The Scene of the Council Hall: the Storyline and the Structure of the Grand Final Scene in the Second Edition of Verdi’s Opera Simon Boccanegra

Abstract

The comparison of different authorial redactions of operas presents one of the through themes of world Verdi studies. The opera Simon Boccanegra holds a unique position, since the second version of the opera was created by Verdi almost a quarter of a century following the first. The depth of the changes, first of all, in the final scene of the first act, for which a new interpretation of the content was found is stipulated by such a temporal distance. Also important is the fact that the edition of Simon Boccanegra became the first large-scale collaborative work of Verdi and Arrigo Boito. In the two versions of the opera, the interconnection between the storyline and the structural laws is examined in the context of the general evolution of Verdi’s pivotal final scenes. In the original version, the composer still followed the conventional traditions, having created the most conservatively structured scene of that kind of all of his works from the 1850s. In the version of 1881, the final scene was transformed into one of the boldest and most original mass scenes in Verdi’s music. While initially the introduction of the episode missing in the play by Antonio García Gutiérrez (the festivities in honor of the anniversary of Simon Boccanegra having been elected as the doge of Genoa) was stipulated by the tradition of the mass grand final scene, the typical structure of which was in many ways “prompted” the scenario, in the second redaction, already the storyline and the verbal text of the scene of the Council session predetermined its musical-dramaturgical structure. However, even in this innovative final scene, Verdi does not abandon certain attributes of the typical structure. The result was a paradoxically organic combination of tradition and innovation of the scene in the Council Hall, which has become one of the pinnacles of the combined artistic work of the outstanding musician and the playwright.