When Samson is led in by a little child, they turn on him in mockery. Delilah takes especial delight in triumphing over him; and the High Priest, with exquisite taste, offers to turn Jew if Jehovah will be so good as to restore Samson’s sight. Samson, turning his sightless eyes upward, prays that the Lord of Hosts may avenge such monstrous impiety.
But now the serious part of the sacrificial ceremony begins. Libations are poured before the statue; the altar begins to flame; and as a climax, Samson is to be made to kneel to Dagon. Amid the triumphant singing of the Philistines, the child leads Samson between the two great pillars where he is to make obeisance. Quietly the huge man tells the boy to leave the temple, as the invocation to Dagon rises louder and louder. Finally, Samson grips the two pillars, prays aloud for a last show of strength, and with a shout starts the pillars swaying. The Philistine mob screams in terror and tries to rush from the hall. It is too late: the whole temple crashes down destroying everyone in it, including Samson and Delilah.
THE SECRET OF SUZANNE
(Il segreto di Susanna)
Intermezzo in one act by Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari
with libretto in Italian by Enrico
Golisciani
Newlyweds
COUNT GIL
COUNTESS SUZANNE Baritone
Soprano
SANTE, their mute servant Mute
Time: early 20th century
Place: Piedmont
First performance at Munich (in German), December 4, 1909
Of all of Wolf-Ferrari’s dozen operas this delicate gem is the sturdiest—that is, if we may measure sturdiness by frequency of performance. It requires the services of only two singers and a silent actor; it can be done with the simplest of sets; it can serve as a curtain-raiser for a major work or as an intermezzo between two shorter ones. In fact, its nature is that of the early Italian intermezzo. The older intermezzo was usually a comic scene between a soprano and a bass thrown in between the more serious business of a tragedy. Much of the comedy was spoken, and it was customary for the audience not to pay too much attention. The comedy of The Secret of Suzanne, however, is set to music throughout and is easily worth the delighted attention of everyone within hearing distance.
The overture, often played as a separate concert piece, is admirably suited to set the emotional pace with its light, bustling, tuneful inconsequentiality.
The action takes place some fifty or more years ago, when nice young women in the upper classes seldom did either of two things—go out in the streets alone, and smoke. But our pretty newlywed, Countess Suzanne, has combined these sins just before the curtain rises by going to the neighborhood tobacconist and purchasing a package of cigarettes. Her husband, who enters the living room of his comfortable home when the curtain rises, has just seen her do this and cannot believe his eyes: it must have been another woman wearing a similar costume. He goes to his own room, and a moment later Suzanne enters wearing precisely the costume he has described, and carrying a wrapped-up little package. This she gives to Sante, the mute servant, and then retires to her own room. And so, when Count Gil returns and listens at her door, he is relieved to think that she has been home all the time. However, he is almost certain that he has detected the odor of tobacco, and his tentative conclusion is that Suzanne must have an admirer. He questions Sante whether he himself smokes and also whether Suzanne does. Both questions are answered by the mute with a negative shake of the head.
When Suzanne enters, he tries to continue the questioning. She looks sad; he asks why; she says it is the first time he has been unkind to her; and the difficulty is temporarily obliterated in the cordial sentiments of a love duet. But the personal proximity with which it closes gives him another whiff of dame nicotine, and he is jealous all over again. Now she believes that he must know of her secret vice, and innocently she suggests that he go to his club, shutting his eyes conveniently, as all reasonable husbands do. Putting a completely different construction on her speech, he works himself up into a fury, throws vases about the room, and drives her out of it for a good, comfortable cry.
Utterly grief-stricken, he throws himself into an easy chair, and this gives the composer a chance to write a charming intermezzo while Sante clears up the debris. Suzanne then comes out, gives him his hat, gloves, and umbrella, and urges him to go to the club. And in a brief little aria (Via, così non mi lasciate—“You’re not going to leave me like this, are you?”) she begs for a little show of affection, which he delivers in the shape of a stiff peck on the forehead.
Considerably relieved, Suzanne lights one of the wicked little weeds and just has time to put it out before Gil returns, looks for an unwanted visitor, and finds nothing but more traces of tobacco odor. Once more he works himself up into a jealous rage; once more he leaves; once more Suzanne lights up. This time, however, Gil remains away long enough for her to sing a pleasant aria in praise of smoking (O gioia, la nube leggiera).
At last she is fortunately caught. Gil suddenly makes a reappearance through the window, sees what she is vainly trying to hide behind her back, and is enormously relieved. So relieved, in fact, that he joins her in the petty vice, and they smoke, dance, and sing together, utterly in love.
As they depart together for her room, old Sante cleans up the room once more, looking very wise and very much pleased with himself and his employers.
LA SERVA PADRONA
(The Servant Mistress)
Opera buffa in one act by Giovanni Battista
Pergolesi with libretto in Italian by Gennaro
Antonio Federico
UBERTO, a bachelor Bass
SERPINA, his maid Soprano
VESPONE, his valet Mute part
Time: 18th century
Place: Naples
First performance at Naples, August 28, 1733
Between the acts of those frightfully formalized eighteenth-century entertainments known as opera seria,* it was common practice to relieve the monotony of high-mindedness with intermezzi† short, low-comedy musical acts calling for the services of two singers—a soprano and a bass—and often a silent actor. La serva padrona was written to serve as intermezzi for the composer’s three-act Il prigionier superbo (“The Proud Prisoner”), a run-of-the-mill opera seria calling for the services of a castrated male soprano in the leading feminine part and a genuine female contralto in the role of the King of the Goths. Like the five other opere serie that Pergolesi composed during his four-year career as opera writer, Il prigionier was a failure. But La serva padrona was a huge success, for the two intermission pieces added up to a neat little story. They could be—and were later on—played as a one-act comedy; the tunes were simple and gay; the action and characters, while stemming directly from eighteenth-century comedy, were not only understandable but almost realistic. Thus was born the form known as opera buffa, which has had a long and honorable history; and its classic exemplar, La serva padrona, has had a career equally honorable and equally long. (Strictly speaking, perhaps, the form was born five years earlier with Johann Adolf Hasse’s La contadina, the first intermezzo to be based on a real play. But Pergolesi’s little work was the first one to receive wide circulation.)—
Pergolesi died in 1736 at the age of twenty-six, and so he never knew that a dozen years later, when an Italian troupe put on his little work in Paris, it created an opera war known as La guerre des bouffons. The vastly respected Rameau and Lully were then composing stately works which earned the disrespect of such advanced intellectuals as Rousseau and Diderot. La serva padrona gave them the ammunition for attacking the formal musical entertainments favored by the King, while the Queen favored the musical insurrectionists. Among the results of this war were no fewer than sixty polemical pamphlets on the subject, a successful opera buffa composed by Rousseau himself and called Le devin du village (which became the model for Bastien und Bastienne by Mozart—see this page), and almost two hundred performances of Pergolesi’s masterpiece.
We cannot credit all this Parisian
brouhaha with the comedy’s long life, for the whims of operatic fashion brushed it right off the stage for a generation or two in the nineteenth century. But its charm and vitality caused it to be revived in the 1860’s, since when it has retained its position as the earliest opera regularly revived by practically every opera-producing group in the world, from college workshops to the Metropolitan and other august museums.
INTERMEZZO I
Uberto, a comfortably off Neapolitan bachelor, has two servants, a pretty girl named Serpina and a mute named Vespone. He complains vigorously of the girl’s failure to bring him his morning chocolate so that he can go out; and when they come in, he tries reading a lecture to both his servants on their deliberate inattention. But Serpina will have none of his lip. She gives him back everything she gets. The chocolate hasn’t been prepared; he’ll just have to do without it. This leads to Uberto’s first aria (Sempre in contrasti—“Always at cross-purposes”), in which he continues to complain but in which he already shows some weaknesses of which Serpina is quick to take advantage. She refuses to let him go out, even threatening to lock the door; and when he complains that she is giving him a headache, she delivers herself of an aria (Stizzoso, mio stizzoso—“My own fuss-budget”) in which she advises him to take her advice. Thereupon Uberto instructs Vespone to go find him a wife just to spite Serpina. A wife, says she, is just what he needs; and who could be a better one than herself? And the first half of the opera ends with a duet in which Serpina assures him that he really means to marry his beautiful and graceful servant even though he says he won’t, while Uberto insists that she is perfectly mad to think it.
INTERMEZZO II
Presumably a short while after, Serpina brings Vespone into the room, dressed as a soldier and wearing a set of horrendous false whiskers. When Uberto enters, she hides her coconspirator outside the door and proceeds to tell her master that as he refuses to marry her and as she must look after her own interests, she has engaged herself to another. His name, she says, is Captain Tempesta, and he has a frightful temper. This softens Uberto somewhat; and when she sings him a sentimental tune about how one day he shall remember her fondly (A Serpina penserte), he begins to feel downright sentimental. He agrees to meet this frightening military man; and while she is gone to fetch him, he admits to the audience that he is more in two minds about this matter than he would like to admit (Son imbrogliato to già). Vespone, thoroughly instructed, plays his part beautifully. He fumes all over the place without ever uttering a word, and lets Uberto know, through Serpina, that he demands a dowry of four thousand crowns. If he doesn’t get it, he refuses to marry the girl; and, furthermore, Uberto must marry her. When Vespone makes threatening gestures and begins to attack Uberto, the master finally gives in and does what he obviously wanted to do all along: he offers his hand both literally and figuratively. Thereupon Vespone doffs his disguise, but Uberto cannot be angry at him very long. Instead, he joins his fiancée in a darling duet about their delighted hearts (which, they say, beat respectively tippitì, tippitì and tappatà, tappatà) and which ends with two most elegant and eloquent lines:
Serpina: Oh, caro, caro, caro! (Oh darling, darling, darling!)
Uberto: Oh gioia, gioia, gioia! (Oh joy, joy, joy!)
* The only genuine opera seria described in this volume is Handel’s Julius Caesar (see p. 236).
† For a description of a modern intermezzo, see The Secret of Suzanne, this page.
SIMON BOCCANEGRA
Opera in prologue and three acts by Giuseppe
Verdi with libretto in Italian by Francesco
Maria Piave, based on a play by Antonio García
Gutiérrez
SIMON BOCCANEGRA, Doge of Genoa Baritone
AMELIA, his daughter Soprano
JACOPO FIESCO, her grandfather Bass
GABRIELE ADORNO, a young patrician Tenor
PAOLO, a politician Baritone
PIETRO, another Bass
Time: 1339 to 1363
Place: Genoa
First performance at Venice, March 12, 1857
Except for a few years during the 1930’s, when Lawrence Tibbett starred in the role with a dramatic sense all his own, Simon Boccanegra has never captured the imagination and affection of a large public—either here or abroad. It was a comparative failure in its early years, and the composer was not only disappointed but also puzzled. By 1881 he had established a fine relationship with the composer-librettist Arrigo Boito, who had collaborated with brilliant skill and taste on Otello, and Verdi turned to him to revise a pretty murky and static libretto. Boito did his best (which, in this case, was not too good); Verdi did far better. The revised version—the only one performed nowadays and the one described below—includes some of Verdi’s most eloquent pages. Even so, the opera remains much more admired by the critics than loved by the public. Every once in a while an opera company will revive it for the benefit of a star baritone and the opportunity to exhibit some rich scenery. The critics praise it; the public stays away; the baritone stars in something else; and the scenery goes back to the warehouse for another few years.
PROLOGUE
The rather long prologue takes place in a public square of Genoa of the early fourteenth or fifteenth century. (The libretto says early fifteenth century, but the historical election of Simon Boccanegra as first Doge of Genoa took place in 1339.) Genoa was, at the time, a republic, and the opera begins with the professional dealings of a couple of politicians named Paolo and Pietro. They represent the democratic, or Ghibelline, faction, and they discuss who shall be elected the new Doge—that is, the head of the state. Quickly they agree that it shall be Simon Boccanegra. He is, at the moment, a popular and highly respectable freebooter, who has rid the sea around Genoa of non-European pirates. Simon himself enters at this moment, claims he does not choose to run, but is quickly persuaded to change his mind by Paolo. For Simon wishes to marry Maria, with whom he has had a clandestine love affair—and Maria is the daughter of the nobleman Jacopo Fiesco. Should Simon be elected Doge, he would have the rank of a prince, and Fiesco could not deny his daughter to him.
When Simon has consented, the two conspirators summon a group of voters around them. Their political arguments are rather personal, but nonetheless effective. They argue against Fiesco-who would be Simon’s rival of the Guelph party-by claiming that he keeps a beautiful woman mysteriously locked up as a prisoner in his palace. This persuades the populace that Simon will make the best Doge, and they depart, their minds made up. Now, Fiesco, however much a nobleman and a Guelph, is not a villain. The woman he is supposed to be keeping locked up is really his daughter, Maria, the beloved of Simon, and she has just died. In the best-known aria of the opera (Il lacerato spirito), Fiesco speaks of his sorrow as an off-stage chorus sings a miserere.
Simon, who is the father of Maria’s child, begs for the friendship and forgiveness of Fiesco, even offering him his life, by baring his chest. But the patrician Fiesco refuses to be an assassin, and he promises forgiveness only if Simon will turn over to him his grandchild. This, Simon explains, he cannot do. For some time ago the woman to whom the child had been entrusted was found dead, and the child had disappeared. And so Fiesco—without telling Simon that Maria has just died—coldly turns on his heel and leaves his political rival. Simon, however, enters the Fiesco palace, and a minute later comes out again. He has come across the dead body of his beloved Maria!
And at that moment the populace comes into the square to hail their newly elected Doge. As the prologue ends, the crowd cries Viva Simon! to the brokenhearted man.
ACT I
Scene 1 Twenty-four years have now passed. Simon Boccanegra is still Doge of Genoa, and his long-lost daughter lives with his old enemy, Fiesco, her grandfather. However, neither the grandfather, the father, nor the girl herself is aware of her true identity, and she goes under the name of Amelia. When the act begins, she is awaiting her lover, Gabriele Adorno, a young nobleman of the party opposed to Simon. She looks ou
t over the sea at dawn, and she sings a lovely aria as she waits for Gabriele. At its end his voice is heard off-stage, singing a love song in the distance. Ecstatically they embrace. But there is a shadow between them, for Amelia does not approve of Gabriele’s plotting with her guardian. As they speak together, they are interrupted by Pietro, who announces the imminent arrival of the Doge himself. Amelia hastily explains that the Doge seeks her hand for one of his favorites, and she begs Gabriele to arrange for their immediate marriage. Before the Doge enters, old Fiesco (who now, to hide his identity, goes under the name of Andrea) tells Gabriele that Amelia comes of humble stock. This makes no difference to the ardent lover, and so her guardian blesses the union in a duet that strikes a fine religious tone.
Now the Doge enters. The purpose of his visit is to secure Amelia’s hand for Paolo, the man who had helped him become Doge and who is now a chief counselor. But in the course of their long and touching duet he learns of her history, and it suddenly becomes obvious to both of them that she is really his long-lost daughter. Their secret must, for the time being, be kept. The Doge decides that Paolo must not have Amelia as she hates him and loves someone else. But as yet Simon does not know that the accepted lover is his bitter enemy, Gabriele Adorno.
Scene 2 A number of things have happened between the scenes. First, Paolo, Simon’s villainous counselor, has heard that Simon no longer backs him in his suit for Amelia’s hand. Second, he has made an unsuccessful effort to have his henchmen kidnap the girl. And third, the attempt has been foiled by Amelia’s lover, Gabriele, who believes that Simon instigated the plot.
As the act opens, Simon is presiding over a meeting of his council, giving sage advice about maintaining peace. Suddenly there is an uproar outside. The people are angered over the attempt to abduct Amelia, and they mistakenly shout, “Death to the Doge!” Simon takes the whole situation in at once. With a scornful majesty he rises over everything, and turns them to his side. But Gabriele rushes to attack Simon with a dagger. Amelia throws herself between the men, and she indicates clearly, without mentioning his name, that Paolo was the villain behind the abduction. A wonderful sextet, with chorus, develops, as everyone expresses his own emotions in connection with this rather complicated situation. At its end Simon turns to Paolo. He knows that Paolo is the unadmitted guilty one, and he tells him that—as guardian of the people’s honor—he must curse the man who committed the crime. Horrified, Paolo is forced to curse himself: Sia maledetto. And as the act closes, the whole assemblage repeats the curse in whispers: Sia maledetto!
100 Great Operas and Their Stories Page 44