Il Trovatore Research Articles

Il Trovatore, Faust, and the Incipience of Printed Film Music in the USA

Il Trovatore, Faust, and the Incipience of Printed Film Music in the USA

The role of Amelia in Giuseppe Verdi’s “Un ballo in maschera” - Vocality and Technical-interpretative Coordinates

Like all of Verdi's mature works, the opera “Un ballo in maschera” demonstrates notable progress in both vocal and orchestral writing. In terms of the vocality of the characters, Verdi creates remarkable solo roles, adapted to the various dramaturgical requirements. The role of Amelia is a key character, being assigned an extensive vocal discourse. Her vocality reflects a noticeable difference from the Verdian patterns used in the construction of female roles, up to “Il Trovatore”. The suppression of the well-known “cabaletta”, the abandonment of the demonstrations of vocal virtuosity and the intensification of the vocal writing in the middle register, offer a plus of uniqueness to this role. Thus, a new vocal pattern is materialized among the female characters representative in Giuseppe Verdi’s work, leaving behind the vocal portraits of the heroines inspired from the belcanto singing “tradition”. In this study we will analyze from a structural and interpretive point of view the main solo moments of the role.

Performance Practice in Early Twentieth-Century Productions of Verdi’s Le trouvère

While preparing the critical edition of Le trouvère, Verdi’s 1857 revision of Il trovatore for the Paris Opéra, I came to realize that the principal source for the edition—a full orchestral score at the Bibliothèque de l’Opéra—also documented how the opera was performed for the Opéra’s last two productions of it, in 1904 and 1923. The conductors of these performances made numerous markings in the score, which provide a thorough account of their performance decisions. Together with the first complete recording of Le trouvère by the Opéra-Comique on the Pathé label (1912), we now have a significant and remarkably detailed picture of performance practice for this opera in the first quarter of the twentieth century. The evidence from the markings in the full orchestral score and the Pathé recording suggests that these productions document a transitional stage of performance practice. While some decisions seem motivated by ideas that were current at the time—such as the cut of the ritornello and da capo sections of all the cabalettas, and other large-scale repetitions,1 as well as some dynamic changes and even modifications of orchestration—these new sources also document practices still firmly grounded in nineteenth-century aesthetics. This is particularly true of the use of tempo modification for expressive purposes and vocal style. Conductors’ markings in the score clearly indicate decisions with respect to tempo, which similar choices on the recording often confirm. The recording reveals much more about the vocal style than the annotations in the score, however. Since I have written elsewhere about the vocal style, this essay will focus exclusively on tempo modification.2

Structure of the Vocal Discourse of the Character Leonora From the Opera "Il trovatore" by Giuseppe Verdi

"The opera ""Il Trovatore"" crowns the famous Verdi trilogy (”Rigoletto”, ”Il Trovatore”, ”La Traviata”) leaving as a legacy in the history of lyrical theatre vocal archetypes relevant to the Italian romantic opera. This research aims at the formal and stylistic analysis of the vocal discourse of the character Leonora, considering the solo moments and outstanding overall moments, attributed to the role. In carrying out this approach we will highlight the vocal peculiarities of the character, as well as relevant technical and interpretive aspects. In essence, the research represents a correlation between the structure of the moments that make up the vocal discourse and the nature of the character’s Verdi vocality, Leonora’s role summing up various technical and interpretive requirements. Keywords: Verdi, Il Trovatore, Leonora, Structure, Discourse, Vocality "

Innovative Gen-II/III and research reactors' fuels and materials

This manuscript presents important material challenges regarding innovative Gen-II/III nuclear systems and research reactors. The challenges are discussed alongside the key achievements so far realised within the framework of 4 EU-funded projects: H2020 IL TROVATORE, FP7 MULTIMETAL, FP7 MATTER and FP7 SCWR-FQT. All the four Projects deal with innovative researches on materials to enhance the safety of nuclear reactors. IL TROVATORE proposes new materials for fuel cladding of PWR reactors and tests in order to really find out an “Accident Tolerant Fuel” (ATF). MULTIMETAL focused on optimization of dissimilar welds fabrication having considered the field performances and dedicated experiments. MATTER carried on methodological and experimental studies on the use of grade 91 steel in the harsh environment of liquid metal cooled EU fast reactors. SCWR-FQT focused on fuel qualification of Supercritical Water Reactor including the selection of the better material to resist the associated high thermal flux.

Un soggetto scabroso, un progetto ambizioso: il “Giasone” va alla Scuola Primaria

Since 2007, Silvia Cancedda has held five/six-month-long listening workshops in primary schools, focusing on various operas, from Cenerentola to Il trovatore. For the 2017/18 school year, she chose Giasone, by Cicognini and Cavalli (1649). This is an opera that deals with embarrassing themes, and hence apparently not suited for an 8-year-old audience, since it centers on a criminal couple, Giasone and Medea, and on a love triangle in which both women, Medea and Isifile, are single mothers.The article describes the protocol followed in the workshop. Through language and content adapted to the target age group, the workshop aims at providing a historically sound, accurate description of the opera, as well as adequate comprehension of the work as a whole, through an examination of: (1) the literary sources; (2) the plot structure; (3) the constellation of characters and voices; (4) the system of poetic forms (and the basic elements of metric structures); (5) the system of basic musical forms; (6) the framework of the drama and segmentation of the action; (7) the combination of word/action/music (text, scene, singing). These activities are complemented by a (inasmuch as possible) complete listening-viewing of the work.Further points that are briefly addressed include: connections with other school subjects, first and foremost linguistic and historical subjects; the origins of the operatic genre; the relationships between the fabula of the myth and the plot of the opera; the system of voices; key scenes; the tools of the poetical metric system. Finally, an intuitive reading of the score is introduced. The effectiveness of the didactic process adopted is documented in the drawings created by the pupils, in photographs and videos.

Sr. José, the Worker mélomane, or Opera and Democracy in Lisbon ca. 1850

Sr. José do capote, a worker and an opera lover, is the monad contemplated in this article. He is a theatrical figure, the protagonist of the one-act burlesque parody Sr. José do capote assistindo a uma representação do torrador (Sr. José of the Cloak attends a performance of The Roaster, 1855), but also an idea that expresses in abbreviated form the urban environment of nineteenth-century Lisbon, the theatrical and operatic sensibility of its citizens, and the politics of their engagement with the stage. This article is a history of Il trovatore and of bel canto claimed for a nascent culture of democracy in nineteenth-century Portugal.

Plot and Tonal Design as Compositional Constraints in “Il trovatore”

Plot and Tonal Design as Compositional Constraints in “Il trovatore”

Verdi's Il trovatore: the quintessential Italian melodrama

No full-length study has ever been written on Il trovatore, in his day Verdi's most successful stage work. This book by one of the world's great Verdi authorities fills that gap, providing a comprehensive look at the opera, from its genesis and structure to its early performance history and critical reception. Starting with the background of the opera, the volume traces the origins of the original play by Antonio Garcia Gutierrez, El trovador, and offers a new, more credible source for the drama. In addition, it examines the evolution of the libretto, the music, and the arrangement of the narrative, revealing innovative musical and dramatic features not seen by other critics. The book also includes a discussion of contemporary reviews and a section on some of the important performers in the twentieth century (for example, Toscanini and Caruso), as well as a consideration of several of the more unusual stagings of the work mounted during the final decades of the century. With these and other explorations, Martin Chusid offers a thorough survey of Verdi's Il trovatore and in the process deepens and enhances our encounter with one of the mainstays of the operatic reparatory. Martin Chusid is professor emeritus of music, New York University, and founding director of the American Institute for Verdi Studies.

Not without madness: perspectives on opera

Opera often seems to arouse either irrational enthusiasm or visceral dislike. Such madness, as Goethe wrote, is indispensable in all theater, and yet in practice, sentiment and passion must be balanced by sense and reason. Exploring this tension between madness and reason, without presents new analytical approaches to thinking about eighteenth - and nineteenth-century opera through the lenses of its historical and cultural contexts. In these twelve essays, Fabrizio Della Seta explores the concept of opera as a dramatic event and an essential moment in the history of theater. Examining the meaning of opera and the devices that produce and transmit this meaning, he looks at the complex verbal, musical, and scenic mechanisms in parts of La sonnambula, Ernani, Aida, Le nozze di Figaro, Macbeth, and Il trovatore. He argues that approaches to the study of opera must address performance, interpretation, composition, reception, and cultural ramifications. Purely musical analysis does not make sense unless we take into account music's dramatic function. Containing many essays available for the first time in English, Not without Madness bridges recent divisions in opera studies and will attract musicologists, musicians, and opera lovers alike.

«MA INFINE NELLA VITA TUTTO È MORTE!» COSA CI RACCONTA IL TROVATORE?

One of the best loved of Verdi’s operas, Il trovatore has accumulated a considerable critical literature, and yet commentators have rarely enquired into its ‘meaning’, apparently out of the conviction that, precisely because it is a pre-eminently ‘popular’ work, it has no particular ideological, social or indeed human message to convey. One received opinion concerning the opera is that it has an obscure libretto: much of the story refers to a prior event that is not presented on stage. We know that Manrico and the Conte di Luna have clashed, but we don’t know how often, or anything about the dynamic of this confrontation, while Manrico’s true identity remains elusive. However, rather than condemning the intrinsic absurdity of Il Trovatore, we would do better to view this as a structural characteristic. The evocation of facts from the past and the lack of clarity concerning their chronological order allude to a temporal structure typical of traditional narrations in which the distinction between before and after and the relationship of cause and effect are ignored. Personal identity is not a problem for the logic of the emotions, which has no knowledge of the principle of non-contradiction, according to Freud’s theory of the unconscious as developed by Ignacio Matte Blanco. In applying this principle to the theory of literature, Francesco Orlando revealed the formal procedures by which the work of art achieves the reinstatement of contents that have been repressed on account of social censorship, attenuating them and disguising them to make them acceptable. This essay argues that in Il Trovatore poet and musician have given scenic and musical form to an idea that is central in Western, and particularly Romantic, imagination, one which Freud reformulated in his maturity: the presence, in human nature, of an inextricable alliance of the urge to live and the death drive (in mythological terms, of Eros and Thanatos). These two impulses are incarnated in variable proportions in all four protagonists, with a progression that culminates in the absolute predominance of the death wish in Leonora. This thesis is verified by means of an analysis focusing on both the verbal components of the drama’s message – including a comparison with the Spanish play on which the opera is based – and the function of the musical components, in particular the virtuoso vocal writing assigned to Leonora. This interpretation requires a revision of the position usually attributed to Il Trovatore in Verdi’s creative development as a retrospective work. Precisely the systematic use of old-fashioned vocal forms and styles denotes a new phase in the composer’s parabola, as the tenacious adhesion to life and love of the heroes of the youthful operas, even when defeated, gives way to the disillusionment and quest for «peace» and «forgetfulness» that characterise Verdi’s mature and last works.

The Bjorling sound: a recorded legacy

The Bjorling Sound: A Recorded Legacy. By Stephen Hastings. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2012. xvii, 406pp (hardcover). ISBN 978-1-58046-406-2. $49.95 Stephen Hastings' The Bjorling Sound is the first attempt at an analytical study of the recordings of the Swedish singer, arguably the greatest lyric tenor on record. The Bjorling Sound is not a discography and, as such, does not attempt to document Bjorling's complete recorded output. Harald Henrysson's A Jussi Bjorling Phonography remains the definitive discography of the tenor, either in its second printed edition (Stockholm: Svenskt Muskhistoriskt Arkiv, 1993), or in the updated version available on the websites of the Swedish Jussi Bjorling Society (www.jussibjorlingsallskapet.com) and the Jussi Bjorling Museum (www.borlange.se/jussibjorling-english). Although the online versions have kept abreast of recent CD releases, Henrysson now lists only CD reissues. For original 78-, 45- and 33*/3-rpm catalog numbers, the printed second edition remains indispensable (the online version does list 78-rpm matrix numbers). The twenty-four chapters that make up the bulk of The Bjorling Sound are arranged alphabetically by composer. Not surprisingly, those devoted to composers whose operas were recorded complete by Bjorling are the longest; ninety-one pages are devoted to Verdi and seventy-eight to Puccini. Bjorling made eleven commercial opera recordings, one each of Puccini's Manon Lescaut, La Boheme, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, and Turandot, Verdi's Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, and Aida, and Leoncavallo's I Pagliacci, plus two of Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana. Except for Madama Butterfly and Turandot, where no live performances with Bjorling exist, Hastings adds the known live performances to his discussions--five in the case of Il Trovatore. Of considerable importance are live performances of operas that are not part of Bjorling's commercial discography, including Gounod's Faust and Romeo et Juliette, and Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera and Don Carlo. Major non-operatic works are also added to the mix: Beethoven's Missa Solemnis (the 1940 broadcast with Toscanini and the NBC Symphony), and three performances of Verdi's Messa da Requiem, including the Decca commercial recording from 1960 with Reiner and the Vienna Philharmonic, plus the familiar 1940 Toscanini/NBC broadcast and an alternate Toscanini performance given at the Lucerne Festival in 1939, the last existing only in a primitive recording of a short-wave broadcast. In addition to analyses of the complete performances, Hastings offers discussions of recordings of individual arias and scenes. Many of the recordings in this category are from operas that Bjorling did not record complete, including Meyerbeer's L'Africaine, Massenet's Manon, Bizet's Carmen, and Donizetti's L'Elisir d'amore. Song literature was an important part of Bjorling's repertoire, and is covered in separate chapters to Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Richard Strauss, Sibelius, Grieg, Rangstrom, and Alfven. Hastings has a thorough knowledge of the work and recordings of the major singers of the twentieth century allowing him to make meaningful, and often very specific, comparisons between Bjorling's recordings and those of other important tenors. Throughout his discussions, the level of detail is often exhaustive. One of many examples of Hastings' thoroughness is the section devoted to Bjorling's 1951 recording of the Act II duet from Verdi's Otello with Robert Merrill. He devotes nearly five pages to this recording, drawing comparisons to Caruso, Martinelli, Zenatello, del Monaco, Zanelli, Lauri-Volpi, Vinay, McCracken, Domingo, and Pavarotti. Leaving no stone unturned, he also offers comments on Francesco Tamagno's unpublished 1903 recording of the duet with an unidentified baritone (possibly Tamagno's brother Giovanni). This recording can only be heard in Historic Masters' collection of seven double-faced vinyl 78s devoted to Tamagno's complete 12-inch records (reviewed by me in the ARSC Journal, 2008;39[1]:169-172). …

Situating Opera: Period, Genre, Reception (review)

Reviewed by: Situating Opera: Period, Genre, Reception Samuel Dwinell Herbert Lindenberger. Situating Opera: Period, Genre, Reception. Cambridge Studies in Opera. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. ix + 313. $95 (Hb). What roles has opera played in the history of European and North American culture? How can we best characterize the processes of change and continuity in opera performance and composition today? To what extent does the academic study of opera demand new modes of interdisciplinarity? These are the broad questions about opera and culture – then and now – that animate Herbert Lindenberger’s collection of essays in Situating Opera: Period, Genre, Reception. The volume represents the culmination of over a decade of research by an acclaimed cultural historian, literary scholar, and author of two previous book-length studies of opera. Fully six of the eleven chapters in this collection have already been published elsewhere, including one in this journal. “I prefer to pursue variety rather than unity,” Lindenberger states in the prologue (4). Indeed, the essays exhibit a wide range of styles, repertories under consideration, and methodological approaches. Their collocation in this volume has the distinct advantage not of making any overarching argument about opera but of revealing the ways in which Lindenberger makes a case for opera studies as an interdisciplinary scholarly endeavour in the humanities. Opera is a form that “transcends the usual intellectual categories,” he asserts (2). This claim leads him to propose the institutionalization in the academy of interdisciplinary opera studies programs (263–79). Turning to some of the individual chapters, essay one is, perhaps, the most successful. It approaches Giuseppe Verdi’s Il trovatore (1853) from many different angles in an engaging and enjoyable manner that would make it useful on the syllabus of an undergraduate course on opera. The [End Page 274] essay touches on the work’s genesis, revisions, performance, and reception history, musical and dramatic aesthetics, and afterlife in Regieoper and film. It is in essays two and three that Lindenberger’s working definition of opera emerges. He does not draw upon the historical record, where a wide variety of terms has circulated to refer to some of the works under consideration (including favola, dramma per musica, tragédie en musique, Singspiel, and drama), nor does he postulate any shared aesthetic ontology. Instead, he borrows a definition of opera from the institutional framework of the twentieth-century opera house in the United States and western Europe. Thus, unlike scholarship that prizes the “anti-institutional” avantgarde in genres such as new-music theatre or performance art, essays seven and eight, concerning the twentieth century, make the case persuasively for the ways in which artistic innovation has taken place within the highly regulated and prestigious institutional context of the opera house. More work remains to be done on how individual institutions, such as opera houses and state funding bodies, shape and reflect operatic texts, repertories, and reception. For example, Lindenberger’s suggestion that substantial state subsidies of opera in Europe allow for a “high degree of innovation” (58) in comparison with opera in the United States leaves unexamined what we might see as the carefully constructed discourses of nationalism that subtend many such public-funding programs (in Britain in the late 1940s or Australia in the 1990s, for example). However, Lindenberger’s analogy between opera houses and museums (111) perhaps suggests a promising avenue for developing this line of inquiry through the insights of the field of museology. Given the iconic status of buildings such as the Sydney Opera House, not to mention the Bayreuth Festival Theatre, a consideration of architecture, too, could be included in fuller examinations of the opera house as institution. The wide range of material discussed throughout the essays in this volume typically provides a refreshing change from scholarship that is, perhaps, all too often cautious about making connections and drawing analogies between historical periods, geographical locales, and different genres of cultural production. Nevertheless, this same strategy occasionally leads Lindenberger into unnecessary laxity. For example, his use of Ibsen as a straw man for “realistic” representational practices not only ignores Toril Moi’s recent work on the dramatist’s modernism but also adds nothing to a paragraph on Verdi (34). Moreover...

RECORDINGS IN REVIEW

1 9 4 Y R E C O R D I N G S I N R E V I E W K E N N E T H B L E E T H A little dog revolving round a spindle Gives rise to harmonies beyond belief, A cast of stars . . . – James Merrill, ‘‘The Victor Dog’’ Near the conclusion of her 1933 memoir Ma vie et mon art, the soprano Félia Litvinne casts a nostalgic glance backward: ‘‘My voice – so beautiful and warm – is almost gone. I made some beautiful recordings. Whenever I touch the gramophone, I say: ‘Here lies Félia Litvinne.’ ’’ In composing her own epitaph, Litvinne imagines her now silenced voice laid to rest in the ‘‘beaux disques’’ that are her monument. But if the gramophone is a kind of tomb, it also contains the promise of resurrection. When the stylus touches the groove, the singer is raised from the cold shellac, reaching generations of listeners who never heard her in the flesh. The illusion of presence, in which the artist and the recorded simulacrum become indistinguishable, was a selling point for recordings almost from the beginning. A 1915 Victor Talking Ma- 1 9 5 R chine advertisement for Geraldine Farrar’s Carmen juxtaposes an image of a 12-inch disc with one of the diva herself, announcing that ‘‘both are Farrar.’’ Around the same time, a publicity photograph shows Frieda Hempel, an Edison recording artist, standing next to a large gramophone with a group of blindfolded Edison employees, who are attempting to guess whether Hempel is singing or the phonograph is playing alone. In a popular television commercial filmed some sixty years later for a new brand of recording tape, Ella Fitzgerald sings the tape’s praises, a high note breaks a glass, and a narrator intones: ‘‘Is it live or is it Memorex?’’ The claim for these products is that they o√er the listener not simply realistic reproduction of singing but what the late John Steane in his indispensable The Grand Tradition: Seventy Years of Singing on Record, 1900–1970 calls a ‘‘voice-face’’ – an instantly recognizable self that we feel we know intimately. Our response to a singer is shaped partly by memories of other singers in the same repertory. So it’s no accident that those critics who describe individual voices with the greatest sympathy and precision (Steane, Will Crutchfield, André Tubeuf, and the late John Ardoin, among others) display not only what seems like total recall of the artists they’ve heard in the opera house or in the concert hall but also an encyclopedic knowledge of the performances preserved in recordings made during the first half of the twentieth century. Some of this material has been continuously available. When 78-rpm discs began to be replaced by vinyl long-playing records in the late 1940s, RCA Victor, Columbia, and EMI dipped into their vaults, issuing selections from the work of a single artist or producing ‘‘highlights’’ albums by performers who may or may not have sung together (A Golden Age ‘‘Il Trovatore’’). But the recorded legacies of singers active in the early part of the century became systematically available only with the advent of the compact disc, on labels like Nimbus, Pearl, Preiser, and, more recently, Marston, Naxos Historical, and Romophone. None of these releases has rung up massive sales; for most producers of historical vocal recordings (some of whom are also indefatigable collectors), the work of recovering and disseminating the memorable voices of the past is a labor of love. For an example of what this devotion can achieve, let’s return to Litvinne. Marston’s Complete Félia Litvinne (Marston 52049-2) 1 9 6 B L E E T H Y includes the thirty-five recordings by this artist known to exist – twenty-seven operatic items and eight songs, committed to disc from 1902 to 1911 for three companies. The accompanying booklet lists titles, matrix numbers, and playing times, and reproduces sixteen photographs, including one of the statuesque soprano in a full-length lace-trimmed dress, elaborate jewelry, and an impressive hat confronting the recording horn in a Paris studio. Two essays by Geo...

Situating opera: period, genre, reception

Prologue. Why opera? Why (how, where) situate? 1. Anatomy of a war horse: Il trovatore from A to Z 2. On opera and society (assuming a relationship) 3. Opera and the novel: antithetical or complementary? 4. Opera by other means 5. Opera and/as lyric 6. From separatism to unity: aesthetic theorizing from Reynolds to Wagner 7. Toward a characterization of modernist opera 8. Anti-theatricality in twentieth-century opera 9. A brief consumer's history of opera Epilogue. Why (what, how, if) opera studies? Works cited.

Anatomy of a Warhorse: Il trovatore from A to Z

What is Il trovatore “about”? What can be more banal than Manrico's eight-note refrain from inside his tower cell during the Miserere? Outside the context of Il trovatore these notes come back to me obsessively at the most inopportune times and without giving me the opportunity to turn them off, as I can a CD player or an iPod. They belong to a musical genre that Oliver Sacks, looking at this phenomenon as a neurologist, has labeled “brainworms.”3 Maddening as these notes may be, when I hear them within their appropriate context—interspersed with the male chorus solemnly intoning the Miserere and Leonora frantically assuring her lover that she will never forget him (see Quoting and Thrust)—what can be more sublime? Any aspiring tenor looking through David Lawton's critical edition of Il trovatore will notice that Manrico is never granted a high c in Verdi's score. Not even a b, though at one point, inconspicuously in the first act trio, he gets a b-flat, with the option of even lowering it to d-flat.4 And in what has become his showpiece, the cabaletta “Di quella pira,” the critical edition reproduces nothing higher than an a. By contrast, Leonora is amply rewarded with high c's and even a d-flat in her two arias, while Azucena gets to show off a high c on top of the deep chest tones that define her personality. The Count, moreover, is expected to display an uncommonly high tessitura.

A Note from the Guest Editor

In a revealing paragraph of Bourgeois Opera, Theodor W. Adorno asserts that Claudio Monteverdi's L'Orfeo is the first “authentic” opera and “that it is hardly too much to claim that all opera is Orpheus.”1 Earlier in his essay Adorno adopts the same qualifier “authentic” for operas such as Der Freischütz, Die Zauberflöte, and Il trovatore (thereby intentionally excluding Wagner's works), which he characterizes as “prototypes of the theatrical.” The theatrical element of authentic operas consists of “that aura of disguise, of miming, which attracts children to theater,” and manifests itself in cloak-and-dagger scenes. The indispensable presence of costumes in any operatic staging, writes Adorno, reflects the audience's basic, childlike delight in dissimulation—gestures and voices working, in this respect, like costumes. Opera, however, does not merely display mimetic components but also preserves magical elements, even in the midst of a disenchanted world. The meaning of opera as a product intended for a judging audience of bourgeois consumers—a function that the genre shares with cinema—is inextricably tied to myth, as the earliest operas show. This link with myth, however, is characterized not so much by sheer imitation of the plots but by music's intervention and transformation of “fate's … ties to nature.” In the attempted rescue of Eurydice through music, the myth of Orpheus becomes, in Adorno's view, the “archetype of opera,” and the correction of mythological plots that often characterizes the genre reveals the Enlightenment's aspiration to subjective freedom. Despite their courtly contexts of production, the first Florentine and Mantuan operas already display this bourgeois and rationalistic element.2 Opera, in fact, Adorno observes, first truly flourishes in Venice under the “social conditions of an evolved bourgeoisie,” in an environment in which Monteverdi figures among “the great opera composers.”3

Common-tone Tonality in Italian Romantic Opera

Some compositional techniques 
 usually associated with German Romantic music, such as tonal pairing and the 
 frequent use of chromatic mediants, may have originated in Italian opera. These 
 techniques are traced from Rossini’s Tancredi (1813) to Verdi’s Il trovatore 
 (1853). Similarities to pre-tonal and twentieth-century neoclassical music are 
 considered. In studying and teaching nineteenth-century music, theorists should 
 broaden their focus beyond the Austro-German repertoire. The notion of “common 
 practice” is misleading and should be abandoned.

Remaking the Song: Operatic Visions and Revisions From Handel to Berio (review)

Remaking the Song: Operatic Visions and Revisions From Handel to Berio. By Roger Parker. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. [xii, 165 p. ISBN 10: 0520244184; ISBN 13: 9780520244184. $29.95.] Music examples, index. The esteemed opera scholar Roger Parker delivered collection of talks as part of the Bloch Lectures Series in 2002 at the University of California, Berkeley. They were, according to the author, a series of meditations on (also I hope celebrations of ) operatic texts, in particular ways in which operas long known to us have been, and might in the future be, subject to change of sort or (pp. 11- 12). Simple enough. Or is it? What constitutes one sort or ranges from single aria to an entire scene, and it is the argument and rationale that preoccupies Parker. The resultant publication, Remaking the Song, deals in those sorts of changes might consider argumentative minutiae, but are fiercely important to the operatic world. Consider, for example, the fit opera producer Jonathan Miller threw over Cecilia Bartoli choosing to use two substitute arias in his 1998 production of Le nozze di Figaro. Mozart composed the arias for production of Figaro in 1789, three years after the premiere. Miller saw them as evidence of diva pressuring Mozart to accommodate her, and not belonging to the true work. Miller was still talking about it four years later in an interview (Martin Bernheimer, Operating Theater, Opera News 66, no. 12 [June 2002]: 20-25). Parker heads into these issues with what he describes as a chipping away at some very familiar works-testing places where they were and might still be liable to change, in particular finding new ways we might think about them in their altered circumstances (p. 13). His first stop is Verdi. Chapter 2, Of Andalusian Maidens and Recognition Scenes: Crossed Wires in Il trovatore and La traviata, looks at the dichotomy scholars have imposed upon the two operas, pairing them as opposites, when upon closer inspection, they are inextricably linked. Due to illness and scheduling delays, Verdi had no choice but to compose La traviata while in the process of orchestrating and rehearsing Il trovatore for its Roman premiere. Recently published sketches reveal music from both operas appearing together on the same piece of manuscript paper. This leads Parker not to jump to conclusions about those precise pairings, but to examine what he refers to as doubles between the two operas. The first of these is La traviata's act 2 finale, in which the female Parisian guests perform mock zingarelle (gypsy dance). Parker finds shared musical context between the introduction to the zingarelle and Ferrando's description of Azucena in Il trovatore. Further evidence of the operas bleeding into another comes later in the finale, when the men (as story-telling matadors) share remarkably similar thematic material with Il trovatore's act 2 duet cabaletta between Azucena and Manrico. But wait, there's more: in the first half of Il trovatore's third act, as the Count di Luna and Ferrando interrogate Azucena, series of ironically sweet chromaticisms and trills accompany the revelation of Azucena as avenger and mother of Manrico. Parker informs us that those same trills become a prime symbol of Violetta's champagne and tears, her dissembling gaiety (p. 37). All this serves to teach the reader there are cases that resist interpretative scholarship, and should simply (as it were) enjoy the recognition. Chapter 3, Ersatz Ditties: Adriana Ferrarese's Susanna delves into the substitute aria problem in Le nozze di Figaro. Parker finds the criticism following Cecilia Bartoli's use of Un moto di gioia for Venite, inginocchiatevi in act 2 and Al desio di chi t'adora for Deh vieni, non tardar in act 4 evinces cultural pessimism about music and opera, perhaps about all art: mood that makes us miserly and grasping, fearful of loss. …

Verdi and the undoing of women

For a brief period in his career, Verdi wrote operas about compromised or ‘fallen’ women, women condemned for their sexuality: not only Lina in Stiffelio and Violetta in La traviata, but also – if we take into account the way their men regard them – Lida in La battaglia di Legnano, Luisa in Luisa Miller and Leonora in Il trovatore. These women suffer or die. Gilda also dies, in Rigoletto, ultimately a victim of her sexual availability. This essay examines Verdi's contribution to ‘the undoing of women’ and relates it speculatively to his experience as Giuseppina Strepponi's lover around the same time.