The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (40 page)

CD: Placido Domingo (Duke); Piero Cappuccilli (Rigoletto); Carlo Maria Giulini (cond.).
DG 457 753 2

DVD and video: Luciano Pavarotti (Duke); Riccardo Chailly (cond.).
Decca 071 401 9 (DVD); 071 401 3 (video)

Il
Trovatore

Four parts. First performed Rome, 1853.

Libretto by Salvatore Cammarano

Verdi intended to follow
Rigoletto
with another opera on a father-daughter theme, based on Shakespeare’s
King
Lear
(a project he considered and rejected several times in the course of his career).
Instead, he returned to the Spanish ambience of
Ernani
and adapted a play by a fiery young imitator of Victor Hugo, Garcia Gutiérrez.
Il
Trovatore
was a huge instant success.
A few critics cavilled about the gloomy atmosphere (almost every scene takes place at night) and the morbidity of the plot.
‘But is not life all death anyway?’ the composer retorted with a shrug.

Plot

In war-torn fifteenth-century Spain, Ferrando, a commander in the army of the Count di Luna, tells a strange story.
Years ago, the Count had a baby brother who died after being given the evil eye by an old gypsy.
The Count’s father had this gypsy burned at the stake.
In revenge, the gypsy’s daughter Azucena stole the baby, and a few days later, some charred baby bones were found at the foot of the stake.
But because of doubts as to whether these were the bones of his brother, the young di Luna has continued to search for him.

As the opera opens, the young di Luna is in love with the noble lady Leonora.
But Leonora is smitten with Manrico, a mysterious wandering troubadour who serenades her.
He and
di Luna fight a duel over Leonora; Manrico wins, but ‘a voice from heaven’ stays his hand and he lets di Luna go free.

In a gypsy encampment, Azucena tells her son Manrico what happened all those years ago – in a frenzy, Azucena mistakenly flung her own baby son into the flames.
Manrico wonders about his parentage.
Azucena quickly reassures him that he is her son.

Believing Manrico to be dead, Leonora decides to enter a convent.
As di Luna attempts to abduct her, Manrico comes to her rescue.
Di Luna’s forces invade the gypsy encampment in search of Manrico and arrest and torture Azucena.

Manrico hears this news as he and Leonora are about to be married.
He rushes off to save his mother, but is himself captured by di Luna and condemned to death.
Leonora offers herself to di Luna if he will spare Manrico’s life.
Di Luna agrees, but Leonora takes poison rather than submit, dying in Manrico’s arms.
Manrico is dragged off to execution, and Azucena reveals to di Luna the terrible truth that Manrico is not her son, but his long-lost brother, the kidnapped baby.
Di Luna is appalled, but Azucena is triumphant – at last her mother is avenged.

What to listen for

A notoriously difficult opera to cast – you will often hear it said that it requires ‘the four greatest singers in the world’.
This may not literally be the case, but it is certainly hard to assemble four voices of equal or balancing excellence.
Leonora used to be taken by the type of big, dark soprano who could also sing Aida – Leontyne Price, for example; today, it has become fashionable to cast a lighter voice, on the basis that in Verdi’s day those who sang the virginal Gilda in
Rigoletto
were also often cast as Leonora.
The role requires one of the widest ranges of any in Verdi’s
œuvre,
from a low A flat to a top D flat: both her arias are sumptuous in their broadly arched phrases and rich melodies.
Manrico is a splendid role for a strong lyric tenor, making no potentially embarrassing demands for coloratura flexibility: the infamous
top C which traditionally crowns ‘Di quella pira’ – thrillingly macho when the singer nails it, disastrously comic when it wobbles or misses the pitch – is an interpolation which does not appear in the score, though Verdi is known to have sanctioned it.
In defence of authenticity, purist conductors like Riccardo Muti insist on excluding it.
The jewel for the baritone singing the unsympathetic character of di Luna is the graceful serenade ‘Il balen’.
It lies high, however, and some heavier voices find this a strain.

But the most interesting and complex role is that of Azucena (invariably sung by a mezzo-soprano, though in fact the range is scarcely different from that of Leonora), one of the few mother-figures in Verdi’s
œuvre
and a character whose fierce passions and desire for revenge offer great histrionic opportunities.

For all its energy, brilliance and conventional orchestration, this is not a coarse or noisy opera, and it is up to a conductor to communicate its Mozartian qualities – intimacy, melancholy, clarity.

In performance

For the director, perhaps the most unrewarding of all Italian operas, not least because so much crucial action takes place off-stage and shrouded in the darkness of night.
Each scene is in effect a tableau – this, as the Verdi scholar Julian Budden put it, is ‘an opera of the expanded moment’, in which the characters are powerful archetypes rather than the credible personalities of
Rigoletto
or
La
Traviata.
Yet whatever the complexities and absurdities of the plot,
Il
Trovatore
has a classical symmetry – each of the four principal characters has two arias and they finally come together in the immaculately constructed last scene.

Some attempts (including one by Andrei Serban, seen at Opera North and elsewhere) have been made to use the period of the Spanish Civil War to make the clash of Manrico and di Luna plausible, but producers nowadays tend to opt for a gloomy abstraction which creates atmosphere but doesn’t elucidate the plot.

Recording

CD: Placido Domingo (Manrico); Carlo Maria Giulini (cond.).
DG 423 858 2

La
Traviata

Three Acts (four scenes); First performed Venice, 1853.

Libretto by Francesco Piave

Based on Alexandre Dumas’s play
La
Dame
aux
Camélias,
dramatized from Dumas’s own novel in 1848 and originally drawn from his romantic involvement with the enchanting courtesan Marie Duplessis, who had died in 1846 at the age of twenty-three.

Verdi had a personal identification with the subject – he himself had been living since 1848 in Paris with Giuseppina Strepponi, a retired soprano with illegitimate children, who in 1859 was to become his second wife.
So he knew at first hand something of the prejudice that women in Violetta’s position faced: ‘a subject for our age’ is how he described the opera.

Plot

The glamorous courtesan Violetta Valéry (soprano) is dying from tuberculosis.
At a party, she falls in love with Alfredo Germont (tenor), who has long admired her from a distance.
The two of them live happily together in the country, until Violetta is secretly visited by Alfredo’s father, Germont (baritone).
He demands that Violetta leave his son, since the scandal of her past threatens to destroy his daughter’s chance of a good marriage.
Fearful that Alfredo’s love would in any case fade, she sadly agrees.
Germont is moved by her nobility of spirit; she asks him not to tell Alfredo the truth until she is dead.
Violetta returns to Paris and an old lover; Alfredo pursues her to a party, where he publicly denounces her.

Deserted by her fashionable friends, Violetta sinks into poverty and becomes mortally ill.
Germont tells Alfredo the truth about her selfless sacrifice, and he hastens to her bedside. Joyously reunited, they talk of leaving Paris and a fresh start, but it is too late – Violetta dies in Alfredo’s arms.

 What to listen for

Violetta is a role often said to require three different voices.
Her long aria at the end of Act I moves from a gently expressive musing (‘Ah!
fors’è lui’) to a brilliant florid climax (‘Sempre libera’, which some brave sopranos crown with a high E flat, not in fact written into the score).
A fuller, richer sound is required for the complex feelings which animate her interview with Germont, as well as considerable resources of breath for the expansive phrases with which she bids Alfredo farewell (‘Amami, Alfredo’).
For the final death scene, the singer must both darken her tonal colour and suggest Violetta’s ebbing strength.
A strong lyric voice, properly trained in coloratura, like that of Angela Gheorghiu, is probably the type best suited to all aspects of the role.