Verdi's Opera Research Articles

Interpretive Activism and the Political Uses of Verdi's Operas in the 1840s

The concept of interpretive activism as a relational position and a practical accomplishment is a useful analytical tool for the study of audiences conceived not as a conglomerate of individuals but as loose networks in which the ability to construct and impose political meanings is unequally distributed. An analysis of the political uses of Verdi's operas in the 1840s demonstrates the power of interpretive activists to impose on audience co-members a political interpretation of cultural objects. There is significant variation in the ways in which these operas were used for the construction of expressive collective statements by contemporary audiences. Opera performances were interpreted as symbolic representations of different political idioms, and audiences expressed their political stance by both affiliating with, and disaffiliating from, these performances. The practices of interpretive activists, not the patriotic symbolism inherent in the operas, account for this variation in outcome. Symbolism, along with the formal properties of opera and the normative enforcement of behavior, is just one of the different contextually grounded resources that interpretive activists use for the construction and imposition of politicized interpretations of cultural objects

Primal scenes: Verdi in analysis

Anniversary years always prompt revaluation as well as celebration, and the centenary of Verdi's death in 2001 was no exception. The conference for which the articles in this issue were written came at the end of a year packed with Verdi celebrations in both opera houses and academic settings. In terms of performance, a handful of ostentatious critical failures in 2001 sparked new debate about two old issues – the pros and cons of revisionist staging in general, and the degree to which contemporary productions should be faithful to what we can glean of the composer's intentions. These edgy, sometimes irreverent productions prompted the critic for the New Yorker magazine, Alex Ross, to declare that Verdi should be exempt from the rigours and indignities of Regietheater. While the abstraction of Wagnerian drama might reward updated settings spiked with flashes of contemporary social critique, he suggested, Verdi's operas work because the composer ‘meant every word’ and because their dramatic force is propelled by unadulterated emotion and sharp juxtapositions, qualities too direct and ‘site-specific’ to tolerate stagings that draw out hidden contexts or ironize dramatic conventions. In what quickly began to sound like a back-handed defence, Ross pronounced: ‘To the analytical mind such music can look crude, even vulgar on the page. Only in live performances, when the momentum begins to build and the voices become urgent, does it catch fire. But how do you go about analyzing momentum and urgency?’

‘Bewitched, bothered and bewildered’: Lady Macbeth, sleepwalking, and the demonic in Verdi's Scottish opera

‘Nothing is but what is not’. These words uttered by Macbeth after his bizarre first encounter with the three weird sisters could serve as a motto for the whole of Shakespeare's tragedy; for ‘the Scottish play’, as the superstitious have called it for centuries, is ruled by uncertainty, the questionable, the netherworld, where the only thing that is absolute is evil. It is about ambiguous forces that violate ife's natural order – witches, ghosts, a moving forest, an invisible dagger – what we call the macabre, what Freud called the uncanny, and what Verdi called ‘un genere fantastico’. Shakespeare constructs a world of binary opposites where boundaries, as Marjorie Garber has observed, are ‘continually transgressed, and marked by a series of taboo border crossings’.

The censorship of Verdi's operas in Victorian London

The censorship of Verdi's operas in Victorian London

Social control and the censorship of Giuseppe Verdi's operas in Rome (1844–1859)

In the 1840s and 1850s, four operas by Giuseppe Verdi (I due Foscari, La battaglia di Legnano, Il trovatore, and Un ballo in maschera) premiered at the theaters Argentina and Apollo in Rome. Two of these works (I due Foscari and Un ballo in maschera) had been rejected at other theaters because the authorities did not consider them concordant with the censorial requirements, and none of the four would have been permitted in Rome had the authorities applied the usual criteria. That they accepted them anyway suggests the process of censorship did not follow strict rules but was handled arbitrarily. These premieres are even more astonishing when we take into account that Rome, in contrast to most other cities on the peninsula, had very rigorous standards of censorship.

Verdi's theater: creating drama through music

Gilles de Van focuses on an often neglected aspect of Verdi's operas: their effectiveness as theater. De Van argues that two main aesthetic conceptions underlie all of Verdi's works: that of the and the drama. In the melodrama the composer relies mainly on dramatic intensity and the rhythm linking various stages of the plot, using exemplary characters and situations. But in the musical drama reality begins to blur, the musical forms lose their excessively neat patterns, and doubt and ambiguity undermine characters and situations, reflecting the crisis of character typical of modernity. Indeed, much of the interest and originality of Verdi's operas lie in his adherence to both these contradictory systems, allowing the composer/dramatist to be simultaneously classical and modern, traditionalist and innovator.

Lyric Form in Ottocento Opera

In a study of Verdi's debt to Bellini published over 20 years ago, Friedrich Lippmann set the course for subsequent investigations of phrase structure in ottocento opera by using letters to describe the archetypal shape of many melodies written by Italian composers after 1830. He identified the most common pattern in the music of Bellini and the young Verdi as a1 a2 b a2, in which each letter represents a four-bar phrase in a prototypical 16-bar melody. The method has obvious risks of turning uncomfortably antiseptic for the analyst, but there is much to be said for its virtue of concision. It served Lippmann for his subsequent work on Bellini as well as Julian Budden for his three-volume study of Verdi's operas. With a minimal addition of bulk, Joseph Kerman and Scott Balthazar subsequently formulated a more elaborate alphanumeric system. Both replace Lippmann's use of arabic numerals to demonstrate musical variation with primes (AA' BA’ instead of al a2 b a2; Kerman uses lower-case letters, Balthazar upper-case) and they communicate the number of bars in each phrase, including those longer and shorter than the four-bar norm, with subscript numbers (for example, A4A‘4B3C6). The relationship of each phrase to the standard double quatrain or sestet of Italian poetry is also accounted for by a parenthetical tracking of verse lines for each musical phrase; for example, A4(S11–2)A'4(S13–4) illustrates how the first quatrain is distributed across the first eight bars of a normative melody. More important, Kerman and Balthazar recognize the musical function of phrases within the prototypical 16-bar group. Balthazar, in particular, identifies the first two four-bar phrases as an ‘opening thematic block’, the B phrase as both ‘contrasting’ and ‘medial’, and the last phrase as a ‘closing’ unit ('some version of A or C, depending on whether motives from the opening phrases are present).

The aging psyche and the question of artistic change: An examination of one career

A long-time lover of music, I confess to having a bizarre penchant for trying to test my informally trained musical intelligence in situations which require quick recognition, be it a piece, a composer, a performer, or some such feature. In fact, this article originated with my failure to recognize a theretofore unfamiliar work and with the surprise I experienced upon learning it was Verdi's last opera,Falstaff, composed when he was nearly 80. For a listener familiar withLa Traviata orAida, it appeared quite strange and surprising. Moreover, as I found out later, the sense of puzzlement was not merely a matter of subjective impression but rather exemplified an overall stylistic departure in Verdi's late life work, its salient features being compression and urgency rather than spaciousness, flowing line, a pervasive use of biting irony compared to the straightforward lyricism of the earlier work, a retreat from psychological realism in favour of sketchy, abstract portrayals, an overall impatience with established operatic convention, and a symphonic rather than linear or melodic conception. Some of these characteristics have also been found in the late works of painters and sculptors (e.g., Arnheim, 1986; Clark, 1972; Munsterberg, 1983). Taken together these observations raised for me the issue of artistic change, an issue of considerable significance to the understanding of creative endeavour in general.

The genesis and literary source of Giacomo Puccini's first opera

All Puccini's biographers tell the story of how the eighteen-year-old composer, in the company of two friends, walked the nineteen miles from Lucca to Pisa to hear Verdi's latest opera, Aida; and how the impact of that opera – the first that he had ever seen performed – was such that he determined from that moment on to make a career as a composer for the theatre.

Towards an Explanation of the Dramatic Structure of 'Il trovatore'

In no other of Verdi's operas does one find even the slightest inclination toward humor. And now the old master writes a work that gives his whole past the lie, so to speak, an opera buffa raised to the nth power, the sublime example of its kind. Falstaff throws a light back over all of Verdi's previous work. It changes the aspect of this work; there must be more to it than we believed; the master who could create such an opera did not write Trovatore as mere hand organ music. And, indeed, the brightest ones among us have already come to the conclusion that Verdi's secret (I am not now speaking of the so-called secrets of form) lies as deep as Wagner's, and is much less obvious than is that of the calculating Wagner-rationalizing sometimes to the point of excess.1

Verdi and theGazzetta Privilegiata Di Milano: An ‘Official’ View Seen in its Cultural Background

Verdi was immensely popular in Italy because he brought to the accepted forms and idiom of opera just that touch of dynamic individuality which was needed; but there was a further reason only indirectly connected with the music itself. Italy during therisorgimento(1820–70) was seething with revolution, and Verdi's operas came to play an important part in the patriotic movements of the 1840s and 1850s. Though their scenes and characters ostensibly had no connection with contemporary events, the librettos were filled with conspiracies, political assassinations, appeals to liberty, and exhortations against tyranny, all of which were of course understood in the intended sense by sympathetic audiences.

Review: A Catalog of Verdi's Operas by Martin Chusid

Review: A Catalog of Verdi's Operas by Martin Chusid

Nemška opera v Ljubljani od leta 1861 do 1875

Nemška opera v Ljubljani od leta 1861 do 1875

The Two Traviatas

An opera so widely known and loved as La traviata may seem. a strange subject for musicological research. It was first performed in March 1853. From the following year onwards it enjoyed an uninterrupted reign as an international favourite. Throughout the nineteenth century it came second in popularity only to Il trovatore; while Verdi himself, when asked at one point which of his own operas he preferred, is said to have replied, ‘Speaking as a professional, Rigoletto, speaking as an amateur, La traviata’. In the period following his death many of Verdi's works now considered masterpieces sank for a while below the horizon—but not La traviata. Today it is not only Verdi's best-loved opera, but the most popular piece in the entire operatic repertory. What more could there be to find out about it?

MERCADANTE AND VERDI: II

WHAT, in the waking world, as contrasted with the nightmare fantasies of Notarnicola, is the position of Mercadante in the Italian musical hierarchy, what are his operas like, and what influence, if any, had he upon Verdi ? Between 1819 and I866 he produced sixty operas. In facility he rivalled Rossini and Donizetti, and five times in his career saw four new works put on the stage in the course of a single year. He had his failures, but also triumphant successes, and his reputation was not confined to Italy. In I824 he wrote three operas for Vienna; 1827-29 he passed in Spain and Portugal, producing new works at Madrid, Lisbon and Cadiz. Twenty-two of his operas were published complete in vocal score, as well as fragments of many others, ranging from a single aria to a volume of all the principal numbers ( pezzi reuniti ). The early works reveal him as a gifted follower of Rossini, extremely fluent and competent, but lacking a recognizable individual note of his own. Then in 1836 he was called to Paris to produce ' I Briganti', which was a failure, but during his stay there he witnessed the first performance of' I,es Huguenots', and acquaintance with Meyerbeer's music probably suggested changes of style observable in his next few operas, ' II Giuramento ' (1837), 'Le due illustri rivali' (1838), 'Elena da Feltre' (1838), ' II Bravo' (1839) and 'La Vestale ' (1840). Meyerbeer's direct influence on Mercadante's musical style, however, is much less apparent than it was to become later in certain of Verdi's operas. It would be interesting to know how far the works of Spontini, with whom he has something in common, were known to Mercadante. None of them seem to have been performed during his stay in Paris and they were not often reproduced in Italy at this period. During the composition of 'Elena da Feltre' Mercadante outlined a remarkable programme of operatic reform in a letter to Florimo:

Verdi

I think I may claim that in this paper, whatever its defects, is a sign of the times. I doubt if in, shall we say, 1914, anyone could have envisaged a paper on the aspect of Verdi which I am going to stress, being read to the Musical Association at all. With the exception of “Otello” and “Falstaff,” and perhaps “Aïda,” Verdi's operas were either entirely dead or regarded as purely popular entertainments, remarkable only for their good tunes. In the meantime, however, there has been a great change. Since the war, the revival of what may be called serious interest in Verdi and his operas has been very marked. The extent of this revival is not perhaps fully realised in England, which, together with France has not yet experienced it to any great degree. But it has been very noticeable in Italy, the United States, and above all, in Germany. Perhaps a few facts would be of interest to you. Take Italy. Those of you who are familiar with the Italian musical tradition will know that what may be called an archaeological interest in music is the last thing in the world that appeals to the average Italian. When, as was certainly the case, Verdi's operas began to be viewed as old fashioned by the younger generation, their eventual doom seemed sealed. Doubtless Verdi retained his hold on the purely popular theatre, but the middle and upper classes showed signs of deserting en masse to Wagner, who is indeed probably the most popular composer in Italy to-day among the educated classes. There are now, however, distinct signs of a swing in the other direction. Thanks in a great measure to the genius and care of Toscanini, the orchestral as well as the vocal effectiveness of works like “La Traviata” have been emphasised anew.

Verdi's Opera "Simon Boccanegra" at the Scala of Milan

Verdi's Opera "Simon Boccanegra" at the Scala of Milan