both in the best of company. s But there are other factors, ones more conducive to public examination. The sheer openness of the text continues to act as a stimulant. First performed as a five-act French grand opera in Paris in 1867, though even then losing during rehearsal some of its most impressive music, the opera went through minor revisions in the 1870s. In 1882-83 Verdi made sweeping changes in order to bring the opera down to more manageable proportions, among other things omitting the whole of Act I. This version, first performed in what is generally agreed to be a pretty awful Italian translation in 1884, has become the "standard text," although two years later a five-act Italian version was published.9 Thanks to the efforts of dedicated scholars such as Ursula Gunther, Andrew Porter, and David Rosen, almost all this music is now available, the result being that each revival of the work is confronted with an impressive array of textual options, some of which can affect quite profoundly the way one sees the characters, their relationships, and even the drama as a whole. To take one of the most celebrated cases: does one restore the Prelude et Introduction to Act I, one of the pieces cut during rehearsal in order that suburban patrons of the Opera could enjoy supper before the show and still make the last train home? It is a commonplace that inclusion of this so-called Woodcutters' Chorus, in which the poor plead with French princess Elisabeth to help bring an end to war with Spain, makes a much clearer context for Elisabeth's agreeing to marry the Spanish king Philippe, even though by that time she loves his son Carlos: the introduction has made her see and hear of the devastation of war that rapprochement with Spain is intended to end. What is more, the "lament" figure that is its opening motive (see example 1.1a) has powerful resonances with subsequent material in the opera, most obviously with the opening of Philippe's great Act IV monologue (example 1.1b). And perhaps a more telling connection still is to the portentous semitonal oscillation of the solemn chant that opens Act II, in which the monks of St-Just seem to gather to themselves the entire, oppressive weight of history in their 8 For the record, both performances were conducted by Bernard Haitink with the Royal Opera House Chorus and Orchestra. The French version (at the Royal Opera House) was in Luc Bondy's production, and included Roberto Alagna (Carlos), Karita Mattila (Elisabeth), Thomas Hampson (Posa), Jose van Dam (Philippe), and Martine Dupuy (Eboli). The Italian version (in concert at the Royal Albert Hall) included Richard Margison (Carlos), Sylvie Valayre (Elisabeth), Dmitri Hvorostovsky (Posa), Roberto Scandiuzzi (Philippe), and Olga Borodina (Eboli). 9 For a thorough account of these revisions, see the chapter devoted to Don Carlos in Julian Budden's The Operas of Verdi, vol. 3 (London, 1981), esp. 20-39.

11

ON REACHING THE BEGUILED SHORE

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prayer for the departed Emperor, Charles V (example 1.1c).tO The chant is, of course, the most important and individual recurring gesture in the opera, as its blaring return in the closing moments of the drama underlines powerfully. More than this, the fact that the opening of the opera serves to link that gesture in pitch content to such a universal topic as a "lament" figure seems of considerable significance: a claim for the work's universality that is hard to ignore. At least when considered in this context, inclusion of the Prelude et Introduction serves to monumentalize the opera, establish for it an imposing pillar and the broadest possible theme. The opening of Act I as it was eventually performed to those comfort10 I owe this point to John Deathridge, who discussed the function of this motive (and its relationship to my example l.la) in a paper focusing on Benjamin's idea of the Trauerspiel given at the Nottingham Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music, July 1996.

13

ON REACHING THE BEGUILED SHORE

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ably dined patrons of the Paris Opera could hardly be more different (see example 1.2). The offstage horn calls are perhaps the least emphatic opening of any Verdi opera. They set out a kind of open scenic and musical space in which the characters can then search for one another and slowly define themselves; they all, that is, gradually and painfully assume the weight of history, rather than being already burdened with its presence from the start. In the process, this new, evanescent opening establishes a fantastical, fairy-tale atmosphere in which a prince (Don Carlos) and princess (Elisabeth) can fall in love. Nor is this atmosphere incompatible with the ending of the opera, though on a very different level from those motivic connections that bind the close to the Woodcutters' Chorus. Carlos's final showdown with the Inquisition ends with a coupde-scene that is in its way every bit as fantastical, with the long-dead Emperor suddenly emerging from his tomb to effect the denouement: Carlos en se defendant recule vers le tombeau de Charles-Quint. La grille s'ouvre. Le Moine parait. C'est Charles-Quint avec le manteau et Ia couronne royale. Le Moine entraine dans le cloitre Carlos eperdue. [Carlos, defending himself, retreats toward the tomb of Charles V. The grille opens. The Monk appears. It is Charles V with mantle and crown. The Monk leads a dazed Carlos into the cloister.]

The point is that there can be no "correct" choice in decisions such as this, even when a conception of the entire operatic message might be at stake. The mere act of choosing the text becomes, in other words, an inescapably interpretive gesture.

14

CHAPTER ONE

But when I talk about the openness of Don Carlos as a reason for my attachment to it, I am perhaps evading the heart of the matter, not responding to the spirit of Tomlinson's stern injunction to confront "the hidden realm of untouchable premise." As I've admitted, I like the openness primarily because it makes me think, not because it makes me feel. If I stand back for a moment, I am aware of fragments of this vast opera that, far from just contributing to grand shapes and patterns, have the power suddenly to arrest my attention, cause an irrational moment of wonder that escapes my ability to construct a formal context or explanation. To go further on the interrogatory path, I need to write about one of these moments, to examine another scene, one common to all versions of the opera and thus-so far as I know-with no textual variants. Posa's death scene in Act IV, and in particular certain passages in his aria "C'est man jour supreme," was at one time in my life an almost dangerous obsession: I would sing it, fumbling the accompaniment on the piano, until I could sing no longer (it's much too high for me), leaving it only to rattle around endlessly in my head. A ripe case for strict questioning. Indeed, it's surprising that I've not written about the aria before: Kafka knew what he was talking about when he said: "We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes." In the rather sparse critical writing on Don Carlos, Rodrigue, Marquis de Posa, has had a bad press, and since I love almost every note Verdi wrote for him, I have sometimes wondered why. Julian Budden sums up the objections very well: [Posa's] ideals, being intellectual, cannot be conveyed in music, only his idealism; and this together with his unswerving selflessness makes him musically rather uninteresting. Even at the height of his greatness Verdi can find for him nothing more impressive than a stream of generically noble baritone melody. 11

The implication (to be examined in a moment) is clear: while all the other major characters-Carlos, Elisabeth, Philippe, even Eboli-are enriched and made more psychologically complex by a violent internal conflict of personal and public sentiment, Posa is comparatively one-dimensional, locked forever in the public domain as he endlessly rehearses his obsession with Flanders and its striving toward liberation. Whatever their critical reservations, however, almost everyone agrees that Posa's greatest moments come with this death scene, in which he has two back-to-hack romances, a virtually unprecedented formal experi11

Budden, The Operas of Verdi, vol. 3, 139.

ON REACHING THE BEGUILED SHORE

15

ment. The scene opens on Carlos's prison with a sequence of chords that, motivically and registrally, recall the monks' solemn prayer for Charles V (example 1.1c), the weight and hopelessness of history seeming ever more powerful a force when lent to the resonant low strings, and with the upper neighbor continually accented (example 1.3). Posa explains to Carlos that his liberation is at hand; the solemn chords briefly sound in a new, minor-mode guise, which shifts the motivic oscillation to G-Al. and introduces a gentle turn toward EJ, major as Posa declares his love for his friend (example 1.4). Then begins the romance "C'est mon jour": C'est mon jour supreme, Echangeons l'adieu solennel. Dieu permet encor qu'on s'aime Pres de lui, quand on est au ciel. Dans tes yeux tout baignes de larmes, Pourquoi done ce muet effroi? Qui plains-tu? La mort a des charmes, 0 mon Carlos, a qui meurt pour toi! [This is my crowning day, let us join in a solemn farewell. May God grant that we love each other still, when we are near him in heaven. In your eyes, all bathed in tears, why then that mute terror? Whom do you pity? Death has its charm, 0 Carlos, for one who dies for you!]

Rather than "analyze" the aria, I'd like to isolate two moments that are, I think, at the root of my obsession. First is the opening period (see example 1.5), in which the motivic alchemy charted by the progress from example 1.3 to example 1.4 takes a surprisingly gentle new turn. Those tired, history-laden, accented neighbor-note figures are still there, indeed have proliferated, with the G-AJ, first emerging in an inner part (over the voice's BI.-C), and then on "echangeons" in the vocal line; but in each case the neighbor notes now "unwind" -reach a goal of harmonic closure. They are also both energized and subtly echoed by the offbeat accompaniment figure: most beautifully, and so fleeting as to be vaguely felt rather than actively perceived in performance, in the counterpoint between sixteenth notes of the voice and accompaniment in m. 2, in which both BI.-C and G-Al. sound simultaneously. In my homemade renderings, I always play those contrapuntal sixteenth notes over and over, trying to make a snapshot out of their sounding together, somehow to halt (perhaps I should say "textualize") the event. The second moment comes in the final part of the aria (see example 1.6). Return to the tonic is marked by an almost banal arpeggiated figure

16

CHAPTER ONE

Example 1.3. Andante

J=58

>

>

·...__:__..·

>

·........:..__,·

Example 1.4. Andante

pp~

Posa

:

;

"'"'

~ ~

I,.

~~

•• L r-a,

A -vee que! doux or - gueil sur mon coeur je >

1\

>

·-:: I;J~:J:

~

Andante

._,

>

: ~·

pres - se!

L.__-

>

-:;-~-:;-

~

pp

p

~

I

Je t'ai sau - ve!

te

I_

pro-

I

r r I ~

----

17

ON REACHING THE BEGUILED SHORE

Example 1.5. cantabile

Posa

:

.

~.....--...._

1':\

-~

~

jour, _ _ mon

C'est mon

jour

J =58

Andante sostenuto

.

A

~.

PP.T/

:

1':\

-#_7

+.../

-

pre -me,

e-

-#___::.....-'

~

T;7

l--

T;7

J

T..:,/ "*.../ "*.7

I

----..1

If

'"'

l'a- dieu

- geons

chan -

..

1':\

~

su

If

'"'

so - len-nel.

..

)·,

-#__;:....'

P

6

i6

6

7 4

~j

4 3

a! pa-ti- re vir-

7

y "Va pensiero"

3

3

Example 2.2b. x

Zaccaria

"Profezia"

.-----------------~----------------~

r.. . Oh chi pian-ge? ... di fern-mi-ne im- bel-li

chi sol - le-va

6

i6

4 3

y

significant: in the choral coda, the passing tonicization of D# has a stabilizing effect; it leads sequentially to a rhythmically stressed predominant chord at the start of the next measure, and then to a firm authentic cadence in the tonic. With Zaccaria, on the other hand, the same progression marks a decisive change of harmonic direction, a move away from the F# tonic of the chorus toward a new key center. This tendency of Zaccaria's to energize musical elements from the chorus, to inject them with newfound tonal and rhythmic momentum (as mentioned earlier, something clearly in tune with the dramatic context, with the fact that Zaccaria is encouraging action rather than passive la-

29

"VA PENSIERO"

Example 2.3. a.

"Va pensiero"

~-·# •1 11 1 Elr ~ ~ ~ ~ r f r 1 E~ r Ef r 1 E r Ef r 1 E f Ef r I! E'f E•r r Vl.I

b.

"Profezia"

?= •u

1

tf[U 1 6Itt 11 rfij) 1 6Itt 11 jij)

Vle. L_ a _.

a

L-.

a _.

a

L_

a _.

a

L_

a _.

3

L_

a _.

a

mentation) turns out to be paradigmatic, and is evident on a number of musical levels. Example 2.3, for example, compares two accompaniment figures, both of which oscillate around the dominant. The first (a) is from the closing stages of "Va pensiero," and does no more than add surface decoration to the reprise of the main melody; the second (b) follows the moment of greatest tonal tension in the Profezia, and serves an important function in leading the music to the final B-major tonic. Again, the contrast between stasis in the chorus, and unrest and forward movement in the Profezia is unmistakable. More basic still are examples 2.4 and 2.5, which offer two ways in which the first phrase of the closing, B-major section of the Profezia feeds from important melodic moments in "Va pensiero." The similarity in example 2.4 is primarily rhythmic and gestural, though it is interesting to see how the chromatic oscillation around the dominant (illustrated in the accompaniment patterns of example 2.3) is taken up in both cases. Example 2.5, though less obvious, is perhaps even more revealing. In the latter part of the example, we can see how shared pitches in the opening lines of each piece are given markedly different weight and impetus by the changed harmonic context. Zaccaria may even be commenting musically on a static element of the chorus. The main lyrical period of "Va pensiero" returns obsessively to the same two notes, F#-E#. And there is in this context perhaps a sense in which Zaccaria's first triplet figure toys with the ubiquitous E# only to reject it decisively and kinetically in the second. We should note also how the opening pitches of the chorus are again put to dynamic effect by ushering in Zaccaria's climactic second phrase. As so often in Verdi, identical pitch levels are given sharply different dramatic effects by a change in underlying tonal context. One could continue with other, more complex and wide-ranging comparisons; but enough has been put forward to demonstrate that, at least from this technical point of view, "Va pensiero" functions harmonically and motivically in a larger context-that, despite its future status, its

30

CHAPTER TWO

Example 2.4.

di

Si- on - ne

Zaccaria

?= •ull1# o·

~

Ir

Niu - na pie

le tor

-

ri at- ter - ra - te . . .

Oh

mia

"Profezia"

P. ; I

o· tra o - ve sor

3

-

se

I' a! - tie

- ra

Ba - bi-

idealization and involvement with extramusical matters, it seems musically dependent on the piece to which it is attached in Verdi's autograph score. Turning to the business of poetic and musical form, I think it will be useful to begin again with the simplest of descriptive summaries: the entire scene is set in the same poetic meter, namely the decasillabo (a tensyllable line), that verse type so often associated with risorgimentale poets. Much has been made of this by those wishing to stress the chorus's "patriotic" status. Decasillabi are certainly the most distinctive and unmistakable of Italian poetic meters: there are three fixed accents per line (no other lyric verse meter has more than two fixed accents), and these accents fall invariably on the third, sixth, and ninth syllables (1 2 3 4 56 7 8 9 10), making almost inevitable a threefold anapest rhythm: "Va pensiero sull'ali dorate" I "Niuna pietra ove sorse l'altera." This metrical point has, as one might imagine, obvious repercussions for the musical setting, but before addressing these, it will be useful to consider briefly the place of the decasillabo in the Italian operatic universe. As mentioned above, decasillabi tend to be associated with Manzoni, Berchet, and other poets of early nineteenth-century Italy. True, the verse type did have a tradition among librettos of the previous century: even Metastasio wrote them (though not many of them). In general they were used sparingly for one very obvious reason: they are (through a combination of length and regularity of stress) the least musically flexible of the common verse meters. The rhythm of a decasillabo always seems to impinge on the musical setting, and was thus used in general only on special occasions, when its distinctiveness could be either disguised or (better still) harnessed to dramatic effect. As Friedrich Lippmann's invaluable compendium of verse meters and their typical musical settings in the Italian opera repertory advises us, decasillabi were used a good deal in the early nineteenth century, but appearances tend to be limited to certain

31

"VA PENSIERO"

Example 2.5. Coro

.

Va

pen - sie - ro

sul-l'a - le

-:;-

do - ra

-

"Va pensiero"

te

~

va

ti

"Profezia"

..

Zaccaria

•

I

Niu - na

pie - tra o - ve

se

l'al-tie-ra

Ba-bi-

types of dramatic and musical situation. 1 0 The majority occur in ensemble numbers (the end of the introduzione or the stretta of a concertato finale were favorite places) and with few exceptions they are in fast tempi. This demonstrates above all the potential advantages and hazards in setting decasillabi. In fast music the threefold accent and driving rhythm is of course well suited to depict certain cathartic moments; but it could become inflexible, lead to a lack of variety. In most cases, we encounter decasillabi on occasions when methods of sustaining interest other than rhythmic are at their height (e.g., ensembles, where the lyrical periods are shorter and the principal interest comes from opposing blocks of sound). They appear far less often in slow, lyrical sections, and are very rare in solo arias of any kind. In this metrical context, "Va pensiero" is anomalous. True, it conforms in that decasillabi are often choral or ensemble pieces, but this is a chorus like no other before it: primarily in unison, very slow-moving, aspiring to a hymnlike quality. Most important, far from there being any sense of strain to achieve rhythmic variety, of attempts to avoid the anapestic repetition inherent in the decasillabo, "Va pensiero" seems to embrace unequivocally and completely the restrictions and repetitions of the verse meter. It is made up entirely of four-measure phrases (no less than eight of them, back to back). Furthermore, each four-measure phrase (and all except two of the half-phrases) begins with the identical rhythm of dotted eighth-sixteenth. At no point is the steady tread of the rhythm interrupted, variety springing entirely from the gradual domination of the triplet rhythm over the dotted eighth-sixteenth. In other words, "Va pen10 See Friedrich Lippmann, "Der italienische Vers und der musikalische Rhythm us: zum Verhaltnis von Vers und Musik in der italienischen Oper des 19. Jahrhunderts, mit einem Riickblick auf die 2. Halfte des 18. Jahrhunderts," Analecta Musicologica 12 (1973): 253369; 14 (1974): 324-410; and 15 (1975): 298-333.

32

CHAPTER TWO

Example 2.6. Zaccaria

': 11 o· g Del

1

r-

fu- tu

.-3---.

fJ l 1..

~ w.

o·

1

ro nel bu

io

no ...

di - seer

Example 2.7. Zaccaria

r:--!----,

0.

•1: • ~.

o·

Niu - na pie

tra o

>-r-! ~

,: •1111

g ttB E~§· ....tP I F 3

- ve sor -

r;:-

se

l'al - tie

-

r

o·

ra

Ba - hi-

;I

3-,

tJ r r v: r f a 0 r 1

-lo- nia __ al-lostra-niodi -rii!

siero" uses the decasillabo deliberately to create an incantatory effect: one in which large- and small-scale rhythmic repetitions combine to purge variety, to supply the expected. Yet again, the Profezia acts as a catharsis, highlighting the extreme rhythmic stability and predictability of the chorus by violently contradicting it. In the recitative and first lyrical part ("Del futuro nel bujo discerno"), the decasillabo is injected with new, dynamic tension by the held notes at the start of each measure, notes that immediately break the chorus's regular anapestic tread (example 2.6). And then, in the poco piu mosso of "Niuna pietra ove surse l'altera," Zaccaria takes up a characteristic rhythmic surface of "Va pensiero," but with an increased harmonic rhythm and dramatic syncopation that finally releases the music from domination by the two-bar half-phrase (example 2.7). The central idea has by now been sufficiently stressed. From the analytical standpoint, "Va pensiero" is anything but independent. Indeed, when one considers the entire number ("Cora e Profezia") as a musical unit, there emerges a sense in which the chorus is deliberately and necessarily rather static and monochrome. It seems inescapable that the piece's principal dramatic function is to create a sense of expectation for what follows. To put it in another, perhaps more modish way, the chorus is defined by its absences, by the contrast it omits to supply, the variety it fails to entertain. To single out "Va pensiero," to separate it from its point of textual and musical release, would appear to do violence to its larger context.

"VA PENSIERO"

33

We reach a crucial intersection. It will be clear that "analysis" and "reception" seem to be at odds. The former suggests that "Va pensiero" is musically unusual if viewed on its own; that it articulates a powerful dependence on the immediate musical context. The reception history sketched earlier stressed the opposite-spoke of the chorus's appropriation, its idealization, its placement in a kind of empyrean. Surely the comparatively subjective inquiry, the analysis, must give way to the "facts." However elaborate or persuasive analytical remarks may be, they are presumably no match for firm historical evidence that, from the very first performance, "Va pensiero" was seized by audiences, divorced from its context, made a rallying cry for the bereaved, bereft Italian people. Franco Abbiati, Verdi principal Italian biographer, substantiates this claim. He quotes a newspaper review of the La Scala premiere of Nabucco in March 1842 in which it is reported that the audience demanded an encore of the chorus, despite an Austrian proclamation expressly forbidding such public enthusiasms. The story is repeated by many others, indeed is a commonplace of Verdian reception history.ll But even in the reassuring world of contemporary evidence, the case of "Va pensiero" is not always as it might seem. As one or two authors have pointed out in recent years, a close and dispassionate look at reliable pre-1848 evidence for Verdi as a rallying call for Italian nationalism is met with an embarrassing paucity of positive support, and often with much that points to an opposite conclusion.1 2 The matter of "Va pensiero" proves no exception. For example, Abbiati's passage referring to this supposed encore simply doesn't appear in the review from which he purports to quote: he made it up, or rather (an interesting example of scholarly etiquette) he took it from a completely different review, referring to a different chorus.13 Of course, questions about the contemporary reception of the chorus run deeper, involving far more than simply one falsified review of one performance. A survey of all contemporary reviews of the first performance shows no evidence for any unusual reception for "Va pensiero": to be sure it was mentioned and praised, but there was no question of it 11 Franco Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, 4 vols. (Milan, 1959), vol. 1, 415; see also Julian Budden, The Operas of Verdi, vol. 1 (London, 1973), 93. 12 See in particular Walker, The Man Verdi, esp. 150-51; and John Rosselli, The Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi: The Role of the Impresario (Cambridge, 1984), esp. 165-67. 13 While most of the review Abbiati quotes comes from Ricordi's house journal, the Gazzetta musicale di Milano, the passage supposedly referring to "Va pensiero" comes from Angelo Lambertini's review of the first performance of Nabucco in the official Austrian daily newspaper, the Gazzetta privilegiata di Milano (10 March 1842). The chorus there referred to as being encored is clearly the concluding hymn, "Immenso Jeovha."

34

CHAPTER TWO

arousing particular enthusiasm. The same could be said of the second Milanese run of performances, in the fall of 1842, the season during which the opera achieved an unprecedented fifty-seven performances, and set the seal on Verdi's Milanese success. And so one could continue through the complete performance history of Nabucco during the years up to 1848-during the period, that is, in which Verdi's famous choruses are commonly said to have become emblematic of Italian political aspirations. In all that period, in all the mass of critical receptions occasioned by some hundred revivals of Nabucco throughout the peninsula, the number of occasions on which "Va pensiero" is singled out for particular praise (or mentioned because of the notable enthusiasm it aroused) is embarrassingly small. Time out of mind one reads of the duet between Abigaille and Nabucco in Act III, of the impressive concertato finales, of the final hymn "lmmenso Jeovha," or even of the thunderbolt that strikes Nabucco down in Act II; but of the very symbol of Italian national chauvinism there is hardly a trace.14 Speculation that this absence of references was simply a reflection of the Austrian censor is at first tempting, but ultimately impossible to believe. There are too many references to other, supposedly "inflammatory" choruses, by Rossini, Mercadante, and Verdi himself, to make this credible. The most telling episode, however, comes at the very moment of crisis, during the tumultuous events of 1848. There, finally, we would expect Verdi's voice to be heard free of all restraint, there we will learn the true feelings of the Italians toward their national hero. Documentation of operatic events during this period is hard to come by, as most of the theaters and (in their wake) the theatrical journals closed down during the crisis; but the famous Bolognese journal Teatri, arti e letteratura managed to keep going. Italy (and of course many other parts of Europe) was in the midst of revolution; censorship had disappeared from the press in Bologna; the journal could finally speak its political and musical mind. And, as if in response, there appeared in May 1848 a long article summing up musical events in the peninsula. Most of the theaters are 14 Needless to say, the documentation to substantiate this claim in detail would be enormous. References to reviews of the 1842 Milanese performances can be found in the introduction to the critical edition of Nabucco, cited in n. 2. There is a preliminary annotated performance history of the opera (through 1846), based mostly on information from the Gazzetta privilegiata di Milano and the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, in my "Studies in Early Verdi (1832-1844): New Information and Perspectives on the Milanese Musical Milieu and the Operas from Oberto to Ernani" (New York, 1989), 116-29. I have since expanded this list both chronologically and in detail from information supplied by Marcello Conati or culled from the numerous musical periodicals preserved in the Centre international de recherche sur Ia presse musicale at Parma, of which he is director.

"VA PENSIERO"

35

closed, for financial reasons; this, not surprisingly, is the major source of concern for the writer. But the article does touch on political issues: In Italia se v'e canto, e per lo pili patriottico. A Bologna si lasciavano I Lombardi per cantare cori nazionali per la citta. -A Napoli si e cantata il Nabucco con mediocre successo, perche il pubblico chiede al Verdi le tradizioni d'Italia e non dell'antico Oriente, e vuole chela sua facolta musicale si rara nel dar voce e potenza alle moltitudini, rappresenti quel soffio di vita, fosse anche con un oragano d'orchestra, che investa e faccia giganteggiare il popolo italiano. Oh sorgera il Paisiello della nostra liberta, e l'Alfieri dei libretti!1 5 [In Italy, where there is song, it is for the most part patriotic. At Bologna they leave I Lombardi to sing nationalistic songs through the city. -In Naples they have put on Nabucco with only scant success, because the public wants from Verdi the traditions of Italy, not those of the ancient Orient, and wishes that his rare musical genius for giving voice and power to the multitude should represent that breath of life, were it even with an orchestral tempest, that invests and swells within the Italian people. If only the Paisiello of our liberty would arise, the Alfieri of libretti!]

This is, to say the least, intriguing in its seeming blindness to the possibility that an opera plot might be read (or have ever been read?) metaphorically. And the critic's reaction is not isolated. Verdi's Attila, for example, is commonly assumed to be one of the composer's most important "risorgimento" works, 16 but a report on the opera's staging in Ferrara in May 1848 voices quite different sentiments: Ma per vedere Attila in teatro, ora che tanti Attila abbiamo in campo aperto, mi par cosa difficile. E perche non iscegliere altra opera, pili adatta ai tempi che corrono? Ricordare un'epoca si umiliante per l'Italia, ora che abbiamo bisogno di rammentare solo fatti gloriosi alla nostra carissima patria, 15 Teatri, artie letteratura, 4 May 1848. Complaints such as these were not merely a product of the release of censorship, and had occurred from time to time in theatrical journals during the previous years. In 1839, for example, a review by "L.F." of the La Scala staging of Federico Ricci's Un duello sotto Richelieu began:

I won't start by crying out against the tricks of our makers of libretti, who borrow foreign clothes, and who ignore everything that is patriotic and Italian: it's an old habit now, and we've become hardened to it. Whether from poverty of invention, or indolence, they love to work on the already-made, and to translate into verses what has already been written in prose. (Teatri, arti e letteratura, 29 August 1839) 16 Much has made of Ezio's "inflammatory" lines in the Prologue, "Avrai tu l'universo, I Resti l'Italia a me."

36

CHAPTER TWO

e cosa contraria a! buon senso e a quell'amore che in massa nutriamo alia nostra nazionale indipendenza.17 [To see Attila in the theater, now that so many Attilas are in the field, seems to me rather problematic. And why not choose another opera, one more suitable to the current times? To recall an epoch so humiliating for Italy, now that we need to recall only those facts that lend glory to our most dear homeland, is something contrary to good sense and to that love that we all feel for our national independence.]

Equally telling results come from considering the official daily newspaper of the Austrian government in Lombardy, the Gazzetta privilegiata di Milano. As its name suggests, the Gazzetta had a monopoly on political reporting but, in part to combat the growing influence of numerous specialized cultural journals that had sprung up during the later 1830s and 1840s, also carried an "Appendice" that was concerned mostly with artistic events. During February 1848 the capital was becoming increasingly restless and, inevitably, theatrical performances sometimes became the focus for demonstrations against the Austrian government. On 22 February the Gazzetta carried a notice by the governor of Milan threatening harsh penalties for demonstrators and mentioning in particular il portare certi co Iori, o il metterli in vista, il portare certi distintivi o segnali, il cantare o declamare certe canzoni o poesie, l'applaudire oil fischiare certi passi di un'azione drammatica o mimica. [the wearing of certain colors, or the displaying of them, the wearing of certain emblems or signs, the singing or declaiming of certain songs or poems, the applauding or whistling of certain passages of a drama or a mime.]

The final issue of the Gazzetta privilegiata appeared on 18 March. On that day the barricades went up and, in five days of street fighting (Milan's famous "Cinque giornate"), the Milanese drove the Austrians from the city. On 23 March, the newly named Gazzetta di Milano, now in liberated Italian hands, began daily publication. Artistic activity during these heady days is reported in some detail. The first theatrical performance, on 30 March, was an ad hoc patriotic prose play given at the Teatro Carcano by the "Drammatica Compagnia Nazionale Lombardo, directed by patrician G. Moncalvo," the performance being followed by "un grazioso Dialogo tra Radetzsky e Metternich, con Meneghino locandiere" (a gracious dialogue between Radetzsky and Metternich, with Meneghino locandiere)JS Other theaters 17 18

Teatri, artie letteratura, 25 May 1848. Meneghino is a stock Milanese theatrical figure, much given to republican sentiments.

"VA PENSIERO"

37

started up with patriotic plays soon after. On 8 April the "Appendice" carried an Ode to Alessandro Manzoni. The first opera appeared on 24 April, again at the Teatro Carcano: it was La muta di Portici (an Italian version of Auber's 1828 setting), whose plot involves a seventeenthcentury Neapolitan uprising against Spanish oppressors, and which had been persistently associated with revolutionary activity ever since a performance in Brussels in 1830 had supposedly sparked off the revolution that led to the modern state of Belgium. After the performance, two (unspecified) hymns to Pio IX (the "liberal" pope then in office) were performed. Two days later, Verdi's publisher, Ricordi, advertised a long series of patriotic numbers, including a hymn to Pio IX written by Rossini.19 On 20 May, some two months after the Milanese uprising, Silvio Pellico's great revolutionary tract, Le mie prigioni, was proudly advertised. Since 18 March Milan had experienced two months of action and tension; as we can see from the Gazzetta di Milano, everyone's artistic endeavors were unequivocally geared to the immediate political situation. And during the entire time, there is no mention of Verdi. The composer supposed to have inspired the masses to the barricades, the very artistic symbol of the risorgimento, was somehow forgotten in the heat of action. To develop here the implications of these last paragraphs is of course beyond the scope of this chapter. Such a task would involve a long overdue revaluation of Verdi's "political" status and influence during his early career. It will be sufficient here to register again a sense of dissatisfaction at the manner in which Verdi's early works are habitually singled out for their association with political and social upheavals. Not, of course, that one need doubt the existence of such a relationship in the most general terms. Verdi was, after all, Italy's most famous and popular opera composer at a time when opera was the most important form of bourgeois cultural activity and social entertainment. It would be strange indeed if his operas were not at certain times involved in Italy's great bourgeois revolution. But that is surely not enough. To justify the claims of involvement that are routinely offered, one needs contemporary evidence that 1 9 But not one by Verdi. One of the most often quoted anecdotes about Verdi's involvement with pre-1848 political uprisings is of how, at performances of Ernani, inflamed audiences changed the words "A Carlo Quinto sia gloria ed on or" to "A Pio Nono sia gloria ed onor" (in honor of the "liberalization" that had ensued). Again, a theatrical journal puts the anecdote in another, far less dramatic light. Teatri, artie letteratura (8 October 1846) reported that on 3 October, after a performance of Donizetti's Roberto Devereux in Persiceto, "there was sung between the acts a Chorus to the Immortal PIO IX, taken from Act III, scene 6, of Ernani, with poetry adapted to the Glorious Sovereign by Prof. Rambelli." This was a time when such hymns were commonplace occurrences; at least on this occasion, insurrection seems not to have been in the wind.

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Verdi's operas held a special place in this phenomenon; and that evidence has so far not emerged. In writing this, I do not seek to devalue the musical importance of the "Coro e Profezia" in Verdi's career. There is no doubt that he found an individual voice in part through the stylistic vein of "Va pensiero," and his attempts to provide further examples, particularly in his next two operas, is a highly significant strand of his early development. From "Va pensiero" in Nabucco, to "0 Signore dal tetto natio" in I Lombardi, to "Si ridesti il Leon di Castiglia" in Ernani is a compelling musical path. It would indeed be revealing to trace the development of the genre through these three works: how the impromptu amalgam of "Va pensiero" was consciously exploited as a finale in I Lombardi, and finally fused into the dramatic catharsis of what is Verdi's finest early achievement, Act III of Ernani. And the strand extends beyond, certainly as far as Macbeth and II trovatore, though, as ever with Verdi, the alterations make the model change before our ears. We are left here with no more than the curious case of "Va pensiero"; of a piece that seems, on close investigation, to assume progressive layers of ambiguity. While it has undoubtedly become Verdi's most famous early chorus, it seems, from a musical and dramatic viewpoint, constantly to stress dependence, or at least to exist in a state of symbiosis, in relation to its companion piece in the opera. As mentioned earlier, it defines itself essentially through a series of musical absences. On another level, that of reception, "Va pensiero" moved fairly uneventfully through a historical period of great political tension, but later emerged as the representative music of that period. Again, there is a sense of absence: of retrospective significance filling the void of contemporary obscurity. Perhaps it is precisely here that the seeming contradictions may finally emerge as connected and coherent; but for that we must turn again to the historical context. When in the autobiographical sketch of 1879 Verdi fashioned the chorus as his artistic epiphany, and more powerfully still when those thousands of Italians sang at his funeral in 1901, the heady revolutionary atmosphere of the 1840s was long gone. Not only had the battles for Italian unity been won, but a severe reaction of economic and cultural decline had ensued, and had been seen by many as a direct result of unification. Viewed in this light, the latter-day appropriation of "Va pensiero" takes on new significance. It was, the documentary evidence suggests, unsuited to (or at least unused in) the active world of its own period. As we saw from the Gazzetta di Milano and the other theatrical journals, Italians in the heat of battle did not choose to, did not need to deal in metaphor. They wanted theatrical caricatures of the vanquished

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by "Meneghino locandiere," they wanted La muta di Portici and immediate memories of a revolution like theirs; they wanted Silvio Pellico's Le mie prigioni: art that portrayed their present situation directly and without equivocation. On the other hand, once removed from the glare of contemporary events, the curiously absent musical center of "Va pensiero" loses its sense of paradox, becomes a source of strength. It makes the chorus into an ideal object with which to conjure up that period of action for future generations. Its power, in short, was not as a piece "of" the times, but as a vehicle of nostalgia: an evocation not so much of a lost homeland as of lost times. Nostalgia is a curious, little-discussed human emotion, perhaps because, like "Va pensiero," it thrives on ambiguity, on contradictory layers of meaning. And when we come to the vessels through which nostalgia travels, a further, equally conditioning ambiguity becomes apparent: nostaglia is at its most intense when directed through an object that has never existed. To put it one way, the fact that "Va pensiero" was relatively uninfected by real events made its appropriation by future generations more possible, more likely, more powerful. To put it another, the tendency of "Va pensiero" ever to look outside itself for resolution is what made it such a compelling representation not only of the achievement but also of the ambiguous aftermath of Italy's struggles toward national unity. We have, of course, limitless interpretive endgames in the face of an inquiry such as this. One, perhaps the most simple and poetic, is offered in aphoristic form by the quotation envoked in the title of this chapter. Its source is a brief poem by D. H. Lawrence entitled "Piano": Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see A child sitting under a piano, in the bosom of the tingling strings And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings. In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide. So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

We can, that is, recognize the insidious mastery of song, the fact that music's power to evoke is sometimes so intense that it can betray us into believing too uncritically what we hear coming out of history, give a false

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sense of immediacy to the associations we make. And if a shadow will be cast over the poem for some by Lawrence's fear that his "manhood is cast I Down in the flood of remembrance" by that linguistic hint of the appalling political repercussions of the risorgimento in the first half of our own century, then that shadow will be made no less menacing in a second quotation. Paul de Man's justly famous essay on Wordsworth and Holderlin strikes an equilibrium between the claims of action and its interpretation which can hardly be improved upon, but which itself has now acquired ghostly biographical remembrances that are difficult to dispel: Act and interpretation are . . . connected in a complex and often contradictory manner. For the interpreter of history, it is never a simple and uniform movement like the ascent of a peak or the installation of a definitive social order. Rather, it appears much more in that twilight ... in which the comingto-consciousness is in arrears vis-a-vis the actual act, and consequently is to be understood not as a conquest but rather as a rectification or even a reproach. The future is present in history only as the remembering of a failed project that has become a menace.2o Rather than end there, or drag the story of "Va pensiero" remorselessly into the present day, into airline advertisements and the present politics of La Scala (where the chorus continues to have a resonant political dimension), I should like instead to return to the 1840s, and to slaves singing in chains. In Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of . .. an American Slave, the author recalls moments when he and the other slaves sang on their way up to the Great House Farm. At the time, he admits that the "meaning" of the music evaded him: "I did not, when a slave, understand the meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear." In the very next sentence, however, and from his now-achieved authorial distance, Douglass proceeds to decode those "rude" songs with surprising specificity: They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. . . . I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy.21 20 Paul de Man, "Wordsworth and Holderlin," in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York, 1984), 58-59. 21 Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of . .. an American Slave (1845) (New

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There is, I think, much to ponder in this extraordinary passage. About the power of music to bear a message, certainly; but also about how that message may change with time, borne on its way by music's uncanny ability to make us believe-if only for a moment-that sounds rising from the human body can transcend cultural context. York, 1963), 13-15. To my knowledge, the passage has been quoted at least twice in the recent musicological literature: once, without comment, near the close of Leo Treitler's "Postmodern Signs and Musical Studies," Journal of Musicology 13, no. 1 (1995): 3-17; and then in a reply to Treitler delivered by Gary Tomlinson at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society, New York, November 1995. Tomlinson's Derridean gloss on the passage was, I might add, a little different from mine here, but there is a mingled chime.

Chapter Three "INSOLITE FORME," OR BASEVI'S GARDEN PATH On him, on him! Look you, how pale he glares! His form and cause conjoined, preaching to stones, Would make them capable. -Hamlet, Act III, scene 4

How CAN WE (how do we) analyze Verdi? The question might to some seem immediately anachronistic: the laying of one age's preoccupations and aesthetic concerns-in this case, a desire to configure musical works by means of essentially abstract narrative patterns-onto the now quite distant past. Most, if challenged, would probably admit that while we can never avoid such superimpositions, there may nevertheless be a peculiar sense of strain in performing such operations on operatic texts that remain in such lively currency (their "other" narratives, both internal and external, still resonating powerfully). What is more, certain elements of the discursive environment of our immediate past are likely to encourage further caution. Most musicologists writing in the mid-1990s grew up with aggressive, totalizing, modernist musical theory all around them-with serialism and sets and Schenkerism and semiotics-and although the last two of these enthusiasms were occasionally draped around Verdian texts, they seemed to sit ever uneasy, the Force of Theory becoming so weakened by caveats-in particular by the insistent presence within the scores of troublesome generic conventions-that the effect was more anecdotal than total: the most that could be offered was a story about how one might use theory, never the real thing, never (to use a favorite term) a "hard" application.l This seeming impasse was never very severe though, because even as these not-so-hard forays were occurring the very generic conventions that impeded them were beginning to offer a far more attractive way in which Verdian drama might be approached. By discussing the operas from the point of view of generic terms current at the period of composition, scholars promised to evade 1 As examples of these attempts, I hope it will not seem immodest to cite, for the semiotic, Roger Parker, "Levels of Motivic Definition in Verdi's Ernani," 19th-Century Music 6, no. 2 (1982): 141-50; and for the Schenkerian, Roger Parker and Matthew Brown, "Motivic and Tonal Interaction in Verdi's Un ballo in maschera," Journal of the American Musicological Society 36, no. 2 (1983): 243-65. I do so to underline that my account here is not intended to be as universal or Olympian as it may sound.

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the feeling of anachronism, perhaps even aspire toward a condition of analytic "authenticity," a word whose value in the musical universe was becoming ever more evident. In what follows I should like to examine the persuasiveness of this new, "authentic" theory (an anthropologist might call it "native" theory), and I want to do so by way of what intellectual historian Dominick La Capra, perhaps not entirely with tongue in cheek, has called "the medium of dialogic exchanges with other critics. " 2 I should like, that is, to address the issue principally with reference to a very ancient book on Verdi and, as a point of entry and an example of that book's modern reception, a recent musicological article. I could, of course, have addressed the whole issue in a way that avoided such open confrontation. We know that scholars in related disciplines, notably in literary studies, habitually write about one another's positions in the form of "review articles" and "responses"-entire journals are devoted to the genre-but musicologists do so rarely and, their world being comparatively small, doubtless avoid such potential strife for very good reasons. I have chosen the present approach, however (LaCapra calls it that of an "essayistic intervention"), largely because its continued focus on close reading of texts best keeps the issues in close focus. And I should stress immediately that although my discourse is of necessity going to be pretty monologic in the pages that follow, it is intended as part of a dialogue: one that started when I heard others and was impressed and influenced by their tone and content, my side then taking shape out of the kind of close reading that occurs only when there is a strong sense of respect and intellectual sympathy for the object under scrutiny. If I succeed, it will be in stimulating further responses. At the start of an article entitled "'La solita forma' and 'The Uses of Convention,'" one of the most influential essays in the analysis of Verdi's music to appear in the last ten years and-in my opinion-the most persuasive example of the application to Verdian opera of what I called a moment ago "native" theory, Harold Powers sets out, as most of us feel we have to, to position himself within the academy. 3 He starts with a Dominick LaCapra, Soundings in Critical Theory (Ithaca and London, 1989), 1. "'La solita forma' and 'The Uses of Convention,'" in Nuove prospettive nella ricerca verdiana (Parma and Milan, 1987), 74-109; the same article is found in Acta musicologica 59 (1987): 65-90. All references here will be to the Nuove prospettive version, and will appear as page numbers in the main text. Other articles by Powers that contribute to his position are "Simon Boccanegra 1.10-12: A Generic-Genetic Analysis of the Council Chamber Scene," 19th-Century Music 13 (1989-90): 101-28; "Tempo di mezzo: Three Ongoing Episodes in Verdian Musical Dramaturgy," American Institute for Verdi Studies Newsletter 19 (1991): 6-36; and "Aria sfasciata, duetto senza l'insieme: le scene di con· 2

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long quotation from the second volume of Julian Budden's now-canonic book on Verdi's operas, a passage in which Budden discusses the limits of Verdian analysis, and in which he gently warns of the dangers that await those who would find overarching motivic or tonal patterns in the operas (he names Edward Cone, Frits Noske, Peter Pal Varnai, and Roman Vlad as possible culprits).4 Powers broadly endorses Budden's stance, and he updates the list of totalizers to include William Drabkin, David Lawton, and Siegmund Levarie. Powers is more explicit than Budden, however, about exactly why the motive- and tone-seekers produce unsatisfactory results: The difficulty with [this] style of Verdi analysis ... -the topical a Ia Wtrnai and Noske, the global-tonal a Ia Vlad and Cone-is not just that they are preoccupied with topoi or tonality but also that neither takes much account of the musico-dramatic presuppositions of Verdi himself, of those expectations and assumptions about how musical theatre worked or should work, that inform Verdi's correspondence, the comments and writings of Verdi's Italian contemporaries, and above all the works themselves. (76)

As already hinted, the terms of this criticism are for my purposes crucial: what Powers sets out as an alternative to the motive- and tone-seekers is a kind of "historically aware" analysis, one that breathes the air of the time of creation, gains impetus and authority from the composer's letters and the writings of his contemporaries; and also (though it could, I think, prove a dangerously circular addition) a method that springs from "the works themselves." This is a powerful claim to make for any analytical method, and-as so often when a composer's intention is marshaled to an analyst's cause-its "authenticity" encourages Powers to make a further claim: so considerable is the authority of the past he has co-opted that he can be prescriptive, proclaim that his chosen avenue into the work is indispensable, that other routes cannot succeed:

fronto tenore-soprano nello 'Stiffelio'/'Aroldo' di Giuseppe Verdi," in Giovanni Morelli, ed., Tomando a "Stiffelio": Popolarita, rifacimento, messinscena, effetismo e altre "cure" del Verdi romantico (Florence, 1987), 141-88. A book entitled Verdian Musical Dramaturgy has been promised. Powers is, of course, by no means alone in this approach. Important predecessors, each with his own inflections, are: Philip Gossett, "Verdi, Ghislanzoni, and Aida: The Uses of Convention," Critical Inquiry 1 (1974): 291-334; Robert A. Moreen, "Integration of Text Forms and Musical Forms in Verdi's Early Operas" (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1975); and Scott L. Balthazar, "Evolving Conventions in Italian Serious Opera: Scene Structure in the Works of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi, 1810 to 1850" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1985). 4 Julian Budden, The Operas of Verdi, vo!. 2 (London, 1978), 50-54.

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An analysis based on the premise that an opera is a synthesis of various pieces has to be able to deal first of all with these pieces, and with the kinds of pieces they are in general; without that, discussion of specific devices, local or global, that bring certain pieces or passages into a special relationship, be it in any one work or across several works, is ad hoc and vacuous. (78)

Although details of Powers's approach are now very familiar, some explanation of it will be useful here. To be brief, the basis of this type of "analysis" lies in seeing Verdian musical drama through the lens of various multisectional fixed forms: the solo aria, the concertato finale, and, most notably, the grand duet, whose "solita forma" or usual structure is typically configured as a succession of four contrasting "movements" (tempo d'attacco, adagio, tempo di mezzo, and cabaletta) often preceded by a "scena" or opening recitative. The reappearance of these fixed forms across numerous operas sets up what Powers calls a series of "normative expectations [... that] may be manipulated for effect" (86). He expands on this a little later: Verdi's constant play on the gestures and junctures pertaining to the normative pattern for duets shows that at every moment he was firmly depending on his prospective audience's awareness of the pattern in order to make his effects; the simple "solita forma de' duetti" clearly underlies the complex surface both psychologically and formally. (93) The question immediately arises: how can we speak of "audience awareness" when dealing with works written so long in the past? In one sense, of course, we cannot; Verdi's "audience" is long dead, buried not only under the earth but under a mass of alien beliefs and social conditions. We can, of course, try to recall their shades by gathering information culled from contemporary writers and critics, and perhaps also from documents left by the composer and his collaborators. Powers makes occasional use of the composer's voice (though Verdi was-or at least liked the epistolary pose of being-an extremely reluctant theorist), but it is fair to say that his main source of information on this matter of "audience awareness," and hence the main burden of his demonstration of "authenticity," falls on one book, Abramo Basevi's Studio sulle opere di Giuseppe Verdi, published in Florence in 1859 and since the 1970s an extremely common point of reference in Anglo-American Verdi scholarship.5 Indeed Powers, like Budden before him, uses one of Basevi's many 5 Basevi's Studio was reprinted in the series Biblioteca storico giuridica e artistico letteraria, no. 73, ed. Giuseppe Vecchi (Bologna, 1978); subsequent references will appear as page numbers in the main text. The reprint may be hard to find, for the new title pages give the author's name as "Bavesi."

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digressions on musical analysis, a passage about "tinta," as a point d'appui for his own investigation. 6 The identification of Basevi with composerly "authenticity" is made explicit very shortly afterward: For my own point of departure ... I take Basevi's list of the movements in the "solita forma de' duetti." ... While not all Basevi's terms are so easily found in Verdi's letters as some, the way Basevi deals with both the action movements and the set pieces in his discourses reflects the same suppositions that one finds in Verdi's correspondence with his librettists. (78)

Why has the Studio sulle opere di Giuseppe Verdi, a book that received only occasional citation in the standard Italian critical works of the early to mid-twentieth century, proved since the 1970s so popular as the representative of "contemporary" Verdian criticism and, by extension, of audience response?? To answer this we need to take a fairly detailed look at the background against which he wrote his most famous work. Abramo Basevi (1818-85), scientist, doctor, man of letters, philosopher, administrator, music critic, and composer, was a key figure in Florentine musical life during the mid-nineteenth century. His monograph on Verdi, the chapters of which originally appeared as journalistic essays, was one of his many books on music, among which are several on aesthetics and one on Beethoven's Op. 18 quartets (he was a co-founder of Florence's Societa del Quartetto in 1861).8 However, it is (at least in the context of his Verdi book) important to recall that Basevi started life as a composer of operas, not as a critic. His opera Romilda ed Ezzelino was premiered at Florence's Teatro Alfieri in August 1840, and although there were critical rumblings about the libretto (written by the composer), the music aroused "un delirio indescrivibile," its originality in particular much praised. 9 But by the mid-1840s, Basevi and other provincial northern Italian composers found themselves professionally becalmed, the public at large overwhelmed by the enormous popularity of Verdi. In 6 However, this particular Basevian digression turns out to have little to do with "forma," whether "Ia solita" or any other, and its principal ideas are not developed in Powers's essay. 7 A representative selection of these Italian responses can be amassed by following up the index references in Carlo Gatti, Verdi (Milan, 1931); Franco Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, 4 vols. (Milan, 1959), where at one point (vol. 4, 316) Basevi's work is described as "superatissimo"; and Massimo Mila, La giovinezza di Verdi (Turin, 1974). B My main source of information about Basevi has been Marcello de Angelis, La musica del Granduca. Vita musicale e correnti critiche a Firenze 1800-1855 (Florence, 1978); see also Leonardo Pinzauti's entry on Basevi in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie (London, 1992), vol. 1, 337. DeAngelis reproduces a fine nineteenth-century bust (illustration no. 23)-a little of Brahms, a little of Karl Marx-suggesting that in later life Basevi became quite literally a monumental figure. 9 DeAngelis, La musica del Granduca, 38.

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May 1847, Basevi's Enrico Howard was performed at the Teatro Pergola, two months after the tumultuous success in the same theater of Verdi's Macbeth, the latter's first and only world premiere in Florence. As an added though unrelated distraction the city was increasingly caught up with revolutionary fervor. Poor Enrico was a critical disaster, and the composer, praised in pre-Verdian 1840 for his originality, was now proclaimed to have produced, in the words of one reviewer, "a medley of pieces by the principal composers of our time."lO Basevi never wrote for the stage again. In this context, Basevi's chapter on Macbeth, an opera about which he is in general rather stern, can hardly fail to have an added biographical resonance. Was the author completely unmindful of his own last opera, of the fact that-in the immediate wake of the Florentine premiere of Verdi's first Shakespearian opera-it was roundly declared to lack originality? Near the close of the chapter, a considerable digression is launched, worth quoting in full. Basevi has in his account of Macbeth mentioned several moments in which Verdi employed "ritmi vecchissimi" (very old rhythms), a point that comes up again in discussing the final number and then leads to a remarkable outpouring: 11 I:aria di Macbeth, che viene appresso, nulla presenta di notabile: solo din) che ivi pure scorgesi un ritmo vecchissimo. Ed a questo proposito vuolsi avvertire, che il ritmo costituisce si gran parte della melodia, che non e secondo Ia giustizia, il dare il nome di scrittore originate a colui che, sopra ritmi vecchissimi, cangiando le note, formi motivi nuovi. La tanto vantata facilita di molte arie italiane deriva in gran parte dalla vecchiezza dei ritmi. Volete voi Ia ricetta per comporre me/odie facilissime ed orecchiabili? Prendete un ritmo vecchio, tra i piu chiari. Per adattarvi le nuove note non fa bisogno di troppa fatica; imperciocche, quanto a trovare una grata successione, vi sono delle regole quasi fisse [... ]; quanto alia condotta o alia forma del pezzo, seguite pure, come su d'un falsariga, quella gia in voga, senza darvi briga d'introdurvi veruna modificazione; quanto poi aile armonie, avete quelle del tuono in cui eil pezzo, ed ove vogliate fare altre modulazioni grate, vi sono le opportune regole. E in questa guisa che vengon creati molti pezzi di musica i quali usurpano il nome di nuovi. I buongustaj vanno poi a! teatro ed esclamano "bella! bella! questa e musica che si comprende subito! Non siva gia mica al teatro per istudiare." Questi stupidi giudizj, che corrono di bocca in bocca, se fossero veramente ascoltati da chi e acceso della sacra scintilla del genio, l'arte musicale trascinerebbero ben presto all'ultimo stadio della corruzione. (108-9) 1o Ibid., 66. 11 Basevi discusses, of course, the first version of Macbeth; the Parisian revision of the opera was still some way in the future.

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[Macbeth's aria, which comes next, presents nothing of note; I shall say only that there too a very old rhythm is used. Concerning this, I should like to mention that rhythm constitutes so great a part of melody that it is unjust to give the name of an original composer to one who forms new motives on old rhythms, altering only the notes. The much-praised memorability of many Italian arias comes in great part from the antiquity of their rhythms. Would you like a recipe for the composition of facile, catchy melodies? Take an old rhythm from amongst the clearest examples. It does not take too much work to adapt new notes to it, for there are some fixed rules .... With regard to the unfolding or form of a piece, copy directly, as from a pattern, the one in vogue at the moment, without taking the trouble to introduce the least modification. For the harmonies, you have those of the key of the piece, and where you wish to make other graceful modulations, there are appropriate rules. It is in this manner that many pieces of music claiming the title of "new" are created. The dilettanti then go to the theater and cry, "Lovely, lovely! This is immediately comprehensible music-it's certainly not to study that one goes to the theater!" These foolish judgments fly from mouth to mouth; if they were to be heeded by anyone truly touched by the sacred spark of genius, the art of music would be quickly dragged down to its final stages of corruption.12] There is much that could be drawn from this passage. Basevi's starting point is a concern with rhythm, which we tend to see as a "surface" element when approaching music analytically, and this point will prove significant, as will his reference to the "unfolding or form of the piece" (condotta o ... forma del pezzo). But at this stage, and in the biographical context outlined above, what might impress most is the tone of the final sentences. One hardly need be a dedicated follower of Harold Bloom to see a certain anxiety in all this, a certain sense of protesting too much. Indeed, it could be revealing to read the entire book in this lightas a gigantic polemic in favor of a lost cause, a fantastically wordy explanation for the failure of Enrico Howard. More to the point, however, this background casts an interesting light on the entire method of Basevi's Verdian monograph, one that might indirectly lead to an explanation for its present vogue. As early as the preface, Basevi positions himself in his own academy by establishing a distance from most other writings on Italian opera, taking a sideswipe at those critics who "examine only superficially the organism of musical pieces" (VI: non si esamina che superficialmente l'organismo dei pezzi 12 In this case, the English (slightly modified) is by Edward Schneider, whose translation of the entire Macbeth chapter appears in David Rosen and Andrew Porter, eds., The Macbeth Sourcebook (New York, 1984), 421-25; here 425. All other translations from Basevi are my own.

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musicali). His book, on the other hand, will be addressed to composers and will eschew those poetic evocations meant for untutored listeners (IX). In one of the last sentences of the preface, he hopes that his writing will help criticism in Italy "acquire the importance it needs in order to prevent the decline of our [national] music" (XI: acquisti in Italia quell'importanza che le abbisogna a volere impedire lo scadimento della musica tra noi). Whether or not we immediately see a subtext here, find in his insistence on writing for composers, offering them "theory," a reference to his own musical past, perhaps even an attempt at selfjustification, the effect of such a program is to produce what, for 1859, is a very unusual book of musical criticism. A separate chapter is devoted to each of Verdi's operas from Nabucco to Aroldo, and each chapter typically dispenses with the plot very early, mentions the language of the libretto rarely, and uses much of the remaining space in a blow-by-blow, sometimes rather technical account of each "number" of the score in question. This format is in sharp contrast to most critical discussions of Verdi at midcentury, which under our late twentieth-century gaze will often seem to ignore the music in favor of endless discussion of the plot, the literary failings and successes of the libretto, and the successes and failings of various singers. Indeed, Basevi is in this respect so untypical that the suspicion immediately arises: has his book become seen as "representative" not because it is a particularly fine example of the general mode of contemporary discourse, but because its methods-highly unusual at the time-most nearly approach our own discourse about music? Mirror, mirror on the wall: we look into what often seems the murky pool of Ottocento musical writings, and we find in Basevi's literary demonstrations of composerly confidence the nearest thing to a clear reflection. But is the Basevian image really that limpid? Is the reflection more imagined than real? Read straight through (rather than trawled in search of the occasional glinting object) it is hard to imagine that the modern consumer will not find long stretches of Basevi's Studio doggedly prosaic. There is-for us-a curious dislocation (common when reading what, for want of a better word, we call nineteenth-century "analysis"): of a move directly from the highly detailed, small-scale observation to the sweeping aesthetic pronouncement. This has, centrally, to do with the business of structural levels, so basic to modernist notions of musical argument. For Basevi, the "form" of a piece derived from its smallest gestural features, in his case very often rhythmic figures; but the resemblance to a Schenkerian or Schoenbergian musical organicism is only superficial, because in Basevi's universe there is, quite simply, nothing under the surface, no Urlinie or Grundgestalt. In terms of the closet scene invoked at the start of this essay, Basevi plays Gertrude: "All that

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is I see." Visions of the behind or the beyond, the levels of structure on which we habitually base our arguments for value-basic shapes, whether thematic or tonal, or large-scale formal articulations-are nowhere to be found. It should, then, come as no surprise that moments when Basevian analysis most tellingly prefigures modern concerns generally involve the smallest levels of musical description. And perhaps "prefigure" does not do it justice: lacking a need continually to locate such detail in larger pictures, Basevi can often contemplate it with striking freshness. Take, for example, the following passage, which discusses the phrase structure of Pagano's Andante, "Sciagurata! hai tu creduto," from Act I of I Lombardi: Quanto alia forma, quest' andante ne ha una delle pili comuni e semplici, cioe un primo periodo di 8 battute a due frasi, un secondo di 4 battute, Ia ripresa poi della seconda frase del primo periodo, cui succede un altro periodo come di appendice, e subito Ia cadenza. (24) [This andante has one of the most common and simplest forms, that is: a first period of eight measures in two phrases, a second of four measures, the reprise of the second phrase of the first period, which is followed by another period as an appendix, and then the cadenza.]

There, more than a century before the structural analyses of Friedrich Lippmann and Joseph Kerman, we find-with very minor adjustmentsthe so-called lyric prototype. 13 What is more, Basevi invents a useful term (appendice) to describe a passage (not uncommon in early Verdi) that occurs outside the prototype proper, after tonal closure, but is generally thought too substantial to be called "coda." At this bar-by-bar level of close musical detail, there is little doubt that Basevi's book can still prove interesting and stimulating. Nor is phrase structure the only small-scale musical element that Basevi treats with some discrimination: he attempts, for example, to deal with rhythm on the same analytical level as pitch, something that modern-day analysts-hampered by the relative absence of large-scale rhythmic theory-rarely manage to do; he is engagingly alert to harmonic and melodic detail, and to orchestration. On the whole, one senses a prolonged attempt to come to grips with what is different about the Verdian surface, what distinguishes him from his predecessors, especially from Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti, and from his contemporaries-in particular Basevi's beloved Meyerbeer. 13 See in particular Joseph Kerman, "Lyric Form and Flexibility in Simon Boccanegra," Studi verdiani 1 (1982): 47-62.

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In the present context, however, it is primarily Basevi's treatment of "forma" in a much larger sense that should concern us, because it is, as we have seen, overwhelmingly that aspect of his book that has been taken up by modern commentators. And here we need immediately to make an important distinction. In the majority of cases Basevi, as ever traveling close to the surface, uses the term "forma" to refer to the internal form of a segment of the larger set pieces. This usage is already present in the description of Pagano's aria cited above, but a few further, representative examples will be useful: La stretta e invece di forma insolita, perche consiste in un solo periodo di slancio che canta Giselda, e replica Oronte, e che da un coro interno viene interrotto con le grida di All'armi. (Of I Lombardi, Act III; 33) [The stretta is, on the other hand, formally unusual since it consists of a single period of slancio sung by Giselda (to which Oronte replies), and that is interrupted by an offstage chorus crying "All'armi. "] I.;andante

con mota si svolge secondo la forma solita, se non che nell'appendice e un breve periodo di forza. (Of Carlo's aria, Ernani, Act I; 52) [The andante con mota develops according to the usual form, except that in the appendix there is a brief, forceful period.]

II duetto fra soprano e tenore merita qualche attenzione. I..;andante e di forma variata, secondo quella notata nel Nabucodonosor, e altrove. (Of Attila, Act I; 93)14 [The duet between soprano and tenor deserves attention. The andante is in varied form, following [the pattern of] that already mentioned in Nabucodonosor and elsewhere.] Nella cabaletta di quest'aria abbiamo eziandio altro esempio dello staccato Verdiano. La forma e delle solite. (Of Miller's aria, Luisa Miller, Act I; 164) [In the cabaletta of this aria we have, what is more, another example of Verdian syncopation. The form is usual.]

True, Basevi does occasionally use "form" in the larger (more modern) sense of the articulated "form" of an entire duet or so-called double aria. There is, most famously, the occasion that furnishes Powers with part of the title for his article, in which Basevi mentions the RigolettoSparafucile duet in Rigoletto, Act I, as a deviation from "la solita forma": 14 This is a reference to what Budden has termed a "dissimilar" duet, in which the characters' thematic material is sharply differentiated.

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Oltreche si mostra con questo pezzo, che non manca l'effetto ancora quando altri si allontani dalla solita forma de' duetti, cioe da quella che vuole un tempo d'attacco, !'adagio, il tempo di mezzo, e Ia Cabaletta. (191). [It is also true that this piece is not lacking in effect even though it deviates from the usual form of duets-those that have a tempo d'attacco, an adagio, a tempo di mezzo, and a cabaletta.]

Again, a few further examples: La forma del duo e assolutamente nuova per Ia varieta delle cantilene. (Of the Violetta-Germont duet in La traviata, Act II; 234) [The form of the duo is absolutely new in the variety of its lyrical ideas.] Troviamo che il duetto trail Doge e Fiesco presenta una insolita forma. (Of Simon Boccanegra, Prologue; 269) [We can see that the duet between the Doge and Fiesco presents an unusual form.] II duetto che segue tra Amelia e Gabriele si scosta pure in qualche punto dalle forme consuete. (Of Simon Boccanegra, Act II; 277) [The duetto that follows, between Amelia and Gabriele, departs in certain respects from the customary form.]

However, the fact that the last two statements come from Basevi's chapter on Simon Boccanegra-and there are further examples from the same source-is significant: in discussing that particular opera, Basevi pursued the thesis that Verdi had turned to the Germanic for inspiration, and had devoted his attention (according to the author, with unfortunate results) to matters of large-scale construction. During the bulk of his book Basevi applies the word "forma" in the manner exemplified in the earlier group of quotations: the form of an adagio, the form of a cabaletta. More important, this usage reflects a bias of interest: one gets very little sense that "forma" concerned him analytically at anything more than the level of what he calls the "pezzo," the constituent members of larger scene complexes, such as cabalettas or adagios. "Forma" in the larger sense-of complex articulated structures manipulated for musical-dramatic endsvery rarely caught his attention. It is worth pausing over this point, because Basevi's supposed concern with and expectations for "la solita forma" (and, by extension, those of "Verdi's audience") are, as already mentioned, clearly a vital, perhaps even crucial element of the argument for its importance-even its indispensability-in modern-day Verdian analysis.

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One might immediately anticipate a possible explanation for this absence of references to, and seeming absence of interest in, large-scale formal patterns: as passages such as the now-iconic description of the Rigoletto-Sparafucile duet would seem to demonstrate, Basevi mentions "la solita forma" primarily when it is not followed by the composer; it was-the argument would run-so natural a part of operatic discourse that its presence was hardly a matter for comment, let alone description or analysis. Hence the virtual absence of Basevian discussion of the issue pre-Rigoletto: there was simply nothing to discuss. Powers comes somewhere near this explanation when, in attempting to account for the relative absence of large-scale formal description in nineteenth-century sources as a whole, he mentions that it "is of course largely the consequence of the intensely practical nature of a living musical theatre" (7879). A thorough reading of Basevi will not, I think, support such an argument: there are simply too many occasions, throughout the book but particularly in pre-Rigoletto operas, on which obvious departures from "la solita forma" are ignored. To take just three examples, all from duets: the set piece between Lucrezia and Jacopo in Act II of I due Foscari begins directly with an andantino (that is, without a so-called tempo d'attacco); the Act I duettino in Macbeth (between Macbeth and Banco) is, famously, in a single movement; and the Gulnara-Seid duet in Act III of II corsaro moves straight from tempo d'attacco to stretta. In none of these cases (and many more could be cited) does Basevi mention any deviation from a "standard" form.1 5 Occasionally he mentions the obvious fact that certain finales lack strette, though often he fails to remark on even that.16 A special point of tension arises around the idea of the tempo d'attacco, a term now commonly used to refer generically to the opening section or sections of the duet, and that seems unique to Basevi. So far as I have found, it crops up only once in Basevi's book to describe an actual piece of music (the quotation about the Sparafucile-Rigoletto duet remarks on its absence), this in connection with the Macbeth-Lady Macbeth duet in Act I of Macbeth:17 15 The Foscari example is discussed on 69; that from Macbeth on 103-4; and that from Corsaro on 140. 16 The absence of the stretta is noted, for example, in the discussions of I Lombardi, Act III (36), and Macbeth, Act I (105-6); but not in those of I due Foscari, Act II (71), or Attila, Act I (94-96). 17 Incidentally, an alternative use of the word "attacco" turns up twice in Basevi, to denote a kind of coda figure. These need not concern us here, except in that they emphasize the relative weakness of the word's association with duet nomenclature: "Finito il cantabile all'unisono, il baritono ripiglia alcune battute del suo predetto canto, e continua con una

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II duo tra Macbeth e la moglie e il pezzo culminante dell'Opera. [... ] II tempo d'attacco del detto duo, quando comincia Fatal mia donna, e la miglior parte. (104) [The duo between Macbeth and his wife is the culminating piece of the opera.... The tempo d'attacco of this said duo, at the words "Fatal mia donna," is the best part.]

It may be highly significant, however, that Basevi chose to bestow the term on this particular passage: unlike some earlier and many later duet beginnings, it is rather short, is in one tempo and one key, and is underpinned almost throughout by one motive (the 5-~6-5 of "tutto efinito"); it is, in a word, clearly in a single, discrete "movement." There seems, then, to be just one movement that Basevi unequivocally thought of as a tempo d'attacco. To put this another way, there is (so far as I know) no evidence that he conceptualized long, complex opening sequences of a duet as existing under the same formal umbrella, or indeed as passages that should have a single term wrapped around them. The modern usage of tempo d'attacco is, in other words, a fairly aggressive appropriation: a label with some threadbare "historical" baggage that gives us a sense of formal control over stretches of music. Basevi's typical method of talking about such sections was, on the contrary, essentially ad hoc. Take his account of the Act III Stiffelio-Lina duet: Viene appresso un duetto tra soprano e tenore. Vallegro sostenuto non presenta nulla di rilevante. Segue un recitativo obbligato, e dipoi il soprano canta un andante sostenuto, cui succede un breve recitativo, il quale procede, al solito, per semitoni, e termina in un andantino, ove il soprano ha una specie di parlante. Dopo altro recitativo si giunge alla cabaletta. (182) [There comes next a duetto between the soprano and the tenor. The allegro sostenuto has nothing particularly interesting about it. There follows a recitativo obbligato, and then the soprano sings an andante sostenuto, which is followed by a short recitativo that proceeds, as usual, by semitones, and finishes in an andantino, in which the soprano has a kind of parlante. After another recitativo comes the cabaletta.]

This treats the entire duet up to the cabaletta on a simple, tempo-bytempo descriptive basis, with no sense of the number as either a transgression of or a complex adherence to a "normative" model. specie d'attacco, o coda, che direbbesi piii presto appartenere alia musica istrumentale, che alia vocale" [of the finale toIl trovatore, Act I, 209]; and "Di poi il baritono principia un periodo, che il tenore, insieme a! medesimo, continua, ed il soprano finisce, concertando le altre parti. Dopo di che il tenore ed il baritono all'unisono hanno una frase d'attacco, o coda, di carattere istrumentale, che conduce ad un bellissimo insieme" [of the finale toIl trovatore, Act II, 218].

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The same ad hoc description can be seen in Basevi's treatment of the Violetta-Germont duet from Act II of La traviata, and this is a discussion perhaps worth pausing over, as a structural analysis of this duet according to "la solita forma" figures prominently in Powers's article. Powers regards it as "critically oversimplified and historically misleading" to see the opening sections of the duet as anything other than a complex tempo d'attacco, something on a different structural level from "Dite alia giovane," which he sees as the adagio, the first "static" movement of the number. In arriving at this prescription, Powers confidently assumes both Verdi's intention and his audience's expectations; to repeat a passage already quoted: Verdi's constant play on the gestures and junctures pertaining to the normative pattern for duets shows that at every moment he was firmly depending on his prospective audience's awareness of the pattern in order to make his effects; the simple "solita forma de' duetti" clearly underlies the complex surface both psychologically and formally. (9 3)

Indeed, in the pages preceding this quote, Powers takes David Kimbell rather severely to task for describing the duet without reference to these "normative" structural divisions.1 8 In this context Basevi's own account of the duet is, to say the least, rather surprising: La forma del duo e assolutamente nuova per Ia varieta delle cantilene. II prima cantabile di Germont, in tempo ordinaria, allegro moderato ["Pura siccome un angelo"], porta un ritmo assai adoperato [... ]. Con accorgimento ha poi il Verdi adoperato un par/ante, invece d'un semplice recitativo, come vorrebbero le parole ["Ah! comprendo"]. Quindi Violetta ha un motivo vivace in tempo 6/8 ["Non sapete"], ove il ritmo della mossa e troppo ripetuto [... ]. Succede ad un breve a piacere un altro par/ante, in tempo 2/4 andante ["Bella voi siete"] che conduce ad un motivo sviluppato sulle parole Un di quando le veneri [... ]. La risposta di Violetta ["Cosi alia misera"], in forma pili larga, nulla porge di notevole. Assai patetico e il cantabile di Violetta ["Dite alia giovane"], ove entra !'andantino 618. Sono 16 battute di un sol getto piene di passione. Ne meno affetto incontrasi nella parte di Germont . [... ] Ripete poi Violetta le predette sue 16 battute, intanto che Germont le si accompagna concertando. Dolcissime e pietose sono le battute d'insieme che seguono, e danno fine all' andantino. Un breve recitativo ed un par/ante conducono alia cabaletta. (234-35) [The form of the duet is absolutely new in the variety of its cantilene. Germont's first cantabile, in common time, allegro moderato ["Pura siccome un angelo"], involves a very hackneyed rhythm.... Verdi has thus, skillfully, 18 Kimbell's analysis appears in his Verdi and the Age of Italian Romanticism (Cambridge, 1981), 419.

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used a par/ante, instead of a simple recitative, as the words ["Ah! comprendo"] seem to demand. Then Violetta has a melody in 6/8 vivace ["Non sapete"], in which one driving rhythm is repeated too often.... Following a brief a piacere comes another par/ante, andante and in 2/4 ["Bella voi siete"] which leads to a developed melody on the words "Un di quando le veneri." ... Violetta's reply ["Cosi alia misera"], which is more expansive in nature, has nothing noteworthy. Violetta's cantabile ["Dite alia giovane"], which starts at the 6/8 andantino, is very moving: sixteen bars in a single, passionate sweep. No less moving is Germont's reply "piangi, piangi." ... Then Violetta repeats the aforementioned sixteen bars, Germont offering accompanying phrases. The insieme bars that follow are very sweet and sad, and bring to a close the andantino. A brief recitativo and a par/ante lead to the cabaletta.] Again, Basevi's description shows no "awareness of the pattern" that Powers considers essential to a "historical" appreciation of the duet: writing only six years after the opera was composed, Basevi mentioned no overarching structure. True to his usual method, he traveled over the surface: the form of the duet was "absolutely new"; he was impressed by the variety of cantilene, and listed them, one by one. Indeed, and in spite of Basevi's oft-quoted, one-time codification of "Ia solita forma," he offers in general a rather poor advertisement for the possibilities of delicate analytical judgments made according to such guidelines. For him, terms such as "andante," "tempo di mezzo" or "cabaletta" were very simple descriptive devices, a kind of shorthand for repeated technical description. As soon as the boundaries of these forms became at all stretched, he was willing to abandon them, and to turn to the task-for him one imagines much more interesting-of describing and discussing what he found before his eyes: in delighting, that is, in the ad hoc. If a great weight of "audience expectation" for a kind of background template of "Ia solita forma" remained with him when he did this, then all one can say is that he kept very quiet about it. Of course, Basevi is just one "contemporary" writer and-no matter how much attention he receives today-it would be foolhardy to place too much weight simply on his example. But among contemporary critics I have read, he-the "composer" writing for "composers"-is by far the most interested in formal matters: if we cannot document a level of "audience expectation" for complex manipulations of "Ia solita forma" through him, then I doubt we will find it elsewhere. In the end, then, just how far is an awareness of "Ia solita forma" such an essential starting point for Verdian analysis and criticism? On the simplest descriptive level, of course, a term such as "cabaletta" suits us

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very well. We have a fairly clear expectation of what it means, and-if we care about such things-we have plenty of evidence that Verdi and his audience shared that expectation. Critical life without the term would be hard to imagine: it can indeed serve as a useful preliminary to analytical or critical inquiry, and has done so in the writings of many a scholar, from Basevi to the present day. The difficulty comes, I think, if we choose to erect such formal terms into complex and-most telling-dominant patterns; to see, for instance, "la solita forma de' duetti" as creating a normative formal complex so strong that it was an inevitable point of reference for generations of contemporary listeners, and therefore should be an inevitable point of departure for our own investigations. To quote Powers one last time: "For a critical appreciation of a scene like this [the Violetta-Germont duet] to be well founded analytically, the historically attested pattern of the 'solita forma' must be taken into account not just in general but with some attention to detail as well" (90, my emphasis). I am not convinced by the notion that such a complex system remained a powerful communicative source-was an expectation whose denial would always trigger the search for meaning-over a large part of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, prescriptive statements about the inevitability of addressing musical works against the background of large-scale abstract structures, about the way awareness of them must underpin and inflect all discourse about music, are indeed "historical"; but they are of course grounded in the second half of the twentieth century, that late-modernist environment from which we are just now emerging. Ultimately, then, it is not the use of "la solita forma" as an analytical or critical tool that is brought into question: as mentioned a moment ago, we all use elements of this strategy when we write about Italian opera-a completely ad hoc approach to this, or indeed to most other repertories of Western music, is an impossibility. But the rhetoric that can surround its deployment may still be worth periodic attention. We live in a performance world in which claims for the exclusive rightness of the "authentic" or the "historically aware" are sometimes strident, and it would be unfortunate if such claims were to find too clear an echo across the-generally-calmer waters of operatic analysis and criticism. I want to end, though, by returning to Basevi-not this time searching for the dim reflections he may offer of our own analytical preoccupations, but with the opposite agenda: to consider some ways in which his attitude to the Verdian text might confuse us, and so perhaps stimulate us toward new interpretive possibilities. For in spite of the Basevian vogue, it is difficult to imagine anyone today reading his Studio and not finding sections of it disconcerting, if not opaque: time and again, interspersed

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with those often rather dogged blow-by-blow descriptions and their attendant value judgments, we are greeted with passages that restore the strangeness of history, that seem to demand either strenuous interpretation or outright dismissal. Near the start of the Macbeth chapter, for example, Basevi mentions that Piave's great mistake was to write a libretto in which there was no love interest; as nature can instruct us, he says, love is the passion most suited to music, "not only do many species of animals sing more often, more animatedly and more richly in the mating season, but other species acquire a voice when previously they were mute" (100). In Rigoletto we should not marvel at the fact that Verdi chose to place a deformed man at the center of his opera, given "the present depravity of taste, in which souls seek pleasure from the stimulus of the disgusting, just as paralyzed members need strong electric shocks in order to make them move" (185). Certainly that last quotation, its stand against public "depravity," brings to the fore a further, broad aspect of the Basevian "agenda," one that, although central to his practice, is as far as can be imagined both from modern conceptions of Verdian musical politics and from our present-day notions of the proper scope of analytical or critical discourse. No wonder it has largely been ignored by recent commentators. A passage near the start of the chapter on I Lombardi sets the tone: Nella musica dei Lombardi si mostro il Verdi animato di quello stesso entusiasmo per il cristianesimo, che il Gioberti manifesto nel suo Primato morale e civile degl'Italiani. (21) [In the music of I Lombardi, Verdi showed himself animated by that same enthusiasm for Christianity that Gioberti displayed in his book Of the Moral and Civil Primacy of Italians.]

It becomes clear from the context that Basevi was a staunch follower of Vincenzo Gioberti, whose famous book, the Primato (Brussels, 1843), laid out a liberal Catholic program for Italian intellectual and cultural revival under the leadership of an Enlightened Papacy. This was an immensely popular trend in the conservative, revolution-shy atmosphere of the early 1840s in northern Italy, one that came to a climax with the election of the "liberal" Pope Pius IX in 1846 and then disappeared under the new wave of revolutions in 1847-49. But Basevi's suggestion that one of Verdi's most famous so-called risorgimento operas might have been a reflection of this trend offers a considerable jolt to modern sensibilities, prone as we habitually are to reading the Verdian revolutionary of the late 1840s back into his earlier works and attitudes. 1 9 In this case, 1 9 For a consideration of the connection between Verdi and Gioberti that gets swamped in this "back-reading," see Gatti, Verdi, vol. 1, 214. Even Frank Walker in The Man Verdi

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then, Basevi potentially offers us a richer, "thicker" description of the cultural ambience, one in which Verdi's early operas might at various times participate in various cultural movements, and possibly in which his "patriotic" musical mode might have served very different ends at different periods.2o Later in Basevi's book, however, the plot becomes murkier. Verdi-in common with many liberals-seems by 1848 to have renounced whatever Giobertian sentiments he may have nurtured in the early to mid 1840s: in February 1849, soon after his return to Paris after the tumultuous Roman premiere of La battaglia di Legnano, he wrote that "two things frighten me: Gioberti and the Congress of Brussels. "2 1 Basevi, on the other hand, evidently held his religious beliefs firmly intact through the revolutions, a fact that placed him on a collision course with the newly cosmopolitan, Paris-influenced Verdi of the 1850s. The point of impact was, predictably, La traviata, the opera in which Verdi attempted most completely to reflect the new subject matter and dramatic devices he had learned from exposure to Parisian melodrame. 22 Basevian discussion of the work begins with a severe, one-sentence paragraph: "L'argomento di quest'Opera mi conduce a fare alcune considerazioni circa l'immoralita della presente letteratura" (225: The plot of this opera leads me to make some observations about the immorality of today's literature). From Basevi's point of view, the tides of immorality washing over to Italy from France had reached new heights with La traviata: the plot could not fail to encourage vice, suggest that forgiveness of sin is possible on earth, and-ultimately-lead to the nightmare of free love. Just as interesting from our point of view, though, Basevi extended his polemic against the opera into the musical sphere, ending his survey of corruption by stating: 11 Verdi non seppe resistere alia tentazione di vestire di note, e per conseguenza di rendere piu avvenente ed accetto, uno sconcio ed immorale argomento, vagheggiato universalmente, solo perche universale e oggi il vizio che rappresenta. (230) (London, 1962), usually the most skeptical of biographers, suggests that "Verdi was no follower of Gioberti" (149), perhaps forming this judgment from the letter mentioning Gioberti quoted in what follows. 20 I examine these issues at greater length in "Sull'ali dorate": The Verdian Patriotic Chorus in the 1840s (Parma, forthcoming). John Rosselli has briefly discussed the possible influence of Gioberti on the librettist of I Lombardi, Temistocle Solera, in the Royal Opera House program book for Attila (1990). 21 Letter to Piave dated 1 February 1849, quoted in Walker, The Man Verdi, 194. 22 The most recent discussion of this influence on Verdi is Emilio Sala's "Verdi and the Parisian Boulevard Theatre, 1847-49," Cambridge Opera Journal 7, no. 3 (1995): 185205.

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[Verdi was unable to resist the temptation to clothe with notes, and thus to render more beautiful and acceptable, an indecent and immoral plot, one that is universally enjoyed simply because the vice it represents is, today, universal.] Basevi had, in other words, a moral objection to such a topic being set to music, any music, and he saw no sense of strain in illustrating his point through reference not to large structural matters but-as was his fashion-to small details of the musical discourse. And in doing this, in going to the text for "moral support" as it were, he places himself at a remove from structuralist concerns that could hardly be greater. To take the most surprising example of where his critical process leads, Basevi declared Alfredo's famous "Di quell'amor," the recurring theme in Act I of the opera, to be "economically shaped" and the most expressive part of that particular episode; and that was all to the good, because the melodic phrase describes a descending octave, and "porta cosi in se, in certo modo, l'immagine della bassezza" (233: thus carries within itself, in a certain sense, the image of baseness). It is in moments such as this that we are reminded of the potentially huge aesthetic distance between our musical world and Basevi's. He wrote in a context in which music still retained its status as essentially an imitative art, its smallest gestures potentially carrying translatable meaning and thus speaking with potential moral force: "Di quell'amor" is a descending melody; Alfredo's love for a prostitute is base; the melody is, therefore, expressive and, therefore, correct. Confronted by such an argument, we may want to turn away: this is surely not "our" Basevi, not the "authentic" one, not the bearer of history, the carrier of audience expectations. "How pale he glares! His form and cause conjoined ... " We may want to bring him back into our world of patterns and forms, where Verdian meaning can be expressed in charts and graphs, where descending melodies are motivic shapes that gain meaning-perhaps even moral force-when compared with other shapes, other abstract patterns. Ultimately, we may prefer to gaze on Basevi moving purposefully down the garden path toward us, not galloping all over the countryside in search of strange beasts. But should the shock of the old be thus avoided? "Why, look you there! Look how it steals away!"

Chapter Four LEONORA'S LAST ACT: LA FORZA DEL DESTINO

As HAS BEEN hinted more than once in this book, opera is the most richly texted music we study within the academy: it is collaborative, and thus produces copious amounts of text during its creation; its music is accompanied by a literary text, one that commonly derives from an earlier, independent text; it involves characters and character types, many of whom carry texts from elsewhere; and its performance is usually a public event that in turn produces a mass of texts concerned with reception, criticism, and commentary. Opera, in short, challenges us by means of its brash impurity, its loose ends and excess of meaning, its superfluity of narrative secrets. This chapter addresses Verdi's La forza del destino (first performed in St. Petersburg in 1862), and specifically an aspect of the work that further contributes to its already formidable "textuality": the revisions Verdi made to the opera during the later 1860s. The business of composers returning to already finished works in order to revise them has of course long been a preoccupation of musicology, and has over the years stimulated much careful scholarship. But the critical insights such inquiries often nurture seem rarely to have been inflected by an aesthetic quandary that the task might seem to bring to the foreground. For the existence of a composer's second thoughts engages an intersection of two seemingly irreconcilable traditional tropes, in which are embedded two covert value judgments. The first is that a "great" composer is one who manages most completely to determine every aspect of his creation, to wed every detail to some gestalt. The second-especially prevalent in writings on nineteenthcentury Italian opera, a period typically described as a painful climb up the muddy slope toward responsible musical drama-is that composers tend to mature artistically as their careers unfold; that, when a composer revises, he tends to improve his work; that, all things being equal, later works tend to be on a higher artistic plane; that the external narrative of the composer's life is governed by some hidden narrative of progress toward an aesthetic ideal. So what happens when the narratives collide, when a composer returns to a "finished" work in later life? Verdi, of course, presents one of the most interesting nineteenthcentury cases of this phenomenon (Bruckner is clearly another). On the one hand, from early in his career he distanced himself from his immedi-

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ate Italian predecessors by insisting on the integrity of his scores, on the fact that his Fassung letzter Hand be respected. Donizetti, for example, though not above complaining if distorted (usually pirated) versions of his operas appeared on stage, typically seemed to view his scores as comparatively "open"; as starting points from which to construct a dramatic event rather than as essentially prescriptive documents. 1 Verdi was this accommodating only at the very beginning of his career, although he did until quite late in life furnish star performers with the occasional "nondefinitive revision."2 By the time of Macbeth, he was insisting to his publisher, Ricordi, that in order to prevent the alterations that theaters make to operatic Works, it is prohibited to subject the score in question to any addition, any mutilation, transposition, in short to any alteration that requires the smallest change in the orchestration, under threat of 1,000 francs fine, which I will extract through you from any theater where alterations are made to the score. 3

It is highly significant that he tended to regard his autograph score as a final and binding physical document, something to be recalled from the publisher and "corrected" if he changed his mind after the first performances of a work. On the other hand, and especially in the second half of his career, Verdi radically reopened a segment of his opus, undertaking a thorough revision of several operas. He returned to the autographs and hacked away at them, sometimes with uncommon violence, discarding whole sections, radically rewriting others, leaving posterity with a series of choices: between Macbeth (1847) and (1865); Stiffelio (1850) and Aroldo (1857); Simon Boccanegra (1857) and (1881); La forza del destino (1862) and (1869); and Don Carlos (1867) and (1884). 4 And it is surely significant that in all but the second case, in which neither version has had much of a modern performing history, the later versions of these pairs have achieved 1 I have examined in greater detail the openness of Donizetti's operas in "A Donizetti Critical Edition in the Postmodern World," L'opera teatrale di Gaetano Donizetti, ed. Francesco Bellotto (Bergamo, 1993), 57-68. 2 For a listing and discussion of such additions, see David Lawton and David Rosen, "Verdi's Non-Definitive Revisions: The Early Operas," in Atti del IIIo congresso internazionale di studi verdiani (Parma, 1974), 189-237. 3 Letter dated 20 May 1847, in Gaetano Cesari and Alessandro Luzio, eds., I copialettere di Giuseppe Verdi (Milan, 1913), 37-39. 4 I omit from this list the revisions Verdi made in immediate response to what he saw as imperfections in his operas after the first performances (such as those to La traviata or Falstaff, for example) and the frequent revisions he made for French-language versions of his operas (such as those to I Lombardi, II trovatore, or Otello). Important as the latter group sometimes are, Verdi never suggested that they should be transferred to, and thus supersede, the Italian original.

LA FORZA DEL DESTINO

63

"classic" status, with earlier versions occasionally revived with a slight air of musicological piety. The nice dilemma that revisions pose-those competing tropes mentioned earlier-can of course be easily dealt with if the later version is preferred: the earlier version can be cast as in some way defective, improved by the composer now grown wise with the passing of years; the strategy (well known to those who enjoy poring over composers' sketches and rejected fragments) turns out to be the standard way of dealing with what we might call this surplus of authorial signature. What principally interests me, however, is that dealing with the surplus often obliges us to be more explicit than usual about our systems of value: we cannot have the composer's authority completely on our side, and so are obliged to make discriminations, to praise certain procedures, find them superior to others. 5 To illustrate the general trend, here is the opening paragraph of Edward T. Cone's 1982 article on the revisions to Simon Boccanegra, revealingly entitled "On the Road to Otello." It sums up most succinctly the manner in which a critic's values will be ascribed to the composer; or rather how the composer, through gaining "maturity," will gradually be shown to have achieved the critic's values: As Verdi approaches the masterworks of his last period of operatic composition, he becomes increasingly concerned with problems of large-scale structure. It has often been pointed out that his more fluid treatment of the conventional patterns of recitative, aria, and ensemble, enable him to effect more realistic dramatic presentation. But this vocal flexibility works equally in the service of form, contributing to the construction of ever more encompassing musico-dramatic designs. Increasingly, the composer's aim becomes an opera envisaged as an indissoluble organic whole. And in the realization of such a conception, tonal unity is one natural musical resource for him to exploit.... Verdi's revisions to Simon Boccanegra already show substantial progress in this direction. While many of the changes can be explained as clarifying the action, abbreviating the conventional passages, and increasing

5 This type of "critical" inquiry is, it seems, what Joseph Kerman finds salutary in sketch studies, at least if we are to judge from the hortatory close to an essay written during a time in which the activity was under some scrutiny; see his "Sketch Studies," 19th-Century Music 6, no. 2 (Fall1982): 174-80, the last sentence of which reads: "I view with equanimity a subfield of musicology, sketch studies, in which the practitioners are constantly confronting not only questions of right and wrong, but also questions of good and bad, good and better." For a dissenting voice, at least about the application of such critical principles to nineteenth-century Italian opera, see my review of Philip Gossett's Anna Bolena and the Artistic Maturity of Gaetano Donizetti, in Journal of the American Musicological Society 41, no. 2 (1988), 368-75.

64

CHAPTER FOUR

the musical interest of the recitatives, the most important aim [was] toward the creation or the maintenance of tonally unified structures.6 I cannot discuss here whether these hypotheses apply convincingly to the Simon Boccanegra revisions, but the litany of positives is striking: striving for "realistic" drama, the breaking of generic codes, the search for organic unity and for large-scale structure, tonal or otherwise. What is more, if we examine more closely Cone's basic premises about Verdi's priorities in later life, their application to Verdi's other major revisions is hardly as unproblematic as he implies. What would have happened, for instance, had Cone considered the revisions to La forza del destino? The circumstances surrounding these alterations have been traced in exemplary detail by a number of recent commentators.? In reaction to some persistent criticisms from the musical press, and to the opera's relative neglect in major houses during its early years, Verdi decided to make extensive alterations to his original 1862 score for a premiere at Milan's La Scala in 1869. This involved the replacement of the prelude with a full-scale overture, various adjustmentslarge and small-to individual passages, a substantial rearrangement of Act III, and, perhaps most important and pressing, a revision of the opera's final scene, which had consistently been judged too gloomy and melodramatic. As I want to concentrate on this final scene, a brief account of the changes Verdi made to it will be useful. After Leonora's aria "Pace, pace, mio Dio" (the same in both versions), in 1862 Don Alvaro, the hero and Leonora's erstwhile lover, enters the scene with Don Carlo, Leonora's brother and his sworn enemy. They fight a brief duel; Carlo falls mortally wounded and begs Alvaro to hear his final confession (Alvaro, it should be remembered, became a monk after his interrupted duel with Carlo in Act III). But Alvaro feels too guilty, and rings for the mysterious hermit who inhabits a nearby cave. The hermit appears and, to a certain amount of surprise and gioia inesprimibile, reveals herself as none other than Leonora. The lovers snatch a quick duettino before Carlo, asking Leonora for a last sisterly embrace, 6 E. T. Cone, "On the Road to Otello: Tonality and Structure in Simon Boccanegra," Studi verdiani 1 (1982): 72-98, here 72. 7 Much basic information can be found in Verdi: Bollettino dell'Istituto di studi verdiani 2, nos. 4-6 (Parma, 1961-66), all three volumes of which are dedicated to the opera. Of particular interest in the present context is Federico Mompellio's "Musica provvisoria nella prima Forza del destino," ibid., no. 6, 1611-80, which publishes in vocal score most of the music from the 1862 version not present in the 1869 score. As always, the differences between the versions are sensitively discussed in Julian Budden's chapter on Forza in The Operas of Verdi, vol. 2 (London, 1978). Two more recent articles, each with fresh information, are John Nadas, "New Light on Pre-1869 Revisions of La forza del destino," Verdi Newsletter 15 (1987): 7-29; and William C. Holmes, "The Earliest Revisions of La forza del destino," Studi verdiani 6 (1990): 55-98.

LA FORZA DEL DESTINO

65

stabs her fatally and then himself expires. Not to be left out, Alvaro calls down a dreadful curse on mankind and flings himself from a nearby precipice. In the revised version this bloody denouement is considerably toned down. Though both Carlo and Leonora meet the same ultimate fate, both the duel and her stabbing occur offstage. The final tableau is radically changed: instead of the melodramatic curse and spectacular suicide, Alvaro and the dying Leonora are joined by the Father Superior (Padre Guardiano), who ushers Alvaro to repentance, and Leonora to the bosom of the angels, in a gentle, ethereal trio of religious consolation. Clearly this reversal in the plot entailed considerable musical alteration, one of the consequences being that the tonality in which the opera ends is changed. In 1862, Alvaro launched himself into space to a diminished-seventh predominant chord that releases onto a firm cadence in E minor; the opera then comes to a solemn close with the monks chanting "misericordia." In 1869 the final trio begins in AJ, minor, passes through 0 major, and ends in AJ, major, the high strings disappearing into heaven with Leonora. This change would perhaps be unremarkable given the radical alteration of plot, were it not that in both versions the opera also begins in E, and thus (at least on one highly contentious level) is tonally "closed" in the first version and "open" in the second.S These days, few would want to press too hard on such a point; indeed, Cone himself is unequivocal: What does it mean to say that an opera is "in" a certain key? Not, to be sure, that it ends in that key, or even that it begins and ends in the key. If the former were a sufficient condition, then it would be trivially possible to assign a key to all operas except atonal ones. If the latter were sufficient, any opera could be tonally unified by supplying it with a prelude in the key of its finale. 9

In this case, however, Verdi seems to encourage us to make the large-scale connection. The prelude to the first version offers-as do so many Verdian preludes-a kind of radical synopsis of the basic action, and it too begins and ends in E; unlike any other Verdian prelude, though, this one actually closes with the music that will, hours later, accompany Alvaro's suicide and then bring down the final curtain. One has to look to the very last works of Verdi's career, to the return of the "bacio" music in Otello or the closing, C-major fugue in Falstaff, to find even the hint of such a gesture toward linking small- and large-scale tonal closure. 8 This effect of tonal "closure" holds whether one imagines the opera's tonality as beginning from the instrumental prelude (1862) or the overture (1869), or from the first act (which is largely the same in both versions, and begins in E major). 9 Cone, "On the Road to Otello," 72-73.

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Even though, as suggested above, Cone's views on what constitutes "tonal unity" are too subtle to stand or fall simply on the beginning and ending of such a large work, those who might subscribe to his general thesis are here likely to be given pause: this is an early version that seems-at least potentially-to be more tonally "unified" than its later, "mature" revision. What is more, one could unravel a line of development through the opera for this particular key area, making at least a plausible case for its continued presence in the unfolding drama. But I prefer to leave the tonal frame hanging there, at least for now, and begin a circuitous journey through the opera, moving back through a further point of departure, another passage in the first version of the finale that was lost from the final scene in the process of revision. Example 4.1 shows Leonora's dying moments in the 1862 Forza, in which she bids an anguished farewell to Alvaro. It is a passage of extraordinary poignancy, and one imagines that Verdi was reluctant to discard it; but it had to go because, in the later version, Leonora has of course to remain until the end, joining the Father Superior in urging Alvaro toward his religious consolation in the final trio. Leonora's last act is, on the verbal level, lapidary: Vedi destino! .. . Io muoio! ... ahime ti lascio! ... Alvaro ... Io t'amo .. . Ci rivedremo in ciel. (Muore) [See destiny! I I die! ... alas, I am leaving you! ... Alvaro ... I love you ... I We will meet in heaven. (She dies)]

Although brief, the musical effect of this passage is considerable, mostly because it is a single, still point of calm in the otherwise hectic final moments of the scene. Notice in particular the F-major tonality, the striking modal mixtures at the start and the close, the unusual predominant chords at mm. 1 and 3 (in particular the latter, spelled as a six-four on E major), the pause on the diminished chord in mm. 9-11; and, most of all, note the solo clarinet sonority (imitando Ia voce) that so poignantly fills in the increasing vocal absences that Leonora's ebbing breath forces onto her. Just as the first version's final moments-those solemn, E-minor chords-vividly recalled a very early moment in the opera (the close of the prelude), so too this brief episode of leave-taking throws us to near the start of the action. The reference is, I think unmistakably, to Leonora's Act I romanza, "Me pellegrina ed orfana," that still point of calm in the hectic first act when Leonora, about to elope with Alvaro, bids another anguished farewell, this time to her father and homeland. There too we have the F-major tonality, persistent modal mixtures,

67

LA FORZA DEL DESTINO

Example 4.1. Andante Leonora

J=60 (a D. Alvaro)

A

r

tJ

Ve - di

de-sti-

no! io muo - io!

Ve - di

I tJ

imitando Ia voce

strs.

,,__..

!

:,.

: 4

..

tJ

~.

ahi-me,

io muo-io!

tl

ti:

ob., cl.

>

:j:

strinf(.

p

..!

~

~

hrn~:.,sustaii

r::::::;;;

Tr

~

ciel,

Al-va - ro,

f

" ~

~

Al-va - ro, cl.

cl.

11 A

tJ

io t'a

.----...

A

tJ

rJJ

: I

-

~~,

mo,

.

-T

dolce pp

~

..

ci ri-ve-dre - moin

largo

ciel,

basses

L

"

~

tutti

string.

8

m

•

~·

Ia - scio! Al-va - ro, io t' a - mo, in ciel, in

cl.

:

d---l

=::

..

"

tJ

I

:f:

p

l

1---1\

cl.

:f:

"

de-sti - no!

~

68

CHAPTER FOUR

Example 4.2. Leonora

tJ

[addi-] o,

ad - di

l

-

I>U

...-

=d=

~

~

:

/~

:f:

.,._.

~

-di

-

-------... . . .

h

f!

~~

~

'it

"

~-

I>

Ahi - me, _ _ non a- vra ter - mi-ne

0.

m.d.

" ~

I

:

'1

" tJ

L~.....

:J:::::::::::;:::J: p

r,.,

~-

---

#'

ad- di

-

o.

r,.,

colla par~

tJ

-~

,.

-lo-re! ... Ad-di- o,

"

do-

si gran

r,.,

~·~

l

dol-ce mia ter - ra, ad-

o,

m.d.

"

tJ

-

..

_A

r,.,

: ~

r,.,

~

:f:

:f:

:j:

~T~-

'!'--' .._ , .._ ,

r,.,

"'

prominent clarinet sonorities; indeed, comparison of example 4.2 (which gives the ending of "Me pellegrina") and the end of example 4.1 shows that the closing moments of each section are virtually identical in motive and pitch levels and, more important, in the vocal space explored by the soprano. However, both the Act I romanza and Leonora's 1862 death scene relate more richly, and hardly less obviously, to a further passage; a central point of repose in this generally headlong opera: the beginning of Act III, so beloved of famous tenors. The scene is, on the face of it, a conven-

LA FORZA DEL DESTINO

69

tional enough curtain raiser: an evocative instrumental solo followed by a scena and romanza for the hero. The instrumental solo and scena concern Alvaro's memories: first, voices he hears from the recent past, and then his filling of a narrative gap in the plot-a necessary account of his upbringing that Verdi and his librettist Francesco Maria Piave dubbed "Alvaro's Life and Miracles" as they tossed the nugget from scene to scene. Then comes the romanza, "Oh tu che in seno agl'angeli," a plea to Leonora, whom he believes dead and in the bosom of the angels, to cast some pity on him. The next stop in my circuitous journey around Forza will be to consider in some detail this scene of recollection and its resolution; but before that I need a kind of general parenthesis, a discussion of the role that recollections of the past, both verbal and musical, play in the work as a whole. La forza del destino is famous, notorious even, for the breadth of its scope, both geographically and temporally. That breakneck first act sets the clock in motion: Leonora and Alvaro try to elope, her father attempts to prevent them and is accidentally killed by Alvaro. By the start of Act II we learn that Carlo, Leonora's brother, has sworn to avenge the blot on their family's honor. After that, and against the backdrop of boisterous military encapments and only slightly less boisterous monastery scenes, thus with lengthy interruptions for infusions of couleur locale, the main characters are forever in search of or attempting to avoid each other. They are all, of course, cruelly burdened by this immediate past, and it is small wonder that, in their own manner, they all feel the need to lessen the load, to offer narrative descriptions and personal interpretations of previous moments within the time frame of the drama. Alvaro's narrative at the start of Act III aside for the moment, example 4.3 offers a thematic catalogue of the most common and necessary recollection: references to the death of Leonora's father at the end of Act I. The example is headed by the event itself (example 4.3a). The sheer variety of these narrations is striking. In example 4.3b (Act II, scene 1) Carlo is engaged in a bluff, extrovert narrative; the music turns to minor, but the melody keeps its rhythmic vivacity and foursquare phrases; example 4.3c, Leonora's confession to Padre Guardiano in Act II, scene 2, is hesitant, musically understated; example 4.3d, which occurs in the famous Act III duet "Solenne in quest'ora," finds Alvaro near death, the narration caught up in a harmonic process leading purposefully to the C-major peroration of "Or muoio tranquillo"; example 4.3e, from the final act, is hurried and underemphasized. In short, these narrations, these gestures to the past, seem to take place principally on the textual level; if not ignored by the music, it would take a fairly desperate intricacy of argument to suggest significant musical links between the

70

CHAPTER FOUR

Example 4.3a. Alvaro (getta Ia pistola, che percuote a! suolo, scarica il colpo, e ferisce Marchese mortalmente il Mar:)

Leonora (correndo a! piedi del padre)

llJl

_A

" A

l

v

!1.

tJ

.-.!1

i ~

~

:

~

~

~

tal

_;-,-.,

~

i""

:L

~=t--

I

:

-

A

-ne - sta! II

~·

1"

:;j

p

.tf

:it :it :it

1:1¥·

:it

---p

Act 1

Marchese (a Leonora)

Lun-gi

:it :it :it

~

da

me ...

Example 4.3b. Carlo :

.

~

Del - Ia II

A

l

~

~

suo - ra un a-man - te stra - nie - ro

If

I

tJ

:

co - Ia

ll

I

1

1 1

::J:

p

.

il

71

LA FORZA DEL DESTINO

·--=---

:

-

tru-ci-da- to,

pa - dre glia-vea .LL .Jl

l

~

ed

il

"U

:f:

~ f:.'

.f#- ••

-lie - ro, Ia

ven

~ II

ca - va-

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"

.

J 1

Act 2 , scene 1 ___.._,._

.---..

det - ta neavea

1-

tJ

:

fi - glio, dapro'

r-;

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:

:

l

_,._

J!.

tJ

"

_,._

~

giu -

-

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Example 4.3c. Padre Guardiano

Leonora

:

.r v E l'a - man- te?

"

l

~

a ~

tJ

.. ~

~

h

)

. ~ r. Act 2 scene 2

a.

tJ

'

- ta - rio m'uc - ci - se il ge- ni - tor.

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l

~

. . . .

~~~

:

"

~

In- vo -ion -

11

~ ~

a.

tJ

~

:

ll

p~~ -~

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..

~ ~.,...~;-

j) 'I ~

72

CHAPTER FOUR

Example 4.3d. 11

1

" II

Alvaro

~,1

pie I

l

-

ce - Ia

go

-

to ...

I

~

r l'af- fi

I

~

tJ

II

\'

re ... Co-

~

~

_b

I

1..

!>!-

-~

~

-~

b

1\ ~

I

~

morendo

p

I

-

I

-,j-

_I

~ ~ ~

do a! - l'o - no

I

-Ia

v'ha un

mi - ste -

ro,

che me - co

ra.

mor-

S'ab-

"

l

tJ

pp

~r--

r~r I

:

I

qs-

If lr I

~

4

~

~-

r

~

.. \'

-bru

-

Cl

me spen

-

Act 3, scene 1

to ... Carlo

:

Lo giu fo.

~~~

I

II

l

0

-

ro,

0

tJ

~

~

~

~

~

~

~ ~ ~

sa-

73

LA FORZA DEL DESTINO

Example 4.3e. ~

"

"

AIvaro

[de]-sti

-

no,

" v

. ... . . . . ~·

:

......

~

II

II

!I

"

II

!I

!·, II

~·

dre v'ha uc - ci

-

so;

non

..... .

• • •• ••

•

II •

~

Act4

che se-

10

_.

-

che il pa

~

Jl.

moments collected here (one could toy with rising half-steps in all but example 4.3e, but few would risk it in this stylistic context). At these points the music seems mostly concerned with other, more local agendas; it is content to let the words carry the burden of reminiscence. For those used to advancing the value of an opera by demonstrating the way in which words and music will combine to support and reflect each other, example 4.3 may pose difficulties, may even encourage aesthetic cavils about Forza, supporting those who find it sprawling, melodramatic, unbalanced, and uneven. Others, though, might come to the opera's rescue. Forza does, they would say, sport recurring themes, most notably of course the so-called fate motive (example 4.4) that is the main musical idea both of the 1862 prelude and the 1869 sinfonia, and that dominates the opening scene in which Leonora's father is killed. Unlike many of Verdi's recurring motives, which tend to disappear in the later stages of the action, 10 this idea figures prominently in some later scenes; these late appearances are, though, exclusively identified with Leonora, 1 0 The "curse" theme in Rigoletto is perhaps the most famous example. One might also cite the heroine's motive in Aida.

74

CHAPTER FOUR

Example 4.4.

being used both to introduce and then to punctuate the heroine's two solo scenes, in Act II and then in Act IV. But even this seeming sense of uncomplicated musical and dramatic congruence is, on closer inspection, somewhat cloudy. Although the motive clearly accrues some semantic weight, its exclusive association after Act I with Leonora is problematic, so much so as to challenge the possibility of any satisfactory verbal tag. To call it "fate" (as most commentators do) is clearly too general: all the principals are, after all, controlled by that malevolent force, not least Alvaro in his final moments. On the other hand, "Leonora's fate" (suggested by others) is too specific, given the motive's general application in Act I.1 1 Perhaps it is the very act of naming, rather than the rightness of this or that label, that we should question. As Carolyn Abbate has warned us, the bedecking of motives with verbal definitions, though often presented as a neutral explanatory act, may at base reveal an attempt to bestow legitimacy on a genre that has long remained on the margins of musical history. 12 And the admission charge for entry into the pantheon may be significant: rigid circumscription of this or that musical gesture seems inevitably to compromise a part of motivic meaning, to limit its capacity for contributing to the drama by means of activity that might best be called "transverbal," in the sense of both "beyond" words and "across" them. We can, at least for now, hold off from postmodern ruminations on the gaps that may emerge between words and music; they will after all impinge elsewhere in this book. For the present, it is sufficient to say that this rather slippery context for moments of recollection serves to make 11 Budden, The Operas of Verdi, vol. 2, 464, calls it the "destiny theme"; the argument for "Leonora's fate" is made by Peter Pal Viirnai, "Leonora and Don Alvaro: Observations upon the Use of Melody as a Means of Dramatic Representation," Verdi: Bollettino dell'Istituto di studi verdiani 2, no. 6, 2115-34, in particular 2116. 12 Carolyn Abbate, "Wagner, 'On Modulation,' and Tristan," Cambridge Opera Journail (1989): 33-58, in which she aims straight at the gaudy Teutonic heart of the matter: "My own view is that Wagner's motifs have no referential meaning; they may, and of course do, absorb meaning at exceptional and solemn moments, by being used with elaborate calculation as signs, but unless purposely maintained in this artificial state, they shed their specific poetic meaning and revert to their natural state as musical thoughts." For much more along the same lines, see her Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1991).

LA FORZA DEL DESTINO

75

all the more striking Alvaro's Act III scena and romanza, whose opening gestures would seem a classic case of confluence between musical and verbal reminiscence. The scene begins with a long, unusually developed instrumental prelude featuring a solo clarinet, presumably intended to mark a sense of geographical and temporal dislocation (much time has passed since Act II, and the action has moved from Spain to Italy), to give musical definition to the somber ambience (the scene directions inform us of "A wood. The night is very dark"), and to offer an emotive, perhaps representational accompaniment for Alvaro's silent musing (during the prelude, he is seen "coming slowly forward from the back"). Once he begins to sing, our hero initiates a long narrative of his past life by explicitly invoking memories of the first act, of "that night" in Seville: La vita e inferno all'infelice! Invano Morte desio! ... Siviglia! ... Leonora! Oh rimembranza! ... Oh, notte Ch'ogni ben mi rapisti! San) infelice eternamente ... e scritto. Della natal sua terra il padre voile Spezzar l'estranio giogo, e coll'unirsi All'ultima degl'Incas Ia corona Cingere confido. Fu vana impresa! In carcere nacqui; m'educava II deserto; sol vivo perche ignota E mia regale stirpe! I miei parenti Sognarono un trono, e li desto Ia scure! Oh, quando fine avran le mie sventure? [Life is hell to those who are unhappy! In vain I do I wish for death! ... Seville! ... Leonora! ... I Oh, memories! ... Oh, night I that robbed me of all joy! I I will be eternally unhappy ... it is written. I My father tried to break the foreign yoke I on his native land, and by uniting himself I with the last of the Incas hoped I to gain the crown. It was in vain! I I was born in prison; educated I by the desert; I live only because I my royal birth is not known! My family I dreamed of a throne; the scaffold awaited them! I Oh, when will my misfortunes comes to an end?]

Sure enough, the musical motive that dominates the instrumental prelude and first part of the scena (example 4.5b) is itself an obvious reminiscence, of a theme that was uttered by Alvaro "that night," in the Act I love duet that Leonora and Alvaro sing immediately before their tragically interrupted elopement (example 4.5a). It may at first seem curious, however, that the theme the solo clarinet "remembers" is, in its original context in the Act I duet, a subsidiary moment, not-as one

76

CHAPTER FOUR

might have expected-the start of a movement or its culmination; indeed, so obscure is the reminiscence that it was not until fairly recently, and with the air of a "discovery," that the connection was made in the Verdi literature.13 The relative obscurity of this quotation is in at least one sense highly functional, however; had a musical "visiting card" been pressed into our hands at this delicate moment, it might well have obscured the fact that within the clarinet's motive are embedded further, more distant but perhaps more telling musical recollections. For one thing, there is a striking tonal ambiguity at the start of the instrumental prelude. The act begins with a brief offstage chorus that ends in A minor; the transition to the prelude proper, the move to F major via an A-C tremolo on the second violins and viola, with the delay of the bass F, makes the initial tonality of the clarinet's motive somewhat elliptical. And as a comparison of examples 4.5b and 4.5c will show, this sense of tonal ambiguity helps to make audible the connection of the theme to the so-called fate motive that dominates the gloomy circumstances of Act I and that-as we have seen-continues to loom over Leonora. Example 4.5.

F3r___,r1 br r I r· rna b.

d'a- mor

si _ _ pu - roe

Clarinet

~~(i)J.

tUI

r r-

Act 1

rI

san to Act 3, scene 1

IJ.

c.

~ 'vgtl[!ljl[!gfiF viU Equally interesting from this point of view are the insistent musical connections between this instrumental prelude (see example 4.6) and Leonora's Act I romanza, a complex to which, in the 1862 version, we can add Leonora's death scene. Again we have the F-major tonality, the 13 See David Lawton, "Verdi, Cavallini and the Clarinet Solo in La forza del destino," Verdi: Bollettino dei/'Istituto di studi verdiani 2, no. 5, 1726-45. Lawton also discusses the practical stimulus for this clarinet solo (and perhaps for the prominence of the clarinet elsewhere in the opera?): the presence of Verdi's student friend Ernesto Cavallini in the orchestra at St. Petersburg during the 1862 premiere.

77

LA FORZA DEL DESTINO

Example 4.6. Andante mosso 1

Act III, Scena [e romanza] (Alvaro)

Coro

II

I

lJ

[atten]-ti. :

[atten]-ti. Andante mosso

II

)·,

cl. solo ~

p pp

-r;-•

• -r;-·

::::::===-

.tz.-. >.tz.-.

-(7-"

~·

6

16 II

l

J

-

lJ

:

p

"'

p~

horn~.

~

I

I

,.:

---·

---·

I

I

: ~

X

rt

·.....

'r'

'f 7.,

-. ~

7 7

78

CHAPTER FOUR

Example 4.6. (cont.) 25

p

poco allarg.

34

" ~~

38

er :

-T

\

·-

l

I

~

J

I

\ s mprjcre .

. ~~

. rf-

~

..

41

f".l!..-·

"::----

o:r dolce

:

------

-

~--:.-..

..

1~~

l~~:

dolce

~---

-

f::_~

--

~1:--~:

LA FORZA DEL DESTINO

79

80

CHAPTER FOUR

Example 4.6. (cont.) 58

Alvaro Rec vo (tristamente rna con forza)

"

"

La vi - taeinmorendo

"

~

P1'

+

+

allarg: :

-

~

r:____UJ

L.LJ

Rec.vo Allegro

"'

r'

62

"

"

I r -fer -no al-l'in - fe - li - ce ... In - va- no mor - te de- si

- o! ... 1":\

" ~

1":\

:

66

Si - vi - glia! ...

Andante come prima.

71

~

II

"

Leo - no

"

~

:

-Jl

-

ra! ...

...........

~h

. r n -mem- bran

J51. r-==:J. r

,...... r'

-

za! ...

.e-·

81

LA FORZA DEL DESTINO

...

75

" Ti

not

Oh

"

,-;

~

tJ

:

te ch'o - gni ben

-

..

L_J_J

~

r=J.

r=n

:

~

('

79

-sti! ...

-

mt~~arg:

~Rec." 0

~m.d.

83

>

L

I

'~

g.

,

I

-

~

:

..

e

>

I

---w

I

ci-

,.

r Del-la na -tal sua ter - ra il pa - dre

scrit - to. !':'\

"

l

-

Allegro moderato (J-- 96) con semplicita

" t(

-

fe - li - ce e-ter - na - men-te ...

:

.......

ra - pi

T

>

_A tJ

mi

I

.. Sa-ro in

_...-..._

-

~

R ec. vo

" t(

dolce

~

Allegro moderato ( j = 96)

tJ

!':'\

:

-----=-

-

~

-

-..

-

~

-----------

-

87

~

r

Ti

~

vol - le spez-zar l'e- stra- nio

gio-go,

r

ecoll'u - nir - si a! -l'ul- ti - rna de-

" tJ

:

-------=----

-

~~

- -

I

I

----

82

CHAPTER FOUR

Example 4.6. (cont.) 90

L

~

T!' - gl'In - cas

"

I

tJ

'v

Ia co - ro - na I v

fi

~ ge-re conem-

I

I

4.IJ-

4.IJ-

Fu va-na r . 1m-

- do.

-

---

~

:

r----

I 93

.--

"

3

'

r-------- r-

.-- 3

.

~---

--,

,-;---

'

3

---,

m'e-du-ca-v~ il de

T!' -pre-sa! ... In un car-ce-re na -c;ui;

- ser- to·,

sol

I

"

"'

tJ

.....---.-..~

~

:

~

~

9~

--

"

vi

tJ

"

I' h'. vo per-c e 1-gno - ta e'

-

mia re-ga-le

stir - pel

0

0

0

I miei pa-

"

:

"

4.IJ-

~-~~

-

99

4.IJ-

~

-

con orza

"

" "

l

-ren

.,...

tJ

:

=rJ:

.

=rJ:

..,.

=rJ:

=rJ:

~~~- "~ w

~

so-gna- ro- noun

ti

~

7.t

~ tro

-

~~

f

,qd= X

no

e

li

de- sto

Ia

83

LA FORZA DEL DESTINO

.

102

..

tl scu - re! ...

..

,

r

Oh quan

-

do

fi-ne a - vran ..

•v

tJ

~.a-

I

I

I

...___.-

-tu

-

-

-

re! ~

"

.g.

tJ

:

#-

-

"

"

p

~1:

:

105

l

r_

le m1e sven-

I.

"

l

·~~

_._

•

l I

I

I>J: I

......... dolce.

~.

1':\

1':\

.

striking persistence of modal mixtures (mm. 19ff.), the clarinet sonorities: later on the resemblance even goes to small harmonic details such as the reappearance in m. 4 7 of that unusually spelled predominant chord from m. 3 of example 4.1. As if to seal the complex, in mm. 17-18 the horns insistently announce the three-note unison figure that began the entire opera and that, in muted form, opened the beginning of Act I. Repeated gestures to the past; a silent figure on stage; no one singing; music speaking: the extraordinarily dense redolence of this passage seems to demand interpretation, wills us to reinterpret the silent figure before us. It is as though, in contrast to Leonora, who is forever dogged by simple, uninflected repetitions of the so-called fate motive, Alvaro's memory has effected a musical transformation: he has somehow managed to take up Leonora's anguished dilemma (her Act I romanza; he didn't hear it, but he caused it), the impetus of their love for each other (the love duet theme), and their tragic separation (the fate motive), and to fuse them into a new idea, one that-as we shall see-eventually comforts and sustains him. Let us consider the scene in more detail. For reasons that will become clear, I'd like to focus on a kind of tonal "plot." First, the opening instrumental solo. Its rhythmically hesitant, reminiscence-laden opening proceeds to the dominant; then modal mixtures intrude and the music arrives at a diminished chord (mm. 23-24) that releases onto V ofF major.

84

CHAPTER FOUR

The ensuing AJ, melody, which arises without functional preparation, being ushered in merely by the clarinet's chromatic sleight-of-hand, finds rhythmic security, perhaps an impression of lyrical release; but the music soon winds back to F, to further modal mixtures, and eventually comes to rest again on V of F. The cycle begins again in Alvaro's scena, the repeated clarinet tune this time interspersed with Alvaro's "explanation" of its meaning: "Siviglia! ... Leonora! Oh rimembranza! ... Oh, notte ch'ogni ben mi rapisti!" But at the stage when the clarinet solo shifts nonchalantly to AJ, (m. 27 of example 4.6), Alvaro moves decisively away, to Bl, minor, and engages in his account of the distant past, his parentage and upbringing (mm. 80ff.): the moment of musical departure from past quotation thus coincides with Alvaro's articulation of the word "rimembranza." As soon, that is, as he verbalizes his emotion, he can begin his release from the immediate past, begin to construct his own "line" both musically and biographically. This distant narrative is framed tonally: as Alvaro returns to his present sorry state (m. 102), F minor again reasserts itself, as do distorted versions of example 4.5a, again on solo clarinet. But Alvaro's ensuing romanza seems to banish or at least absorb the weight of the past. Certainly there is no doubt about the true focus of the words: Oh, tu che in seno agli angeli Eternamente pura Salisti bella, incolume Dalla mortal jattura, Non iscordar di volger Lo sguardo a me tapino, Che senza nome ed esule, In odio del destino, Chiedo anelando, ahi, misero, La morte d'incontrar. Leonora mia, soccorrimi, Pieta del mio penar. [Oh, you who have risen to the bosom of the angels I eternally pure I beautiful and untouched I by mortal sorrow, I do not forget to look I down upon me, miserable wretch, I who without name and an exile I pursued by fate, I longingly begs, ah, so unhappy I to meet death. I Leonora, help me, I have pity on my pain.]

The first quatrain neatly disposes of Leonora; he believes her dead, and she is safely transported, "bella, incolume" (beautiful, untouched), to that great fuori scena in the sky. The remaining eight lines get to the business in hand, a remarkably dense, entirely conventional litany of ten-

LA FORZA DEL DESTINO

85

orish self-pity, of railing once again at the "odio" of "destino." The music, though, is in some ways a strange accompaniment (see example 4.7). During the course of the first phrase, Alvaro "achieves" AJ, major (yet again using a diminished chord [m. 111] as the port of entry) as he describes his beloved. But in spite of being repeated, this first arrival is generically so strange as to be functionally premature: when is the opening of a cantabile, usually the most tonally stable of moments, so harmonically unsettled? The romanza quits AJ, major to move through a troubled AJ, minor. During the moments of transition, over a dominant pedal, Alvaro marks himself as part of the process by declaiming a somewhat crude synopsis of his first quatrain over the orchestral transition (mm. 117-19), and then by introducing a distinctive new theme ("Non iscordar di volger") that will dominate this section. The romanza then moves, with minimal functional preparation, to 0 major, in which Alvaro again apostrophizes Leonora; then finally returning to AJ, major for the closing moments. This description, of harmonic process, is of course a very partial account of the romanza, but it will perhaps serve to emphasize the sense of achievement, of triumph almost, at the end of the piece; it might even seem as though Alvaro's powerful final cadence, rising to a sustained high aJ,', is at odds with the "pieta dime!" that are his words. The clarinet's understated added sixths hardly return us to the ambiguity and hesitancy of the start; they rather underline the sense of arrival this new tonic has signaled. For those who know the opera at all well, my reasons for concentrating on this tonal "plot," in particular on Alvaro's achievement of AJ, in his romanza, may already be clear. In the final act of the opera, the progress described in the romanza will again be powerfully associated with our hero, and significantly developed.1 4 The first port of call is Alvaro's and Carlo's Scena e Duetto in Act N, in which Alvaro, now long installed in the Convento della Madonna degli Angeli, is confronted yet again by a remorseless Carlo. As can be seen from example 4.8, Alvaro's opening melody in the andante section, in AJ, minor (4.8a), is clearly close in pitch content to the AJ, minor section of his romanza, but-befitting Alvaro's changed character-is more rhythmically controlled; Alvaro then, as he did in the romanza, makes a transition to 0 major, though again the 14 The tonal cycle described here will remind some of certain recurring cycles in Verdi's early operas, first identified by David Lawton in "Tonality and Drama in Verdi's Early Operas" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1973). It will, however, become clear that I differ from Lawton in the significance I am prepared to grant such patterns in the overall structure of the opera. In the ensuing discussion, I leave aside the Act III Scena e Duetto between Alvaro and Carlo, even though it begins with a further, fugitive recollection of example 4.5b (in E minor, of all keys!), and even though a substantial portion of the duet is in AJ, major. Though clearly related to the complex of pieces I discuss here, it is sufficiently different that its inclusion would broaden my terms of reference more than is practical.

86

CHAPTER FOUR

Example 4. 7. Andante sostenuto Alvaro

A

•

+"

Ti

Oh tu che in se 1ndante sostenuto u

~

no a - gl'an

-

~

r

e - ter- na-men - te

ge -li

-

~

'

-nar, _ _ Leo-no-ra mi - a, pie- ta, _ _ pie-ta del mi

_A__l

f'.

-nar,

pie- ta di

soc-cor-n- mi,

...

...

...

~

l

-

po::::::::tfifS

~

..

~

'"'5-.f

"

tJ

.,.

....-=--. . .

~

"

pe-

me.

.,.

t(

o

--

137

139

-

~ 1':'1

I

.__ f

p

"

allarg: ~·.........

q.I'J

~J

"

'-'

\

1':'1

J

1':'1

r

progress is more orderly, more smoothly grammatical. Carlo, spoiling for a fight, drags the music back to AJ, minor, but Alvaro now counters, somewhat desperately, with an ethereal AJ, major (example 4.8b), the added sixth prominent, as he swears that he loved Leonora as one would love in heaven. This time, in spite of Alvaro's efforts, the ethereal AJ, major is denied: after various taunts, Carlo resorts to a slap in the face and the men rush off to fight their final duel.

90

CHAPTER FOUR

Example 4.8a.

Tt

Le ~i-

Andante

"

l

Alvaro (a D Carlo) Cantabile con espress

I

fc

-...

~

I

~

l~

e)

/egg.

:

con espress. dolce

~.

l;i:

"""-J --.,

" r

Tt

! .

r

-nac- cie, i fie-n ac - cen - ti por-tin

- -

II

p

:

~

~

~

.

L--

r

.

se-co m pre- da 1

-

...

...

e)

...,_

.--

~

~

ven - ti, per-do-

...

. _..

r-=-

~

II.

II.

-.f

-.f

II

" "

l

~ ta, ' o fra - tel, pie-

-na - te - mi ... pie - ta, I

e)

~

.

r . . . . r-

..I..

II.

:

.

-.f

-.f

~

t...

t...

t...

t...

-#

-#

-#

-#

..-

II

-

,r r -fen-de-re co - tan - to chi fu

Tt fc

-

.l

e)

Jo- lo

-.

~

~

~

~

7

~

~

...

~

L--

.

... r·

:

~

Ache of-

s:en- tu- ra - to? ... Deh chi-

- ... -

...

~

p1e - til,

~

II.

II.

-.f

-.f

91

LA FORZA DEL DESTINO ~

"

~;;:

I

-niam Ia fron - te a!

"'

fa

~

l

. - ta, ' pie . - ta, ' to,~ o fra - teI, pie

-

Carlo

o fra~~

:

Tu con-ta-mi-ni tal

"

l

~j

I

-

--1-

OJ

'I

-

lj -.T

I

....

....

..

rr__.r~

.--

~

r--..

:

~~":

1;1=

~

~

~

.......

Pi

Example 4.8b. Alvaro

"

L

d0 IctSS: .

l

molto legato

--..

p

"'

-do - te;

" OJ

I

sul-la

L_H I

:

ter

-

-

-~-

====

====

~

-

"

"

l

... -

.-..

loa-mar si puo ~-

-

.~.

===

OJ

:

-

~

PP dolciss:

I

cie

ra l'ho a-do - ra

ta

...

co-me m

-:-:--

-.... ... te ... L'a-mo an-cor, ___ e s'el-la

-.

-~

==

~

92

CHAPTER FOUR

Example 4.8b. (cont.) ...-....

m'a

rna piii non

bra

dolce

~3---,

rna que- sto cor. Carlo

Non si

·.._:__:_..: ·-.:____:_-· p

dolce

L'a

pia

-

ca il

ffi!O

fu

ro

- moan-cor ...

re

per men-

The concluding link in this chain of resemblance appeared only when Verdi revised his score in 1869. As discussed earlier, the 1862 version ended in E, effecting closure and "fatalit:i" by returning to the tonal sphere that opened the opera. The revised version, on the other hand, closes-as mentioned earlier-with a trio in which Leonora dies and Alvaro manages to achieve a kind of redemption; and this trio repeats exactly the tonal trajectory now twice described, though again with significant variations to match the changed dramatic situation. This time it is the saintly Padre Guardiano who, begging Alvaro not to curse God, begins in AJ, minor (example 4.9a), though notice again the similarity of melodic profile to the earlier passages in that key. The middle section, in C~ major, underpins a crucial transformation for our hero: Alvaro finally listens to Leonora's pleas and, in a magnificent soaring phrase, accepts God's forgiveness and his own redemption (example 4.9b). A last passage

93

LA FORZA DEL DESTINO

Example 4.9a. II

Andante sostenuto

Alvaro

T(

1':\

- ZIO -

no! ... ma-le-di

-

. I z1one ....

Padre Guardiano

:

•

1':\

:

c::::l"""''

-

lia

-

1':\

p· ..........

~

----- ..

~--

N on 1m-pre.r ca - re, u-mi Andante sostenuto

- .......... -

II

(solenne)

1':\r--

I

c::::l"""''

1':\

-

~

-

v

espress.

.

.,... ...

-

.-

--==== ====--

>

-ti

':giu - sto, che e gm

Lui che e

a

--

sto e

>

Example 4.9b. Leonora

animando pp

II

~

DiDio

per

- don

==== PP ~:i:.mdo "' "'

.r.P...

"'

r. tl

pro -

======

"' "' "' "' "' "'

..--

io

#

~-

. . .. .

--

94

CHAPTER FOUR

Example 4.9b. (cont.) do/cissimo ~.:----.-

" ~

-met

"

I

-

L :-:------,.

-

Pre

to ...

ga.

Alvaro

tl

Aquel- l'ac- cen-to I

_A

~

L~ ~.

Jw: ~ ppp I

:

piu non pos-s'io re -

lb--:

•:

~

~

~~

¥

~

" ~

~

Ah!

1-

-

(gettandosi ai piedi di Leonora).

"

I

"

-si -ste-re ...

Leo - no

-

ra,

_,._

~.

Leo - no - ra~ io son

re-

Padre Guardiano

:

Pro-stra-ti! _A

_l

L~

L~

:

~

~

----.::1

:

----- . ~~

:

~

L~- :

:

~

,._~

~ /'

;.

1-&-:

J,~.

~

95

LA FORZA DEL DESTINO

"

ff-e::

L

oJ

Cle - lo! li

_j_

t(

-

dal

to,

son per - do - na

ciel

Cie-lo!

Sia

r to, per- do-

-

.....___.. ~~:

~·

:

~

~

t:•

~:

~·

b.J~ :

.IJ'I

...

'?f.

r r r r de a te, lo - de, Sig - nor.

" -na

-

-

-

(ad Alvaro)

" -

-

Cantabile dolciss:

~-,4.,

tJ

lo

---

I

tJ

t(

-

~.

:

l

-

-

"· .

l~

-den

"

lo

Sia

-

-

r

#

Lie - ta pos- s'io

pre-

ciel!

to

dal

te,

Si - gnor, lo - de a te,

......, :

-de

..

l

a

r-r--,

I

tJ

:

'?f.

Si - gnor.

-

1.

r' I ~·

.

~

_._ _._

r

Arpa

~

~. #

r

96

CHAPTER FOUR

Example 4.9b. (cont.)

"

I

-----.. ....

v

-ce

-

"

l

der- ti

-

-

-

)·,

~

~

~

~

---

-

-

-

ra ...

-

--- ---

~

--- --~

I

v

"

ter

. ..

.._ .._

:

A

r

a!- Ia pro-mes - sa

.._ .._

.._ .._

v

--

Ia I

ces-se

-

-ra

Ia

--- ---

_I.

-.J-

guer

ra,

--

.._ .._

~

.

of ethereal AJ, major, led off by Leonora with suitably restrained melody as she prepares for heaven, brings the opera to a close. The resonance of this second version of the finale, its reference to musical contexts earlier in the opera, seems to be telling us that Alvaro's final achievement of religious consolation is the culmination of a process that he began much earlier, in his Act III romanza. This rumination on La forza del destino began at the end of the opera, and has now returned to the end, albeit to the radically changed music of the revised version. The journey has been circuitous, and even so has of course left most of this huge opera gaping in its wake. By departing from the business of Verdi's revision, however, by stressing that surplus of authorial signature and authority, I hope at the least to have made room for conclusions. My inquiry has been centrally concerned with recollection, and it seems well to repeat that in this opera, as I suspect in most operas, literal and obvious connections between verbal and musical recollections are rare; to put this another way, the narrative structure of the literary text, the complex relationship of its story and discourse, can find few echoes in music, a medium that resides perpetually in the present,l5 Moments in 15 These formulations clearly owe much to the example of Carolyn Abbate; see in particular the items mentioned in n. 12.

LA FORZA DEL DESTINO

97

which music assumes a kind of narrative competence are thus not commonplace, are not the perpetual goal to which a "serious" opera composer will aspire. Events such as Alvaro's "quotation" from "that night in Seville" in his Act III scena are points of strange contact: points, perhaps, where questions of voice and authorial control are critical, where music seeks to confuse or even appropriate the smooth purpose of verbal narrative; points that tend to demand rather than satisfy interpretation. They may often initiate fruitful interpretive inquiries; but they cannot, except under very unusual circumstances, be erected into a system. Of course, musical connections between similar dramatic situations, such as the links between Leonora's first and final solos (in the first version); or between the opening and closing moments of the drama (in the first version); or between Alvaro's romanza and Leonora's final solo (in the first version); or between Alvaro's romanza and the final trio (in the second version)-these certainly exist. But given that none of them is maintained across both versions of the opera, and thus appear or disappear in an otherwise mostly unchanged larger structure, it would be perilous to place on any of them too great a weight of exegetical pressure, to make claims for some governing structural or dramatic significance. It seems more sensitive to conclude that in replacing certain passages, Verdi was not violently reconstituting some organic mass but merely replacing one set of connections with another, in the process making room for a further set of interpretive paths. When Verdi revised La forza del destino, he offered us, in other words, a reinterpretation of his opera, albeit one to which the authority of his signature gives special significance. Especially when considered in conjunction with the curiously elusive relationship between verbal and musical recollection, between such unequal narrative competencies, I would suggest that his radical readjustment might be an interpretive model for us all. When writing about opera, we necessarily place weight on certain aspects, certain episodes, and we ignore others, thus arriving at interpretations and conclusions that will differ; we are, to adapt Frank Kermode's resonant words, "responding creatively to indeterminacies of meaning inherent in the text and possibly enlarged by the action of time." 1 6 The existence of Verdi's revision, that is, further encourages us to accept his opera as protean and malleable: its surfeit of signifiers, its excess of meaning and expression will continue to defy unitary or even remotely comprehensive expression; unless there are unimaginable changes in our culture, the opera will outlive us all, continuing to produce new meanings when every reader of this book has gone with its author into the bosom of the angels. 16 Frank Kermode, The Classic: Literary Images of Permanence and Change (New York, 1975), 134.

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There may still be space enough for one further conclusion, however. Up until now, I have worked under the assumption-and (small wonder) have come to the conclusion-that the two endings of La forza del destino displayed a kind of paradigmatic difference, and that this difference, when pursued, reduced to confusion and contradiction any kind of totalizing initiative. But at a late stage there began to emerge an insistent sense in which the two finales remained startlingly similar. In the first version, those musical relationships between Leonora's dying gasps and her opening aria seem to make manifest that she is essentially unchanged by the events that have overtaken her. She begins the opera by singing a romanza that bemoans her impending separation from paternal (patriarchal?) authority and security, from that famous Italian double act, "il padre" and "la patria": Me pellegrina ed orfana, Lungi dal patrio mio, Un fato inesorabile Sospinge a stranio lido. Per me non avra termine Si gran dolor! ... Addio! [A wanderer and an orphan, I far from my fatherland, I inexorable fate I forces me to strange shores .... Such great sorrow I will never end! ... Addio!]

Sure enough, she ends by bemoaning her impending separation from her lover, Alvaro, who was of course the reason she rejected this authority, or rather shifted its site onto himself: Vedi destino! ... Io muoio! ... ahime ti lascio! ... Alvaro ... Io t'amo ... Ci rivedremo in ciel. (Muore) [See destiny! I I die! ... alas, I am leaving you! ... Alvaro ... I love you .•. I We will meet in heaven. (She dies)]

Her words at the beginning and end of her operatic life, trapped as they are by the economy of literal meaning, do not perhaps make this clear; but the musical resemblances, taken from that medium's well-nigh infinite lexicon, can hardly be mistaken. She is, as those thumping literal repetitions of the opera's principal motive also remind us whenever she appears, whenever she sings, a passive victim, unable to alter her musical ambience. Alvaro, on the other hand, develops musically, grows inwardly. As we saw in his Act III romanza, the force of his personality

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causes memories of the past to effect musical transformations. His ultimate Byronic fantasy, his decision in the final tableau to cast aside those transformations, embrace the key of the opera's opening, and hurl himself into the abyss-all this comes about through his own volition: the grand melodramatic close, the return to the opening key, it is very much "his" scene. In the second version, Leonora would seem a more active participant in the closing stages of the opera: instead of that brief arioso, she does after all participate in the closing trio, even to the extent of leading off the final, AJ,-major section. But by then, as mentioned earlier, her voice is bleached of emotive force; the musical content and development of the trio suggest rather that this number again marks the final stage of Alvaro's progress, Leonora being merely the vehicle through which this progress is effected. When, to a shimmering C~ major, Alvaro cries "Leonora, io son redento!" (Leonora, I am redeemed!), that crowning statement reminds us more powerfully than ever that, in this opera at least, and in whichever version we prefer, it is the male hero, and not his beloved, who is granted the considerable power of musical transformation. Some will doubtless be suspicious of this second conclusion: as though I have tried belatedly to sprinkle the chapter with a kind of opportunistic "feminine ending." Backpedaling slightly, I would certainly not want to suggest that my point about Leonora as a passive victim in Forza should be paraded as a general condition of women in opera; indeed, as I will explore later in this book, and as many have said before me, there are many obvious examples in which a woman's musical voice serves magnificently to overwhelm and drown the petty misogynies of the libretto. But the conclusion will still be useful if it reminds us that whatever our debates over form and analysis, over the naming of opera's various parts and the sorting of its various systems, we do well occasionally to admit that operatic characters also serve to articulate cultural attitudes. And for that reason I should like to let it stand, as my last conclusion to, though by no conceivable means the last revision of, Verdi's much-revised La forza del destino.

Chapter Five FALSTAFF AND VERDI'S FINAL NARRATIVES

THE PHOTOGRAPH reproduced in figure 5.1 dates from the summer of 1892, about six months before the premiere of Verdi's last opera, Falstaff. It presents to the world a familiar, much repeated image, a kind of "personal uniform."l Our hero wears his standard, gentleman-farmer costume: a wide-brimmed, pretty functional-looking felt hat; very plain double-breasted frock coat; perhaps a hint of the "artista" in that flowing cravat. It's a profile shot, of course: a perfectly conventional, "studio" pose, complete with the standard neutral background; but somehow one gets the impression that Verdi has deliberately turned away from the camera's eye. The expression is enigmatically poised between laughter and sadness. The creases around the eyes have a kind of reluctant serenity. What a fuss he made about having this picture taken! The circumstances were explained to a doubtless expectant public in a special edition of the magazine Illustrazione italiana, published to mark the world premiere of Falstaff: Verdi does not care for poses of any kind, not even for photographs; and the portraits of him, taken directly from life, are very few if you consider his long and glorious artistic career. Last summer, Arrigo Boito, Giulio Ricordi and other close friends expressed their wish ... to have a new photograph of him .... "I am not averse to being photographed," Verdi said with his natural affability, "but, my dear friends, what do you want? I can't stand still.... I don't know how to pose .... Seriously, it would be torture for me ... "2

Thus warned of Verdian sensibilities and shyness, his friends invite him to lunch. Things go very well: "Verdi was happy, filled with all that gaiety he had infused into his last artistic creation. There was much discussion of Falstaff, none of photography." Afterward they lure him into the gar1 I take the phrase, and several other sartorial details, from Patrick O'Connor's "An Individual Style: Verdi's Clothes," in Alison Latham, ed., The Royal Opera Verdi Festival (London, 1995), 24-27. 2 The article, entitled "Verdi fotografato," is reprinted in Marcello Conati, ed., Interviste ed incontri con Verdi (Milan, 1980), 218-20; the English translation (here and in subsequent passages slightly modified) comes from Encounters with Verdi, trans. Richard Stokes (Ithaca, 1984), 225-27.

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Figure 5.1. Verdi in the summer of 1892, portrayed in the Perego garden, Via Borgonuovo, Milan. Photograph, Archivio Storico Casa Ricordi. Reproduced by permission.

den, where paparazzi, lurking behind bushes and at first unnoticed, snap off at him. Eventually Verdi realizes that his image is being stolen. He takes charge: "All right, then," said Verdi, still in the best of humor, "since you want my execution, let's climb the scaffold . .. . I see, here . .. " And he sat down on a chair, to the side of which stood a white sheet, so that the maestro's face would stand out clearly against the background . .. "Quick, don't prolong my torture ... "

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"But it's all over!" said Giulio Ricordi. In fact, two cameras had been leveled at him, one focusing on the whole group, the other concentrating on the great maestro's serene and vigorous head.

The inner message, both of the photograph and the journalistic anecdote that packaged it for the public, is as familiar as the outward trappings, the "personal uniform." Here is a man whose image has become one of the most revered in Italy: the article also tells us that there was in progress a competition "advertised by the Ministry of Education, for an etching of the great maestro." But this fame has not in the slightest corrupted our hero. His roots go too deep for the wash of contemporary fashion to disturb him. Here is a man of the people, someone who has lived through a lifetime of struggle and who can now stare boldly out of the frame, look wisely at the world's folly; and especially-the subject seems gently to tell us-at the folly of those who would value this shiny icon, this unnecessary celebration of such a down-to-earth figure. Even without the prompting of the Illustrazione italiana, without being reminded that the maestro's good humor flowed from work on his final, comic masterpiece, those famous lines from Fa/staffs closing fugue, "Tutto nel mondo e burla" (All the world's a joke), come inevitably to mind, so often have we been prompted to the connection between life and works. By this stage in his career, Verdi the opera composer cared not a jot for the fashions of the artistic world; his final opera, his last will and testament, is "pure," "universal," what you will; nothing less than the artistic representation of what that photograph so plainly projects. It has, of course, often been pointed out that the preceding collection of ideas about Verdi's last style reveals only one side of a more complex story, and moreover a side that the composer himself promoted and fostered.J As with most of us, the construction of an autobiographical narrative was an increasingly essential element of Verdian self-projection in later life, and in his case the construction had a distinct ideological message. The context was his preoccupation with what might broadly be called the ethnic purity of his national culture. The Italy of the 1880s was certainly very distant from that of his youth, and-like many an old man in many places and times-Verdi saw the changes chiefly as decadence and decline. He would do what he could to alert the public to the dangers. In a country newly and-Verdi felt-dangerously infatuated with cosmopolitan vogues, the man commonly felt to be Italy's greatest composer offered his own Life as a massive alternative: he was a man of the 3 The most consistently skeptical attitude toward Verdi's forays into autobiography remains Frank Walker's The Man Verdi (London, 1962; reprint, Chicago, 1982).

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people, a simple farmer, a self-taught artist who, far from needing the help of "foreign" influence, drew inspiration directly from his native soil. I've discussed elsewhere in this book, especially in chapter 2, the way in which Verdi encouraged appropriation of his earlier music-Nabucco in particular-to these nationalist ends. But it is worth adding one further example, if only because it comes from an interview published in January 1893, less than a month before the premiere of Falstaff. The polished coyness and detailed recollection of matters fifty years in the past make it a typical late Verdian narrative: "Ah," said Verdi, "the people have always been my best friends-from the very beginning. It was a handful of carpenters who gave me my first real assurance of success." I scented a story and asked for details. "It was after I had dragged on in poverty and disappointment for a long time at Busseto, and had been laughed at by all the publishers, and shown the door by all the impresarios. I had lost all real confidence and courage, but through sheer obstinacy, I succeeded in getting Nabucco rehearsed at La Scala, in Milan. The artists were singing as badly as they knew how, and the orchestra seemed to be bent only on drowning the noise of the workmen who were busy making alterations in the building. Presently the chorus began to sing, as carelessly as before, the 'Va pensiero,' but before they had got through half a dozen bars the theater was as still as a church. The men had left off their work, one by one, and there they were, sitting about on ladders and scaffolding, listening! When the number finished they broke into the noisiest applause I have ever heard, crying 'Bravo, bravo, viva il maestro!' and beating on the woodwork with their tools. Then I knew what the future had in store for me. "4

Readers of chapter 2 will perhaps already find the entire anecdote, in particular this singling out of "Va pensiero" as the moment of epiphany, primarily significant for the present, fin-de-siecle perspective it throws on Verdi. It is, in this sense, a companion piece to the famous passage in his earlier autobiographical sketch in which the numinous appearance of the chorus's text leads the composer back from the abyss and into his first operatic success: I went home and, with a violent gesture, threw the manuscript on the table and stood before it. As it fell, the sheaf of pages opened on its own; without knowing how, my eyes stared at the page that lay before me, and this line appeared to me: 'Va, pensiero, sull'ali dorate .. :s 4 5

Conati, Interviste, 230; Encounters, 237-38. For a fuller discussion of this episode, see chapter 2, 21-23.

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The "literal truth" of Verdi's rehearsal anecdote6 is, for my purpose here, less interesting than its compactness of tone, the way in which circumstantial details so powerfully contribute to the narrative force: the theater "quiet as a church," the carpenters "sitting about on ladders and scaffolding"; and-perhaps most telling-the neat way in which the storyteller manipulates his listener, his masterly fueling of narrative desire. "It was a handful of carpenters who gave me my first real assurance of success," says Verdi, disingenuously. The nineteenth-century interviewer was surely being disingenuous in her turn when she wrote: "I scented a story and asked for details." A hundred years later, the more appropriate response to Verdi's tease would surely have been Morris Zapp's famous line: "Is this where the narratee sits?" What, in this context, is the narratee to make of Falstaff? For if Verdi was capable of assimilating his earlier music into present political concerns, then his last works are unlikely to have been immune to similar pressures. Indeed, by the time of Otello and Falstaff, Verdi knew all too well how prominently he was to figure in the story of Italian opera, and that his last works would inevitably be seen as a watershed in Italian operatic history, quite possibly as the end of an era that stretched back for centuries. Hanslick had it just right when he wrote, immediately after the first performances of Falstaff, that the opera "already belongs to music history. "7 Given Verdi's unique position, the opera would almost inevitably become a manifesto. While it was one thing to deliver covert messages in the form of autobiographical narratives of the distant past, though, it was perhaps more tricky to manipulate the present. The core of Verdi's political message, his establishing of his own naive simplicity, was after all deeply embedded in those narratives. How could a simple man of the people be seen operating the thunderous publicity machine that now surrounded him, let alone involve himself actively in the promotion of a political/cultural cause? The contradiction unfolding here perhaps explains some of the extraordinary ambiguities that surround what we have to call the public genesis of Falstaff. From the very beginning of the project Verdi insisted that his librettist, Boito, preserve absolute secrecy, not even telling their publisher, Ricordi, that work on a new opera was in progress. 8 Some 6 For example, Verdi certainly exaggerates the lowliness of his artistic fortunes immediately before the staging of Nabucco. 7 Eduard Hanslick, "Verdi's Falstaff," in Neue freie Presse (April 1893 ), reprinted in Conati, Interviste, 235-39, here 236; Encounters, 243-47, here 244. 8 For example, Verdi's letter to Boito of 10 July 1889: "Yes, I too want to preserve the most profound secrecy, a word I also underline three times to tell you that no one must know a thing!" Mario Medici and Marcello Conati, eds., Carteggio Verdi-Boito (Parma, 1978), vol. 1, 147.

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months after beginning work, with the first act finished, he was blithely telling an interviewer that "I can assure you that Otello is my final work. The decision is irrevocable. At my age it is better to be silent. I have made up my mind. My task is finished."9 But then, immediately after this fivefold negation, he dangles a very considerable carrot, becoming enthusiastic about composing a possible version of Romeo and Juliet, in particular as "there's the entire comic side, which Gounod ignored. I would want to create a more spirited work with greater contrasts." The usual explanation for Verdi's secrecy (one later voiced by the composer himself and taken up by countless commentators) was that, now in his late seventies, he feared he might not live to complete the project. That may indeed be part of the story. But his delay also had the effect of increasing the impact of Fa/staffs eventual announcement, which now occurred when the opera was well under way and so when details of its plot, genre, and theatrical requirements could further excite public interest. The announcement itself took the form of that rare Italian operatic number, the brindisi con racconto. It occurred during a lunch at the Hotel de Milan, to which Verdi had invited the Ricordi family and Boito. Champagne appeared, and Boito rose to offer a toast "alia salute ed ai trionfi del pancione" (to the good health and triumphs of paunchy). Again the narratees had to beg for enlightenment, and apparently got a very thorough press release, for the newspapers of the next few days were full of elaborate details of the now half-finished opera.to It is highly unlikely, I would say inconceivable, that Verdi was not party to this announcement: neither Boito nor Ricordi would have dared speak openly without the composer's agreement. But Verdi's public reaction now took another turn, another step in the mating dance. As he said to one reporter, "This is the last work of my life.... I am writing it for my own amusement. The public would have known nothing had it not been for que[ Mefistofele di Boito."ll This emphasis on Falstaff being a purely personal work, not addressed to the public at large, was now one he voiced whenever he could, in both 9 Interview with Etienne Destranges (April1890), reprinted in Conati, Interviste, 2067; Encounters, 214. Verdi reported to Boito his completion of Act I (probably in short score only) on 17 March 1890; see Carteggio Verdi-Boito, vol. 1, 163. 1 0 The Teatro illustrato of December 1890, for example, reported the incident at length, adding at one point that "this new opera of Verdi's has a baritone as protagonist, and many other characters; it requires a small but select chorus, and the singers need to be first-rate, almost all of soloistic stature, fifteen men and thirty women at the most; and finally some young girls to dance." Conati, Interviste, 223; Encounters, 230. Other sources for the incident are mentioned in James A. Hepokoski, Giuseppe Verdi: Falstaff (Cambridge, 1983), 37. 11 Conati, Interviste, 228; Encounters, 235.

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letters and interviews, with suspicious frequency and telling repetition of word choice: I am writing without plans, without a goal, merely to pass a few hours of the day. (To Maria Waldmann, 6 December 1890) Let me explain myself. I set to work on Falstaff simply to pass the time, without preconceived ideas, without plans; I repeat, to pass the time! Nothing more! (To Giulio Ricordi, 1 January 1891) In writing Falstaffl haven't thought about either theaters or singers. I have written for myself and my own pleasure. (To Ricordi, 9 June 1891)1 2

A common response to these reiterations, one that risks taking Verdi at dangerously near face value, is to use his declarations as an invitation to idealize Falstaff, as "the old man's toy," the sublime plaything of an artist who, by sheer weight of experience, has passed through the usual barriers of time and place. Or, as mentioned a moment ago, we may see his protests and seeming diffidence as the product of insecurity, of uncertainties about whether he might now be too old to finish his opera. Both may have been partly the case. But Verdi's repeated attempts to personalize Falstaff, to assimilate it into his own image, also bring the opera sharply into the focus of that photographic session; they can, in other words, encourage alternative interpretations, ones that will reexamine the work within its cultural context. As mentioned earlier, that surprise photographic session in the summer of 1892 caught Verdi in more than just a carefully posed "studio" portrait (figure 5.1). It also produced the most famous image of Verdi with his librettist, que/ Mefistofele di Boito (figure 5 .2). This second photo may give the impression of spontaneity, but was surely constructed with some care. The librettist puts his best foot forward, the man about town, sportif and perhaps even a touch vulgar in his checked suit, proud of the company he keeps: he unabashedly addresses the camera's eye. Verdi on the other hand-arms akimbo, without his hat, staring down-is, I would guess, again determined not to pose, or rather he poses at not posing: he retains his distance, his serenity. The photograph's resulting sense of balance, its compactness and poise, is put into focus, as it were, by the rather unfocused figure 5 .3, a second, very similar image, presumably taken moments before from slightly to the left, and clearly dal vivo.13 12 The quotes come from Franco Abbiati, Verdi (Milan, 1959), vol. 4, 408; and Gaetano Cesari and Alessandro Luzio, eds., I copialettere di Giuseppe Verdi (Milan, 1913), 712 and 713. 13 Conati, Interviste, ff. 28-29, reproduces three further "unposed" shots from thesession. He also makes clear that figure 5.2 is often misidentified as having been taken in

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Figure 5.2. Verdi and Boito, summer 1892, Perego garden. Photograph, Archivio Storico Casa Ricordi. Reproduced by permission.

Figure 5.2 became and remains very popular, possibly because it has what we might call narrative force: it seems to encapsulate something of the uneasy relationship between the "simple" Verdi and the ultrasophisticated younger generation of Italian composers, movingly emphasizing Verdi's garden at Stant' Agata: see, for example, William Weaver, Verdi: A Documentary Study (London, n.d), plate 239.

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Figure 5.3. Verdi and Boito, summer 1892, Perego garden. Photograph, Archivio Storico Casa Ricordi. Reproduced by permission.

that Boito's and Verdi's collaboration crossed generations, and so encountered formidable cultural barriers. Very early on it became wellenough known to spawn a caricature entitled "II nuovo atteggiamento della giovane scuola musicale italiana" (The New Pose of the Young Italian School of Composers), in which Leoncavallo, Mascagni, Puccini, and others all look ludicrously uncomfortable in the great man's plain clothes

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Figure 5.4. "The New Pose of the Young Italian School of Composers." Caricature from the Guerin Meschino, inspired by the photograph in figure 5.2.

and unassuming stance (figure 5.4).1 4 Amusing as the caricature may be, though, its image of a younger generation slavishly trying to emulate the maestro could hardly be more misleading, as Verdi would have been the first to admit. Verdi's views on the problems faced by younger Italian composers are fairly well known but deserve summary here. Just as in broader cultural and political matters, he saw in the Italian fin de siecle a dangerous influx of foreign (particularly Teutonic) styles and ideas, a dilution of the "true" Italian school. As early as the 1870s he was recommending that courses of study in the reformed Italian conservatories consist of little else but strict counterpoint and Very Old Italian music. Students should submit to constant, daily doses of fugue, enlivened only by Palestrina and then Marcello: in effect the type of training he himself had received in Milan at the hands of Vincenzo Lavigna in the 1830s. In one respect, however, Verdi departed from his own model. Lavigna may indeed have crammed a good number of fugues into his young pupil, but he also taught Verdi "composizione ideale" (free composition), and-most importantrequired him to take out a season ticket at the opera (presumably La Scala) to learn at first hand the modern style.1 5 It should come as no surprise that in later life Verdi's autobiographical glosses ignore this acutely contemporary side of Lavigna's tutelage;16 again, his past life was Reproduced in Conati, Interviste, figure 31. On Lavigna's teaching of "composizione ideale," see his reference for Verdi, dated 11 December 1834, in Carlo Gatti, Verdi (Milan, 1931), vol. 1, 74; on Verdi's season ticket, see Walker, The Man Verdi, 11. 1 6 See, for example, his letter of 9 January 1871 to Francesco Florimo, in which he discusses Lavigna: "In the three years I spent with him I did not do anything but canons and 14 15

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dragooned into the present battle. In the conservatories of the 1870s, budding composers "must attend few performances of modern operas, and avoid becoming fascinated either by their many beauties of harmony and orchestration or by the diminished seventh chord, the rock and refuge of all of us who can't manage to compose four bars without a half dozen of these sevenths."17 Nearer to the time of Falstaff he became more circumspect in his opinions on the present state of music in Italy, at least in any public forum, being particularly wary of letting loose comments on the new Italian school of opera composers. He could, for one thing, get farcically misquoted: his indignation can only be imagined at a much-circulated report of how he had announced that he could die "a happy man" after hearing Cavalleria rusticana for the first time. Closer to the reality of his feelings about "modern" opera was an ironic letter to the conductor Edoardo Mascheroni, shortly after the Falstaff premiere: At present I'm extremely busy putting the finishing touches to an opera in twelve acts plus prelude and an overture as long as Beethoven's nine symphonies all joined up together; there's also a prelude to each act with all the violins, violas, cellos, and basses playing together a melody in octaves, not in the manner of Traviata or Rigoletto, etc., etc., but with a modern melody, one of those beautiful ones that has neither beginning nor end, and remains suspended in the air like Mohammed's tomb.lS He did, though, allow himself a few public comments about Mascagni. The terms in which he discusses L'ami co Fritz are particularly revealing: "We, the old school, from Rossini on, studied music more, acquired a more thorough knowledge of harmony and therefore had at our disposal a greater variety of expression for different situations, without which one runs the risk of employing identical effects for different emotions." In private, he was less sanguine: I soon tired of so many dissonances, of false modulations, of all those interrupted cadences, of those tricks, and more! ... and of so many changes of tempo in almost every bar-all most appetizing, but they offend one's sense of rhythm and hearing.19 fugues, fugues and canons of all sorts. No one taught me orchestration or how to treat dramatic music." Quoted in Walker, The Man Verdi, 13. 17 Letter to Florimo dated 4 January 1871, Copialettere, 232; the Copialettere also has a substantial appendix of letters devoted to Verdi's "pensiero artistico" (617-35). 18 Letter dated 15 May 1893, ibid., 633. 19 The public pronouncement is from an interview with Heinrich Ehrlich published in the Berliner Tageblatt of April 1892, reprinted in Conati, Interviste, 212-17; Encounters, 219-24. The second quotation is from a letter to Giulio Ricordi dated 6 November 1891. See Conati, Interviste, 216; Encounters, 223.

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This is of course only a small selection of the available evidence; but it is, I think, representative. Time and again during the last thirty years of his life, Verdi's letters and public pronouncements lament the unfortunate influence of foreign styles on young Italians, the dangers of harmonic and orchestral complexity for its own sake, and the lack of strict contrapuntal training, which he thought was leading to a depressing absence of variety in dramatic works. In short he had become, at least as a literary persona, a staunchly conservative cultural nationalist. One should not assume that what I have called here Verdi's "literary persona" will necessarily have an uncomplicated relationship with his work as a musical dramatist; indeed, pondering the larger context of Verdian theory versus Verdian practice, one is more likely to arrive at the opposite conclusion, namely that his various critical poses are more often an elaborate screen covering some more essential (and probably unvoiced, probably in part contradictory) artistic agenda. 2 0 For anyone who knows Falstaff at all well, though, the background of these particular Verdian attitudes can hardly fail to have strong resonance. Indeed, rather than being "the old man's toy," Falstaff might in this sense be better described as "the old man's bastinado": as an elaborate essay written against the grain of contemporary opera; more than any other Verdi work, a kind of manifesto, an ideological statement, an attempt to influence the story of Italian opera. Perhaps the most obvious external way in which this is manifested is in the remarkable efforts both Boito and Verdi expended to suggest that Falstaff was at base an Italian subject, the argument being that Shakespeare based The Merry Wives of Windsor on a sixteenth-century collection of tales by Ser Giovanni Fiorentino entitled II pecorone. An interviewer in 1894 reported Verdi as saying: Do you know what Falstaff is? It is nothing other than an old Italian comedy, written in a very ancient language, and long before Shakespeare! Shakespeare took it and added the character of Falstaff.... Boito wanted toreturn to the original source, and translated directly from the ancient Italian language, which was far from easy.21

This, to put it at its most kindly, is a considerable exaggeration of the extent to which Boito went beyond Shakespeare for his sources; but it is surely a significant one. Around the same time, Boito himself made clear zo James Hepokoski, one of the most thoughtful of recent commentators on Verdi's last style, has gone so far as to see "the gap between [Verdi's] written opinions and his own musical practice" as "the central paradox of Verdi's later years." See James A. Hepokoski, Giuseppe Verdi: Otello (Cambridge, 1987), 49. 21 Conati, Interviste, 249; Encounters, 258.

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to the French critic Camille Bellaigue that the grafting of Italian roots was-for him at least-part of a conscious aesthetic program. He had obviously been reading Nietzsche's anti-Wagner polemics: "Ah, this Falstaff! How right you are to love this masterpiece. And what a boon for art when everyone manages to understand it. We'll do everything we can to arrive at this goal. The human spirit must be 'Mediterraneanized'; only there is true progress."22 It is, however, inside the opera that the most complex and interesting manifestations of Fa/staffs "message" are to be found; if also the most slippery. Up to this point, my discussion has centered around literary material. When we approach the score, we have of course a different type of evidence and can adopt different strategies, both rhetorical andnotably and enrichingly-technical. But the distinction between, say, a composer's score and a letter about that score will remain, and we should be wary of automatically assuming a simple connection between the evidence such modes of communication may furnish. Given that cautionary note, there are in this case connections of a particularly inviting kind. Falstaff begins and ends, for example, with closely related, ironic glosses on two of the grand pillars of "academic" musical form, thus couching the musical argument in a formal setting seemingly antithetical to comedy. The first minutes of the opera are, as several commentators have noticed, in a kind of mock sonata form, and as each new section begins, the words offer laconic comment: "Ecco Ia mia risposta" (Here is my reply) as the "second subject" begins; "Non e finita!" (It's not finished!) at the start of the development; "Amen" at the coda. When we think of Verdi's concern during this period with what he regarded as the "symphonism" of younger Italian opera composers, these asides can assume a rich irony. And the natural corollary to this opening section is of course the opera's closing fugue, "Tutto nel mondo eburla." In several senses, particularly in its highly individual tonal motion, this fugue is a kind of recomposition of the opening sonata, casting material anew but in a similarly unconventional academic guise.23 Of course, the referential nature of these passages is hardly simple: in a work that, as mentioned earlier, abandons traditional operatic forms more completely than any other by Verdi, the fact that the action is framed by two forms hardly ever used by operatic composers is at once deeply ironic and deeply significant; on the other hand, the feared symphonism and the beloved Quoted from Hepokoski, Falstaff, 34. It may be that in fact "Tutto nel mondo e burla" was one of Verdi's first musical ideas for the opera. As early as August 1889, before Boito had written the libretto, Verdi wrote to his librettist: "The strangest thing of all is that I'm working too! I'm amusing myself writing fugues! Yes, sir; a fugue ... and a comic fugue, which would be in place in Falstaff!" Quoted in Walker, The Man Verdi, 497. 22 23

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fugue here stand as equal and integrated, signs that accrue meaning endlessly. Equally Janus-faced is the proliferation of references to works by other composers, not least because they are for the most part veiled and difficult to pin down. Rossini (in particular his II barbiere di Siviglia) seems constantly to stalk the wings, and the delightful minuet in Act III, scene 2, is surely Verdi's valedictory salute to Mozart. Some gestures strike nearer home, and perhaps nearer the heart of Verdi's preoccupations with the contemporary Italian scene. Julian Budden has suggested a relationship between the Act I finales of Falstaff and Die Meistersinger, calling the former passage "Verdi's most substantial debt to his great contemporary";24 and (for this writer at least) there is a clear reference to Beckmesser's Act II serenade "Der Tag seh ich erscheinen" in Falstaff's Act II wooing of Alice (particularly at "T'immagino fregiata del mio stemma"). It seems fitting that in his final opera, Verdi should pay such wary tribute to Wagner. And again, as with the gestures to sonata form and fugue, there may be a deeper irony. At a period when indiscriminate wagnerismo was (according to Verdi) damaging the integrity of Italy's musical traditions, we might want to read these sections as a kind of object lesson on how to benefit from Wagner's example without being overwhelmed by it. Needless to say, the farther we move from arguments centering on large formal units or thematic recall into those relying on more detailed technical observations, the less easy it is to fashion the music into neat pa:raUe1s. For example, Falstaff is more highly chromatic than any other Verdi opera, but equally it is obsessed by cadence, forever punctuated by unequivocal gestures of closure. Related to this, but on a larger level, is the contrast between the work's enormous variety of expression and looseness of form on the one hand, and on the other its many periods of massive closure, its huge orchestral climaxes that seem to overwhelm what precedes them. Are these matters to be related to Verdi's complex reaction to musical modernity, to his desire for progress from his own past while aggressively countering the modernist tendencies of his younger contemporaries? Perhaps the best we can say is that, just as there are contradictions surrounding his attitude to the didactic mission of his later life, so there will be, inevitably, contradictions in the way in which this attitude is realized artistically. These strands in the work could certainly stimulate further exploration, but I prefer instead to take up another thread, one that again unravels from narrative acts, but this time ones within the opera: two moments in 24

See Julian Budden, The Operas of Verdi, vol. 3 (London, 1981), 470-71.

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which one character assumes another's voice. The first of the these occurs in the opening scene. Falstaff narrates how one day he was spotted by Alice Ford, and his fantasies about the emotions a brief sight of him has already awakened culminate in a moment of mimesis: Alice e il nome, e un giorno come passar mi vide Ne' suoi paraggi, rise. M'ardea l'estro amatorio Nel cor. La Dea vibrava raggi di specchio ustorio Su me, su me, sui fianco baldo, sui gran torace, Sui maschio pie, sui fusto saldo, erto, capace; E il suo desir in lei fulgea si al mio congiunto Che parea dir: Io son di Sir john Falstaff [Her name is Alice, and one day as she saw me pass by I her neighborhood, she laughed. The ardor of love burned I in my heart. The Goddess shot rays from a burning glass I on me, on me, on my gallant flank, my great thorax, I my manly foot, my firm, erect, capacious trunk; I and desire burned within her at my presence, so much I that she seemed to say: I am Sir john Falstaff's.]

The fantasized quotation is famously intensified, its "other-voicedness" made sonorously manifest, by the musical setting, in which Falstaff breaks into a coy falsetto at the critical moment (example 5.1). The effect is memorable for its calm mysteriousness: the static accompaniment (the strings in hushed awe-ppp-of this new voice); the delicate tonal ambiguity (should the vocal part beG or G#?); perhaps above all the completeness of the impersonation, its vocal poise, the way it leads calmly to a settled dominant seventh chord. The second mimetic moment has much in common with the first. A narrative culminates in a moment of mimesis, Alice Ford is the fantasized object; however, this time (in the Act II duet between Ford and Falstaff) it is Alice's husband who invokes her, and her chastity rather than her surrender is imagined: Mi spiego: quella crudel belta Sempre e vissuta in grande fede di castita. La sua virtu importuna m'abbarbagliava gli occhi, La bella inespugnabile dicea: Guai se mi tocchi! [Let me explain: that cruel beauty I has always lived in great chastity. I Her troublesome virtue dazzled my eyes, I the unconquerable beauty said: Don't you dare touch me!]

The musical setting underlines the similarity between these two moments: again the singer lingers over his impersonation; again the orchestra is motionless, as if in awe; again the harmonic context is slippery and

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FALSTAFF

Example 5.1. Fa Istaff

:

-~~--

dolciss

"·

h.

.

-...._

E il suo de - sir

ful- ge - a

lei

Ill

~-

si

a!

mio con -

,---

" tJ

~

p

~

:

"- r

I---

_,._~

~

,

:

,--_,._

Lr_l_5 1...-----.1

(in falsetto) ~

-giun- to Che pa-re- a

" tJ

~

~r :

dir:

...

Io

son di Sir John

Fal

, ...

Ill'-

"

I

ul

...----

1--1 .._

-

staff.

Ill'-

j I

ambiguous, but nevertheless leads us to a point of repose, introducing one of Ford's most sustained passages of lyrical exposition, his "Ma se voi l'espugnate" (example 5.2). It would perhaps be dangerous to lean too heavily on these two brief passages, arresting though they both are. However, it is clear that the command these two men think they have over Alice Ford's voice (and by extension of the female world that surrounds them) is illusory, as perhaps the wavering harmony of these "quotations" might reflect. I draw attention to them, though, principally because they provide a context for yet another passage of narrative and mimesis, this time one in which the genders are reversed, and on which I should like to spend some time. Mistress Quickly's narrative in Act II, scene 2 ("Giunta all' Albergo"), is an exceptional episode in at least two ways. First, as James Hepokoski has so thoroughly documented, it was one of the last sections of the opera to be written, being added by Verdi after the bulk of the score was finished. The immediate artistic reason for the addition was, as Hepokoski explains, probably Verdi's interview with and auditioning of

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Example 5.2. Ford

:

poco piu animato ~ ~ ~

La

.

.. ..

. . . ~--

~

vir-tu im-por - tu

sua

na m'ab - bar - ba - glia - va

-

-

poco piu animato

"

>

OJ

~

:

leggero ·

.

·

~ ~ #!i- ¥-

II~

~

~

a.-

-

-

gl'oc

chi,

La bel - Ia i - ne - spu

>

~

¥- ~

~

:

..

~

~

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~'!"

a.-

h.O.

di - cea:

"

" ~~11"~. -

.

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>

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>

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i'-

ll.•

.,._

-#-

- gna-bi-le

~·~

~~~

>

"' (in falsetto)

:

t=

t:'

t.=

t=

Guai

se

mi

toe

~

_l_D::=:::,

"

-

-~

Cantabile

chi!

Ma se

1':\

Lo stesso movimento J= 112

voi l'e - spuLo stesso movimento J = 112 "?-~"?-~"?-~"?-

OJ

r...

" I

I

OJ

-

:

w_,;:::==

-gna - te,

"

I

J.

1;

I

..

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pos - so an-chi'io

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I

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:

J

~

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~

---r--~ I

~ '!' ~ '!' ~

~ '!'

~

'!'

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. -.f .

"?-

pp "I

1

J I

11

J

~

-.I

FALSTAFF

117

Giuseppina Pasqua, the creator of Quickly. Impressed by her capabilities, Verdi decided to expand her role in the ensembles somewhat and supply her with a moment in the limelight.25 The second curious point-quite possibly related to the fact that this was a late addition-is that, unlike almost all other Verdian narratives, whether in Falstaff or elsewhere, this account is strictly speaking superfluous. Far from supplying necessary background information, it describes actions already witnessed by the audience, already enacted onstage.26 Quickly's text, which sets out to describe to Alice and Meg her "entrapment interview" with Falstaff in the previous scene, runs as follows: QUICKLY

Giunta all' Albergo della Giarrettiera Chiedo d'esser ammessa alla presenza Del Cavalier, segreta messaggera. Sir John si degna d'accordarmi udienza, M'accoglie tronfio in furfantesca posa:

:

~

-

dal-le du-e ai-le tre.

" ~ eJ

3 __, r - 3 ____,

f;;_ I

-,;-

...

•

>

~

p

v

I

>

I

le

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CHAPTER FIVE

Example 5.3. (cont.) ,-- 3

" ~

" 0)

r- 3

----,

Dai-le du-eal-le

du - e! ,--3---,

---,

r-

tre.

3------,

Dai-le du-e ai-le tre.

,.,

r-- 3 ______,

.---- 3 ---,

.

0)

.

dal-le du-e ai-le

,.,

l

0)

:

_h

>

·~

~

I

~

~

~

-.Jp~

~ (accorrendo al fondo e chiamando)

,., OJ

o

,.,

.----- 3 ----;

OJ

r-- 3 _____,

, - - 3 _____,

..,_

~

.

v

tre!

~~t~t~~ ! ff

~

:

Ned!

,--3------,

tre, dal-le du-e ai-le tre, dal-le du-e ai-le

"

Ia!

v

3

>

.-

p

v

~

opera, from C major toE major. Section 2 begins at the appearance of "Sir John," to music that has the air of starting a larger period-one assumes that of the narration proper: it has a decided new theme and a pair of patterned two-measure phrases in A major, the second coming to rest on the dominant with clear expectation for an answering four measures. So far, so obvious: this is by no means a classic Ottocento narrative, but it has that level of refraction one might expect in the sophisticated generic world of Falstaff.

FALSTAFF

123

Instead of that continuation, though, comes a strange interruption, an obvious crux. A tonal non sequitur lands us into uncertain C major, and with the sole accompaniment of four horns pianissimo Quickly plunges below the staff to quote literally Falstaff's opening words to her-Buon giorno, buona donna-and then, to an unambiguous cadence, her response-Reverenza. Like Falstaff and Ford, Quickly pauses sonorously on her moment of imitation. But there is an important difference. The two men employ their other-voiced performances at the moment critique, the culmination of their narrative acts. Here, though, just as the force of this intrusion seemed to disrupt the verse flow, so it does the musical progress. Instead of taking up the "narrative" music of section 2, Quickly follows her Reverenza by hovering uncertainly on the description of her obsequious bow, as if still impressed by the force of her ventriloquism. The curiously aimless harmonic movement here-the oscillation between BJ, and :rn-matches the angularity of Quickly's line with its registrally unresolved low Bl.s. Section 4 (in which Quickly begins her radical synopsis of the information her narrative was intended to convey) attempts vigorously to dismiss this uncertain mood by restoring the tempo and sense of restless energy that characterized the opening of the entire scene; curiously, though, this section lasts a mere six measures, and tonally muddies the waters further by stressing the dominant ofF minor. Then comes section 5, which begins in F major. Here the hectic mood is confirmed; one might say that "the music" takes over, the vocal line, distinctly instrumental in character, is doubled throughout by the orchestra. The "narrative" ends with repeated attempts at closure in C major: no less than five perfect cadences, each to repetitions of the famous catchphrase "dalle due alle tre." Even among the often wild varieties of Fa/staffs musical language, this episode is strange, inconclusive even. What is more, it does not become markedly more comprehensible in the larger context. With the glaring exception of that central, unmistakable moment of mimesis, and with the "dalle due alle tre" quotation at the close, there are, as Hepokoski has pointed out, no more than wisps of further reminiscence between the opening of this narration and the scene it purports to describe.29 On the other hand the latter stages, in particular section 5, refer quite obviously to moments later in the score, in seeming contradiction of the backwardlooking words. For example, the relationship in scoring, melodic movement, tempo and tonality between section 5 and the melodic idea that 29 I should say that Hepokoski makes rather more of these connections, even going so far as to suggest that "scraps of musical detail that were first presented during Quickly's interview with Falstaff are transformed and regrouped in new ways, almost in the manner of a symphonic development" ("Verdi, Giuseppina Pasqua," 249). Much virtue in that

"almost."

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eventually closes Act III, scene 1, is far more striking than the subtle "reminiscences" one might extract from a comparison of the narration with the act narrated. How can we relate this scene to the various backgrounds for Falstaff outlined earlier? On the most praCtical level, the answer might be rather simple. Here, as so often in the score, and even at the risk of losing local coherence, Verdi wants at all costs to keep the action moving forward. Pieces added late to exploit particular performers typically do the opposite, they tend to be external to the action, slow down its forward movement; that above all must be avoided. But then, in a move characteristic of the score, Verdi chooses for this episode what is conventionally one of the classic moments of stasis in Ottocento opera-the narrative. On the smallest level, the tension thus created causes a typical oscillation between wandering tonality and reiterated, almost manic cadential closure. On a larger, formal level, this tension is repeated: the ostensible racconto sets off in a properly static manner, but no sooner has that manner been established than it is violently dispersed by a wrenching of the action back up to full speed. Although this explanation makes Quickly's narrative neatly paradigmatic, I don't think it fully accounts for the sheer strangeness of the episode, its lack of self-assurance. The crux is that mimetic moment: and he said Buon giorno, buona donna, and I replied Reverenza. As mentioned earlier, the two other mimetic moments in the opera are negotiated without this sense of strain: when Falstaff and then Ford briefly assume the woman's voice in their imagined love scenes, the sense of dislocation is merely local, merely vocal. But both episodes are fantasies, the woman is an impossible object of the future or the past. The crucial difference between these and Quickly's vocal cross-dressing is that in Quickly's case we have ourselves heard Falstaff sing these words, we know she is accurate, that her story is to be believed. Perhaps this simple fact is the center of the issue. We are in the middle of an opera that constantly plays with ambiguous, multivalent musical gestures, and that was itself preceded by and wrapped around in an extraordinary series of stories, of authorial statements of intention meant to deliver one message by saying another. In this context, it may be small wonder that a true story becomes deeply problematic, and that its central moment of revelation fails to find mediation with its surroundings. I wouldn't want to press too hard on this point, of course: too great a weight would certainly cause strain to the framework, if not total collapse. I'd prefer to return, in closing, to that deeply expressive, deeply enigmatic photograph of Verdi. As mentioned earlier-and the repetition must serve as my own narrative closure-it offers a familiar, much repeated image: the

FALSTAFF

125

battered felt hat, the simple, dark clothes; a man of the people who has lived through a lifetime of struggle and who can now stare out wisely at the world's folly. But if you stare resolutely at Verdi, if you search his gaze long enough, the image may take on different shapes, may even absorb your late twentieth-century desire for movement, for variation. In my version of the scene that ensues, Verdi takes off his hat, turns with mock-shyness half toward the camera's eye, and gently, self-effacingly, says: Un attimo ... aspettate ... vorrei raccontarvi una storia-"Ah yes, wait just a minute: I'd like to tell you a story."

Chapter Six

READING THE LIVRETS, OR THE CHIMERA OF "AUTHENTIC" STAGING Melodrama appears as a medium in which repression has been pierced to allow through articulation, to make available the expression of pure moral and psychological integers. Yet here we encounter the apparent paradox that melodrama so often, particularly in climactic moments and in extreme situations, has recourse to non-verbal means of expressing its meanings. -Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination!

IN THAT weighty, ongoing monument to Verdi's composerly intentions, the critical edition of his works, each volume contains a preface that sets out what we might call a basic philosophy. These prefaces, which change little from volume to volume, talk at proper length and in proper detail about the musical text, and they include a paragraph about the libretto and its particular editorial problems. But they offer no guidance on how textual traces of the "third" element ofVerdian opera might be approached; there is no mention of staging materials. This absence is far from casual, for the editions themselves make almost no reference to such materials, other than including those rather sparse instructions found in the composer's autograph score or the earliest librettos. Although the practice in each opera published so far in the edition is to define as "the base text" the version performed under Verdi's supervision during the first run of performances, whatever remains of the staging of those first performances is largely ignored, even though significant documents are, in some cases, freely available.2 1 The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, 1976; reprint, 1995), 56. 2 The edition is published jointly by the University of Chicago Press and Casa Ricordi under the general editorship of Philip Gossett. None of the operas so far published in the edition-Riga/etta, Ernani, Nabucodonosor, Luisa Miller, II trovatore, and Alzira-has a disposizione scenica that dates from near the time of the first performances. In some cases, though-particularly that of Rigoletto-there exists a fair amount of iconographic evidence concerning the staging of the first performances.

READING THE LIVRETS

127

On one level, this absence is easy to defend. The edition's general prefaces all begin with the words: "The Works of Giuseppe Verdi . .. is an edition of the music of Verdi" (my emphasis); in other words, and to take an example at random, the opening volume of the series does not pretend to be a critical edition of Rigoletto but rather of Verdi's Rigoletto, and this in effect means that the enterprise restricts itself to those parts of the opera over which the composer had sufficient (and sufficiently documented) control. Verdi clearly exerted stern and detailed authority over the music-not as much as we late twentieth-century text-fixers might like, perhaps, but enough to make Verdi's Rigoletto a viable slogan. He also concerned himself to some extent with the words-he wrote them (though often carelessly) into his autograph score, sometimes overruling his librettist or other "collaborators." But his interest in details of staging-albeit at times intense, particularly in the final operas-often left no trace, was at best sporadic, and was sometimes nonexistent. The critical edition could not, in short, pretend to offer the reader "Verdi's" staging of any of his operas, and this state of affairs obtains even for an opera such as Otello, about which there survives a huge body of evidence concerning Verdi's collaboration in staging matters, not least a sternly authoritarian and enormously lengthy production book or disposizione scenica. 3 Such conclusions may not, however, be quite the end of the matter. The Verdi critical edition does after all present its readers with all sorts of information not strictly relevant to the formation of a Verdian "text" (at least in the most restricted sense of that term). Its historical introductions tell us much about the genesis of the works in question, for examplenegotiations with theaters and librettists; draft fragments of earlier versions of various pieces are transcribed and printed in appendices to the main score; it will furnish information about how the first performances were received by the public and press; and-most relevant in this context-it will offer a section of advice about performance practice, in which (if the information is available) the precise musical forces used at the premiere are discussed. The question once more arises: Why, in the midst of all this information, are details of staging largely ignored? 3 After a masterly analysis of the evidence surrounding the disposizione scenica for Otello, James Hepokoski concludes that "by 1887 the staging of an opera-in particular the premiere of a towering masterpiece-had become a vexedly complex operation, far beyond the control of any single individual." And about the disposizione scenica itself he concludes that "[Verdi] may have agreed to approve the disposizione scenica for Otello . .. but one can doubt whether he would have agreed to sign it 'G. Verdi' and thus lend it the mark of his definitive personal approval." See the facsimile of and extensive essays on the production book for Otello, ed. James Hepokoski and Mercedes Viale Ferrero (Milan, 1990), 24, which is the first volume of Ricordi's series "Collana di disposizioni sceniche," ed. Francesco Degrada and Mercedes Viale Ferrero.

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There are, I think, various answers. Partly the matter is institutional. Critical editions of operas are essentially-and quite rightly-a musicological endeavor, and the musicological establishment has tended to be indifferent or even hostile to the visual aspect of musical drama. To become aware of this, one need only glance through histories of opera before the Storia dell' opera italiana (which is an important recent exception):4 whenever the operatic event undergoes a period of particular elaboration in its staging practice, musicologists become unusually prone to talking of "decline," even of a kind of moral failure. In a recent survey, for example, David Kimbell concludes a discussion of the visual splendors of late seventeenthcentury opera by talking of a "collapse of artistic standards, the surrender of genuine dramatic values." 5 Perhaps there is something particularly Anglo-Saxon about this attitude, but I suspect it is more widespread. Nor is the matter so simple that it can be explained entirely through institutional prejudice. To be sure, as musicology changes with changing intellectual currents, it is probably inevitable and desirable that newmillennium critical editions of operas will take more notice of staging. But it is equally inevitable that fresh problems will emerge in this brave new world, and nowhere will these problems be more difficult to resolve than when grappling with what, for many late nineteenth-century operas, will surely be the major historical source in matters of staging. Nineteenth-century operatic production books, the French livrets de mise-en-scene and their Italian sisters, the disposizioni sceniche, have for some time been the object of scholarly research and critical attention. Much has been revealed about their extent and diffusion, their often complicated authorship, the aesthetic conditions that brought them into existence. 6 There has also been interesting speculation about how their 4 Ed. Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli (Turin, 1987-); see in particular vol. 5, La spettacolarita (19 8 8). s David Kimbell, Italian Opera (Cambridge, 1991), 133. 6 The fundamental bibliographical survey of the French sources is H. Robert Cohen and Marie-Odile Gigou, Cent ans de mise en scene lyrique en France (env. 1830-1930) (Stuyvesant, N.Y., 1986); no comparable volume on the Italian sources exists. Articles concerned with the Verdian corpus of production books, whether French or Italian, include David Rosen, "The Staging of Verdi's Operas: An Introduction to the Ricordi Disposizioni seeniche," in International Musicological Society Conference Report (Berkeley, 1977), 44453; and H. Robert Cohen, "A Survey of French Sources for the Staging of Verdi's Operas: Livrets de mise en scene, Annotated Scores and Annotated Libretti in Two Parisian Collections," Studi verdiani 3 (1985): 11-44. The livrets of Les vepres siciliennes and Le Trouvere are published in facsimile in The Original Staging Manuals for Twelve Parisian Operatic Premieres, selected and introduced by H. Robert Cohen. Musical Life in NineteenthCentury France, vol. 3 (Stuyvesant, N.Y., 1990). The disposizione scenica of Aida is reproduced, in translation, in Hans Busch, Verdi's "Aida": The History of an Opera in Letters and Documents (Minneapolis, 1982). Ricordi's "Collana di disposizioni sceniche" (seen. 3)

READING THE LIVRETS

129

prescriptions might be transferred to the modern stage, and even a few brave attempts at such putatively "authentic" staging. It would, I think, be fair to say that the central concern of this scholarship has so far been recuperative, its task to summon forth to modern consciousness a collection of historical documents that have long been ignored. The interpretive work that has sprung from this act of recuperation has been comparatively slight and has, implicitly or explicitly, mostly been caught up with the idea of "authenticity," with the illuminations these little books may shed on "what really happened" when an opera was first produced. Particularly in the case of Verdi, who is known to have actively encouraged the importation of the French livrets into Italian operatic culture, and who was closely involved in the creation of several disposizioni sceniche addressed to his operas, the books have also been thought an aid in rediscovering a further strand of the composer's intention. For reasons of both space and personal competence, I must leave aside the strictly philological aspects of what might broadly be called the production books' "authenticity": the often tricky question of who wrote them and, more important, the varying degrees of accuracy with which they record what happened at a first run of performances. As mentioned already, these aspects have been discussed in some detail in the recent past. For my purposes, it will be sufficient to set out from a general acknowledgment that the livrets are often very early, and almost always uniquely detailed, accounts of a certain aspect of the operatic event. Another example of such a source would be orchestral parts we know to have been used near to the time of a first performance (the latter, I should add, often used in establishing the critical text of an opera). I suspect that the very fact the livrets have been principally approached from this particular interpretive angle-as further evidence of ways in which the operatic text might be fixed-has tended to place on the margins a number of other questions surrounding them, on the one hand about their textual "status," and on the other about ways we might "read" them: about what weight and manner of interpretive pressure they can fruitfully bear. Let me start with a briefly sketched background. It is now something of a commonplace that the livrets' appearance coincided with, and was inseparably linked to, the Europe-wide establishment of what we now call "repertory opera," the gradual formation of an operatic world based not on the constant production of new works but on the revival of past classics. 7 This was a fundamental shift in values, one that affected almost has also published a volume on Simon Boccanegra, ed. Marcello Conati and Natalia Grilli (Milan, 1993). 7 Gerardo Guccini's essay "Direzione scenica e regia," in Storia dell' opera italiana, vol. 5, 123-74, offers a useful historical perspective. Guccini (151) makes the important

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all aspects of operatic production. It changed the manner in which composers and librettists thought of themselves as creators, and of the relative status of their works in the artistic pantheon; it changed their attitudes to the balance between convention and "originality," with the latter increasingly seen as a necessary artistic goal; and it changed singing style, favoring as it did those performers most able to adapt to a broader, more cosmopolitan repertory.s But perhaps most obviously the shift called into question what has become for us, existing as we do at an extreme point in this continuing process of repertoire formation, a crucial aesthetic issue surrounding the visual aspect of opera: when revivals of a "classic" work are mounted, how far should the original staging of that work be considered part of its basic "text"? In other words, how far is that first staging to be regarded as "authentic" -on a par with the words and music? The appearance of the livrets reflects what most today would see as a radically restrictive answer to these questions. Each livret aimed to make certain aspects of the production a fixed text, and (implicitly at least) to govern the visual manner in which the operas would be revived. It was, one might add, largely this prescriptive aspect of the books that so attracted Verdi.9 Although the typical livret might have a page or so of "Indications pour les Costumes," and might begin each new act or scene with a diagram of the set, the bulk of the text (often as much as twenty or thirty densely packed pages, and tending toward even greater bulk at the end of the century) is concerned with two basic issues: it offers a detailed account of where characters should stand, of what visual patterns they should assume in the (still very many) static moments of the opera; and it presents a blow-by-blow narrative description of the unfolding stage action-at which musical points characters should move, sometimes even which gestures they should make when doing so. These two modes of stage discourse, one in which the static tableau is the norm, and one in which stage movement is a kind of constant, were of course in lively and not entirely peaceful cohabitation during the period. Moreover, to focus point that the livrets were far less widespread in Italy than in France, despite the efforts of Verdi and Casa Ricordi 8 For a recent consideration of the earliest stages of this shift, see Emanuele Senici, "'Adapted to the Modern Stage': La clemenza di Tito in London," Cambridge Opera Journal?, no. 1 (1995): 1-22. 9 The disposizione scenica for Otello, for example, declares that "it is absolutely necessary that the performers take exact note of the mise-en-scene and that they conform to it: likewise, the Directors and Management must not allow alterations of any kind to the costumes: these were carefully studied and copied from pictures of the period and there is no reason for them to be altered to suit the caprices of this or that performer." Hepokoski and Viale Ferrero, production book for Otello, 119.

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on the possibilities of tension between these alternative modes can offer a way of examining what the livrets are now able to tell us. Before considering that aspect from a narrowly operatic point of view, however, it will be useful to address some implications of the relationship between gesture and word in the wider world of nineteenth-century theatrical practice, in particular the practice of melodrama, a theatrical style that so greatly influenced opera all over Europe. In the third chapter of his seminal book, The Melodramatic Imagination, Peter Brooks approaches this issue by means of what he calls "the text of muteness." Why does melodrama so frequently, almost characteristically, dissolve into mute gesture at moments of great crisis? Why indeed are mute characters so frequent in the genre? Brooks finds one of many useful avenues into answering such questions by addressing the stage directions that so often accompany these gestures, directions of the type we meet in their most basic, lapidary form in opera vocal scores and libretti, but which tend to be far more elaborate (increasingly so as the century progresses) in the livrets and in prose theater texts. Among these descriptions, Brooks stresses a distinction between those that concern what he calls (borrowing from Greimas) "gestural sequence"-the actions a performer is to undertake-and those that concern "gestural project," defined as "the effect to be rendered by the actor's gestures, their expressive result, their achieved message." 10 The distinction is important, because it highlights a basic problem in dealing with these mute gestures and the rubrics that accompany them. Gestures seem on the surface to be a classic mode of evading language, forming as they do a separate system of communication; they are, in Brooks's terms, part of a general attempt to render emotion "ineffable"; they add a new force of primal language to dramatic communication. But this viewpoint is confused by the fact that the gestural system itself is so often supported, or explained or supplemented by words, by copious directions concerning the emotion behind the gestural acts, and also by explanations of the effect they might have on an audience. Where does music fit into this already complex system of linguistic and gestural communication? For Brooks, at least in the immediate context of his "text of muteness," the matter is simple, and worthy of only brief mention: "The habitual recourse of Romantic drama and melodrama to the gestural trope of the inarticulate suggests ... why these genres tend toward a full realization in opera, where music is charged with the burden of ineffable expression."ll This may simplify too much, or at least leaves unexplored a further potential level of communicative complexity 10 11

Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 70. Ibid., 75.

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within the melodramatic experience. Brooks's formulation seems to rest on the assumption that music is in some way codeless, or at least that its systems of communication are vague enough not to interfere with or potentially contradict the verbal or the gestural: according to him, music is either like mute gesture and so, ever the obedient servant, is a perfect support for those primal acts; or it disappears into romantic notions of the "ineffable." Indeed, when Brooks talks of the "full realization" of melodrama in opera, he may even imply that music can in some way fill the gaps he finds in the space between gesture and language-the gaps that both generate the need for gesture and then, at the other side of the gestural event, necessitate an attempt to recode the gesture into language again, in an act that is simultaneously one of completion and one of interpretation. The situation may change, though, if we move music out of the realm of the ineffable and begin to see it (at least in its operatic manifestation) as richly endowed with potential communicative codes, both through the formal shapes it assumes (tension between the "static" and "kinetic" is, for example, central to the gradually changing attitude to those fixed musical forms that had for so long dominated opera) and through the myriad of meanings it can accrue in association with a dramatic text. Brooks's distinctions may then begin to have musical resonances, and may alert operatic scholars to the possibility of looking critically at, of "reading" in the strong sense, stage directions in their musical context. And if this path is followed, the livrets may prove uncommonly rewarding, partly because the material they provide is so much more abundant than that within the musical text or the libretto, but also, and more important, because they themselves seem to hover continually in that noman's-land between creation and interpretation, between addressing the "gestural sequence" and the "gestural project." These are not the usual theoretical waters trawled by operatic critics. But mention of the connections between scenic and musical processes, the way in which gestural action and musical action might support or supplement each other, will of course strike a sympathetic note. All the more so, perhaps, when the livrets are under consideration, for it is often supposed that a return to "contemporary" or "near-contemporary" staging practice would result in a much more obvious relationship between these two operatic systems, thus acting (some would say) as a stern historical corrective to the flamboyant contradictions we frequently see in today's production culture. To put this more radically and controversially, the livrets might even seem to return us closer to some originary moment in which words, music, and staging were "as one" under a controlling imagination.

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There is no doubt that the language of the livrets does much to encourage such views, their surface detail frequently seeming to offer the reader a kind of choreography, a sense that the stage picture and stage movement are intimately related to the music. At the most trivial level, a passage from the livret for Les vepres siciliennes, the start of the second act, demonstrates the level of precision often called for, in this case concerning the very moment the visual system is to make its first impact, superimposed on the musical: Levez le rideau sur la treizieme mesure de !'introduction. (5/267) 1 2 [Raise the curtain on the thirteenth measure of the introduction.]

Even very brief passages of instrumental music, in the example below four measures from Act I of Vepres, sometimes give rise to a complex coordination of actions and reactions from several characters: Apres avoir dit: D'autres en chanteront pour nous/ 13 Robert, un peu plus ivre, laisse sa bouteille sur la table, court pres d'Helene, la prend par la main et la force a descendre en scene.-Mouvement d'indignation du peuple, aussitot reprime.-Ce mouvement occupe les quatre mesures qui precedent la phrase: La belle enfant, voyons, en savez-vous? etc. (3/265) [After having said "D'autres en chanteront pour nous!" Robert, a little drunker, leaves his bottle on the table, runs up to Helene, takes her by the hand, and forces her downstage. A gesture of indignation from the crowd, immediately repressed. This stage action occupies the four measures that precede the words "La belle enfant, voyons, en savez-vous?"]

As we can see from example 6.1, the corresponding stage direction in the vocal score gives far more freedom to the performers. Some would go further and argue-surely correctly-that Verdi's trills, syncopations, and sudden accents are clearly a musical depiction of Robert's wicked, drunken lechery, and thus that the description in some way clarifies a composerly intention otherwise obscure or decipherable only by the experts, by those who from experience know what trills and syncopations "mean." 14 But even in this seemingly diaphanous passage, there is in the livret something more than mere choreography. What about the "Mouvement d'indignation du peuple, aussitot reprime"? Is that choral gesture also there, encoded within the music; or is it a narrative gloss 12 This and all subsequent citations derive from the facsimiles reprinted in Cohen, The Original Staging Manuals; the first number refers to the page number in the original document, the second to the page number in Cohen's volume. 13 The passage occurs on p. 43 of the first French vocal score, published by Escudier (L.E. 1500). 14 The motive has already underpinned Robert's earlier sorties against Sicilian women; see the vocal score, pp. 25-26.

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Example 6.1. Robert ~ a ----, r-,

~ ~ D'au-tres en chan - te-ront pour no us! ,.,

'lr

--....__:_

~

p

~-

-

: r

:

..

,.,

> ':"~

~

:

'lr

.. +

~

-

L

L

·~

. ~..

---

I (s'adressant a Helene et lui prenant Ia main) L La belle en - fant! ...

..

L

r

supplied by the writers of the livret? To put this another way, and in terms that may immediately find a resonance with Peter Brooks's theoretical distinctions, is the livret's reference to this "mouvement d'indignation" best seen as an instruction that clarifies something already in the text; or is it, on the contrary, an act of interpretation, an act of reception? Whatever our answer to this particular question, there is little doubt that examples such as Robert's staggering music and its accompanying description could be repeated hundreds of times: the overwhelming impression given by the livrets is one of coordination, of an operatic world

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in which musical gesture and stage gesture are locked in a permanent and expressive embrace. But before we celebrate this too clamorously as simple, timeless "good sense," we should look at a few passages in which the aesthetic of congruence can result in coordinations of stage and musical movement that most now will find far from "natural." To take an example from outside the Verdian canon, the livret of Donizetti's La Favorite asks that the chorus, corps de ballet, and walk-ons react immediately and en masse to Balthazar's curse on Leonor in the second-act concertato finale: Fuyez, car cette femme est maudite de Dieu!

A ces mots, messieurs et dames des choeurs, messieurs et dames du corps de ballet, les pages et les dames d'honneur a !'exception d'lnes [Leonore's confidante], passent spontanement ala gauche du theatre. (135/79) ["Fuyez, car cette femme est maudite de Dieu!" At these words the men and women of the chorus, men and women of the corps de ballet, pages and ladies in waiting-with the exception of Inessuddenly move to the left of the stage.] More surprising still is a direction toward the end of the same finale: Sur le grand forte qui precede de quelques mesures la fin du final, tous les personnages font deux pas en avant. [135/79] [On the grand forte that precedes by a few measures the end of the finale, all the characters take two paces forward.] I want to leave to one side the aesthetic implications of these last examples (which, like the earlier citations, could easily be multiplied), but they will remind us that any particular sense of "congruence" between the various systems that make up the operatic experience will itself be historically contingent: a gesture that in one period might be judged a satisfying conjunction between words, music, and stage action might, for another, appear unimaginative, redundant, or even downright comical. Such confusion strengthens the impression that, at least when peered at closely, the livrets begin to take on a more blurred aspect. Smooth and authoritative their surface may usually be, but at this historical distance it is not always easy to distinguish between what might legitimately be thought of as performance instructions on the one hand, and what on the other are clearly interpretive glosses; more than this, it may sometimes occur that instructions in the former category (the two paces forward on the forte) present us with the most difficulty, clash most acutely with our horizon of interpretive expectations. Such difficulties as have so far emerged might legitimately be put down to our historical distance from the text under scrutiny, in this case our mod-

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ern(ist) desire to distinguish rigidly between a text and its interpretation, and perhaps also to the fact that views of what constitutes dramatic "naturalism" undergo constant subterranean shifts. At certain moments in the livrets, however, one suspects that these ambiguities may have come to the surface at the time of writing, that the compilers of the livretslS at least occasionally found themselves with similar problems. To return to a notion mentioned earlier, one notices moments in which the rhythm of the stage action seems at odds with that suggested by the musical structure: places where interpretive, narrative weight needed to be applied in order to cover a moment in which the operatic "systems" were straying away from each other. A particular trouble spot in this respect came at the end of scenes-the traditional site of the cabaletta; and this should perhaps be no surprise, for by midcentury the cabaletta was coming under severe dramaturgical pressure, especially in France. If we take the livret for Le Trouvere, for example, which refers to Verdi's 1857 French version of II trovatore, there seems little doubt that French theatrical practice, in the broadest sense, could tolerate the relative stasis of the cabaletta less well than could the Italian. Of course, during this period Verdi himself was also experimenting with the cabaletta, sometimes changing it quite radically; on certain occasions music and scenic action could run comfortably together. For example, the author of the livret was encouraged to construct elaborate scenic action around an already loosened cabaletta structure such as the Count's "Per me ora fatale" in Act II, a movement that erodes the feeling of a static set piece by embedding the main theme within a conspiracy chorus itself then fading into the background: Ala second reprise du chant: Cruelle impatience! ["Per me ora fatale"] etc., on descend se grouper pres du Comte.-Vers la fin de l'air, Messieurs des choeurs reculent peu a peu, et disparaissent derriere les murs du cloltre.... Pendant le choeur des Religieuses dont les voix se font entendre dans l'interieur du cloltre, on aper~oit encore quelques Seigneurs prets a s'eloigner au moindre signe.-Seuls, le Comte et Fernand viennent de temps en temps preter l'oreille a la porte du cloltre. -Avant l'entree de Leonore, tous disparaissent. (51255) [At the second reprise of the aria "Cruelle impatience!" all come downstage and form a group around the Count. Toward the end of the aria, the men of IS As Cohen makes clear in his introduction to The Original Staging Manuals, xix-xx, the livrets tended to be published anonymously. One can usually assume that they were written by a resident stage director (a regisseur or regisseur gentirale), as were those few whose authorship is known, or perhaps by a number of people connected with the original production.

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the chorus gradually move back, and disappear behind the walls of the cloister.... During the nuns' chorus, which is heard from within the cloister, some of the men are again seen, ready to retreat at the slightest sign. Alone, the Count and Fernand from time to time listen at the door of the cloister. All have disappeared before Leonore appears.]

It is perhaps significant that these instructions elaborate slightly the stage movements marked by Verdi in his autograph score of the Italian Trovatore, especially by having the Count's followers occasionally visible during the nuns' offstage chorus. But the overall scenic effect, the impression of stage action taking place across a "set piece," is not much changed.16 On other occasions, though, one has the altogether more modern impression of a stage director at odds with a stage rhythm imposed by musical form: in the case of Le Trouvere of a French regisseur impatient with the lack of stage action in an Italian set piece, anxious to inject into it at least a surface sense of movement. The second-act Azucena-Manrico cabaletta in II trovatore ("Perigliarti ancor languente") is a classic example of a closing set piece that delays stage action. In the preceding tempo di mezzo Manrico has received notice that Leonora is about to enter a convent and resolves to prevent her. The cabaletta, during which Azucena strives to detain him, delays his supposedly precipitate departure by several long minutes. Again, Verdi was by this stage of his career becoming anxious to avoid too protracted a lyrical pause on such occasions, and provides an extremely concise, "dissimilar" set piece. But set piece it undoubtedly is: if attuned to a later nineteenth-century dramatic aesthetic, Major General Stanley's "Yes, but you don't go" will echo in the ears. The autograph score has no stage directions at all, and those of the libretto do no more than prepare Manrico for departure before the cabaletta begins. On the word "Addio" he is instructed: "postosi l'elmo sul capo ed afferrando il mantello" (putting on his helmet and taking up his cloak") and then, at the end of the cabaletta text, is finally dispatched: "si allontana, indarno trattenuto da Azucena" (he departs, Azuncena in vain trying to detain him).1 7 Of course, staging practice may have amplified this; but it is nonetheless significant that the verbal discourse was content with such minimal reportage. The livret of Le Trouvere, on the 1 6 See David Lawton, ed., II trovatore, series 1, vol. 18, of The Works of Giuseppe Verdi (Chicago and Milan, 1993), 193-96. At m. 156 (toward the end of the reprise of the cabaletta), "II Conte pure s'allontana a poco a poco e si nasconde con !oro fra gli alberi" (The Count also moves away and gradually becomes hidden with them among the trees); during their interruption of the nuns' chorus, they are described as "nascosti fra le piante" (hidden in the undergrowth). 17 See the critical edition, pp. 152 and 166; the last stage direction is placed over the orchestral coda to the number, immediately after the singers' final notes.

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other hand, describes a sense of constant stage action through the set piece: Azucena cherche vainement a retenir son fils qu'elle comble de caresses.Dans ce combat, Azucena, qui etreint Manrique dans ses bras, se trouve n.o 1 aux mots: Que je brave l'anatheme.-Ah! reste . .. laisse moi partir, etc., etc. [the middle of Manrico's solo statement in the cabaletta, in II trovatore "terra e ciel non han possanza ... "]. Jusqu'a la sortie, Azucena supplie vainement Manrique qui veut toujours s'eloigner, et qu'elle ramene constamment. Manrique finit par se degager et sort vivement par un des derniers plans cote cour. -Azucena, eperdue, court sur ses traces. (4/254) [Azucena tries in vain to detain her son, whom she overwhelms with embraces. In this struggle, Azucena, who presses Manrique in her arms, should be at no. 1 at the words "Que je brave l'anatheme.-Ah! reste ... laisse moi partir." Up to his final departure, Azucena begs Manrique in vain: he constantly tries to exit; she constantly holds him back. Manrique eventually breaks free and exits hurriedly toward the back. Azucena, distracted, runs after him.] Less extreme than this, but perhaps even more revealing because it has become a cliche of modern directorial practice, is the livret's treatment of the famous cabaletta "Di quella pira" (another "Yes, but you don't go" piece, this time two stanzas of it), in which "stage business" for Leonore and Manrique fills the interlude between the two statements of the cabaletta. Again it is clear that there was what we might call discursive unease at Manrique's continuing presence onstage to deliver the second stanza of his cabaletta, and that stage action was injected in order to give more "verisimilitude" to the episode. There also seems to have been a Leonore problem: what is she doing during the final moments of this scene? Pendant le solo de Manrique: Barbares, affreux delire, etc., etc. [the phrases immediately before the cabaletta, in Italian "Ah! vili ... il rio spettacolo"], Leonore remonte la scene, jette ses regards au dehors par les fenetres du fond, et donne les signes du plus grand desespoir.-Elle redescend pour attaquer: Souffrance extreme, etc., etc. ["Non reggo a colpi tanto funesti," the interlude between the two stanzas of the cabaletta]. Pendant ce solo de Leonore, Manrique dans la plus vive agitation court aux fenetres, puis il redescend attaquer de nouveau: Supplice inffime qui La reclame ... , etc., etc. ["Di quella pira "]. Ruiz sort et rentre bientot suivi de quelques soldats.-D'autres soldats entrent egalement par la droite.-En tout, vingt soldats.

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Aux armes! etc. [here the positions of the principals and the chorus are diagrammed]. Manrique tire son epee.-Tous l'imitent.-Sortie generale par Ia porte de gauche, Manrique et Ruiz en tete.-Leonore, se soutenant a peine et jette avec anxiete ses regards au dehors.-Le rideau baisse vivement. (7/257) [During Manrique's solo, "Barbares, affreux delire," Leonore goes upstage, looks out of the windows at the back, and shows signs of great despair. She comes back down to sing "Souffrance extreme." During Leonore's solo, Manrique, extremely agitated, runs to the windows, then he comes back to attack again "Supplice infame qui Ia reclame." Ruiz goes out and soon returns followed by some soldiers. Other soldiers enter from the right. "Aux armes!" ... Manrique draws his sword. All imitate him. General exit by the door to the left, Manrique and Ruiz at the head. Leonore, hardly able to remain standing, anxiously looks outside. The curtain falls quickly.]

These examples could, of course, be interpreted simply as a demonstration of the differences at midcentury between French and Italian theatrical practice, the French moving slightly faster away from the idea of the "static" set piece. But they also show how, at least on certain occasions, descriptions of mid-nineteenth-century staging practice could and would function as it were "across" the musical forms: perhaps in an attempt to update the operatic event (in the case immediately above by injecting movement, and thus a semblance of motivation, into the reprise of the cabaletta); perhaps also out of a sense that, again, a narrative thread was missing, that in this case Leonora could not simply cease to exist as Manrico poured forth two stanzas of "Di quella pira. "18 In this context, certain moments from the livret of Les Vepres siciliennes become most intriguing, in part because this opera was conceived for Paris: there is no question of a transposition of genres, of an Italian dramaturgical design being adapted for the French stage. One of the most revealing passages describes the great Henri-Montfort duet near the start of Act III, in which Montfort reveals to Henri that they are father and son. This is highly unorthodox, not so much in its generic context as a grand duet but rather in its treatment of an encounter so typical of melodramatic practice; it comes as no surprise that its composilS Again, Verdi's autograph score carries no stage directions. The critical edition (p. 320) simply places the libretto's final indication over the closing bars of the number: "Manrico parte frettoloso seguito da Ruiz e dagli armati: mentre odesi all'intorno fragor d'armi e di bellici strumenti" (Manrico leaves hurriedly, followed by Ruiz and the armed men: offstage the noise of weapons and other instruments of battle can be heard). There is no mention of Leonora.

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tion cost Verdi considerable effort, and that its shape was changing until very near to the first performances.19 And the manner in which the livret responds to the unorthodoxy can perhaps provide us with a final layer of possible ways in which these documents might "read." A summary account of the duet's musical and verbal progress will be a useful starting point: 1) Recit. Allegro; mm. 1-35: "Je n'en puis" Henri angrily confronts Montfort; Montfort accuses him of ingratitude. 2) Allegro moderato-Un peu plus vite-Allegro moderato; mm. 36-96: "Quand rna bonte" Montfort asks Henri to consider why he (Montfort) might be so moved by Henri's plight; Montfort produces a letter written by Henri's mother, proving that Montfort is Henri's father. As Henri reads and offers shocked exclamations, Montfort is thankful that he can at last address his son. 3) [Recit.]-Allegro giusto-Allegro; mm. 97-128: "Eh quoi! tu detournes la vue" Henri fears he will lose his beloved Helene. Montfort offers him all he owns, but Henri angrily rejects this, saying that Montfort's is "un nom dereste." 4) Allegro assai; mm. 129-70: "Comble de misere" The two bemoan their positions in an agitated "a 2." 5) Adagio; mm. 171-96: "Quoi, rna tendresse" Montfort appeals to his son again; Henri begs to be allowed to leave (a lyrical "a 2"). 6) Allegro agitato; mm. 197-214: "L'image de rna mere" Henri is assailed by the thought of his mother as Montfort's victim; Montfort remonstrates. 7)

(J =

88); mm. 215-71: "Ombre sainte"

Henri calls on his mother's spirit, asking for guidance and protection; Montfort begs Henri not to reject a father's love (a final "a 2").

The unorthodoxy of the duet comes about less through any perceived departure from a so-called normative structure, the oft-invoked "solita forma de' duetti," than from two (quite possibly related) features, one 1 9 See Julian Budden, The Operas of Verdi, vol. 2 (London, 1978), 211. Budden discusses the early versions of the duet on 213-15.

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musico-dramatic, the other more strictly musical.20 The first of these is that the crucial revelation, the "moment" on which the scene hinges, is not a "moment" at all: not, as might be expected, a grand utterance followed by amazed declamation; not a moment in which music breaks down. On the contrary, Monfort reveals to Henri that they are father and son during the course of a three-part subsection of the duet (labeled section 2, above). The first part ("Quand rna bonte"), mostly in F minor, is dominated by a sorrowful melody from Montfort (see example 6.2a).The middle section, which is more agitated, ends in declamation as Montfort gives Henri the letter revealing the fatal secret. Henri reads the letter and his asides chart a gradually emerging recognition; but this new stage is again dominated musically by Montfort, who launches into a further sustained melody ("Pour moi, pour moi, queUe ivresse inconnue"), one that has already been heard as the "second subject" of the overture (see example 6.2b). The revelation is, in other words, a process, enwrapped in vocal lyricism, a kind of musical discourse that usually supposes stasis among the principals, a fixed position both emotionally and scenically. The second unusual feature of the duet is that the final section, clearly a cabaletta-substitute, is based on that same melody from the overture, but this time sung by Henri, slightly faster and a major third higher (in F major rather than the earlier D~ major). Melodies shared between principals are of course a commonplace in duets of this period, but such shared material is almost always locked within one tempo and "affect"; the fact that the melody here is shared between characters who are in evident opposition makes the case even more unusual.21 One could imagine many scenic realizations of this duet: the rapid alternation of contrasting sections; the fact that the central dramatic clari20 The most persuasive argument for "Ia solita forma," both its historical validity and its effect on audience expectations, is Harold Powers, "'La solita forma' and 'The Uses of Convention,'" in Nuove prospettive nella ricerca verdiana (Parma and Milan, 1987), 74109; the same article appears in Acta musicologica 59 (1987): 65-90. The term "Ia solita forma de' duetti" derives from Abramo Basevi, Studio sulle opere di Giuseppe Verdi (Florence, 1859). Readers who have survived chapter 3 of the present book will not need to be told that my views on this mode of operatic analysis are tinged with skepticism. 21 It is possible that Verdi was encouraged to employ this melodic reprise as a gesture toward earlier nineteenth-century French practice. Some manuscript notes made by Meyerbeer in 1838, for example, mention a difference between duets "a l'Italienne" and those "a Ia fran~aise, c.a.d. oil les paroles de !'ensemble du milieu [in Italian terms the "adagio" or "slow movement"] se repetent aussi a Ia fin." An example might be the third-act duet between Raimbaut and Bertram in Robert le Diable (1831). However, as both Meyerbeer's words and the duet in Robert suggest, such repetition of material was, unlike that in the Vepres duet, typically a "literal quotation" -of both words and music, in the same key, and sung at least in part by the same character. I cite Meyerbeer from Steven Huebner, "Italianate Duets in Meyerbeer's Grand Operas," Journal of Musicological Research 8 (1989): 203-58, here 208-9, which discusses at length the influence of Italian practice on French nineteenth-century duet form.

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Example 6.2a. Montfort

. . ..

All egro mo d erato

:

~

Quand rna bon - te

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~

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tre

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~

con

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~

nou - vel - le,

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:

tou- jours

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t'em-pe -chait

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:if ~ :if ~ :if

~

:if

~

dam- ne:

Example 6.2b. Henri

(!'tsan t l a l ettre )

I

fl

~

0

.~

Montfort

:

Pour

moi,

qu'elle iv- resse

-- -- --

I

fl

moi, pour

=t

~

~ ~ _.....,

-~

=