La Bella Lingua: My Love Affair with Italian, the World's Most Enchanting Language

by Dianne Hales

  “For many years,” a journalist of the time wrote, “it was an adventure to walk under the windows of La Scala because from above rained down everything—leftover food and other things, too.” Performers were also in firing range. The opera-mad loggionisti not only voiced their dissatisfaction with catcalls and boos but hurled tomatoes and other alimentary missiles at the stage—a tangible expression of their “passione musical-teatrale.” (The food flinging has stopped, but the vociferous booing has not.)

  By the end of the eighteenth century, the names of librettists began to disappear from printed librettos. Writing fast and furiously, they may not have had time or energy to worry about recognition. In addition to impresarios’ deadlines, composers’ dictates, and divas’ demands, librettists had to contend with church and state censors. Some banned the name Maria because it suggested the Madonna; others required such picky substitutions as nubi (clouds) for cielo (heaven).

  Censors were the least of the threats that menaced Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749–1838) in his breakneck romp of a life. Born Emanuele Conegliano to a Jewish family north of Venice, the spiritoso ignorante (clever ignoramus) essentially educated himself by reading old books stored in the family attic, including Metastasio’s verses. When he was eleven, his widower father, hoping to better the family’s position, converted to Catholicism. As was the custom, Emanuele, the eldest son, took the full name of Bishop Lorenzo Da Ponte, who had received them into the church.

  The new Da Ponte, sent to the local seminary, quickly acquired Latin, Hebrew, and Greek, but his greatest passion was for Italian literature. Memorizing much of Dante and Petrarch, he wrote poems by the thousands. But when his sponsor died, Da Ponte’s only hope of continuing his education was to train for the priesthood, a calling he described as “wholly contrary to [his] temperament, [his] character, [his] principles.” Six months after his ordination in 1773 at age twenty-four, the handsome prelate bolted to Venice.

  To support himself, Da Ponte became an improvvisatore, a sort of street poet who spontaneously declaimed hundreds of lines of verse to musical accompaniment. Like Casanova, the philanderer whom he later befriended, Da Ponte feverishly pursued women, wine, cards, and trouble. In 1779 his debauchery reached such extremes that the unrepentant rake was convicted of mala vita, or bad living, and exiled from the Venetian republic for fifteen years.

  Two years later Da Ponte showed up in Vienna, where Emperor Joseph II’s Italian opera company was in need of a “poet,” or house librettist. During his job interview, Da Ponte confessed that he had never written a full opera libretto. “Good, good,” Emperor Joseph said. “We shall have a virgin muse.” In this post, the anything-but-virginal Da Ponte, who reportedly read twenty opera texts to prepare for his new trade, met the most famous composer in Europe, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791). The two collaborated on three of opera’s crowning glories: Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte.

  When I ask Maestro Ruffini about this unlikely creative pairing, he describes it as a partnership made in operatic heaven: “Who but someone brazen, malicious, peevish, lying, vulgar, vain, servile, and hypersexual could write librettos like the ones that Da Ponte provided to Mozart?” he replies, noting that Mozart prized Da Ponte’s firsthand knowledge of loscaggine—a suggestive word that roughly translates as “the slimy underbelly of society.” The libertine librettist also brought to the collaboration a strong sense of plot, intriguing characters, and immensely singable, witty, economical verse.

  “And what did Mozart bring?” I venture.

  Mozart, says Ruffini, brought Mozart: “If it is true that the libretto is finished when the music is finished, Da Ponte’s Italian librettos are drenched in the genius of Mozart.”

  After Emperor Joseph’s death, the arrogant, argumentative Da Ponte was hounded out of Vienna—or as he saw it, “sacrificed to hatred, envy, the profit of scoundrels.” He lost more than his sinecure. When he developed abscesses in his mouth, he treated them with a potion containing nitric acid. The abscesses disappeared, along with all his teeth. But in Trieste the serial seducer fell in love for the last time.

  “At the age of forty-three, penniless, toothless, and with no prospects,” Rodney Bolt writes in The Librettist of Venice, Da Ponte won the heart of sweet, beautiful, British-born Ann Celestine Grahl, known as Nancy, twenty years his junior. The couple, whose marriage would endure for forty years, settled in London and had five children. Da Ponte hopscotched from one doomed entrepreneurial venture to another. In 1805, tipped off that creditors were pressing for his arrest, Da Ponte boarded a ship to America.

  In New York City, Da Ponte launched a string of enterprises, including a grocery, pharmacy, and dry goods store. In a casual conversation with a customer, he delivered such an erudite oration on Italian literature that the stranger—Clement Clarke Moore, who later wrote ’Twas the Night Before Christmas—offered him a job teaching Italian literature at the house of his father, the president of Columbia College. In time Da Ponte became the college’s first professor of Italian—the first, in fact, in the United States. But Italian wasn’t an academic requirement or much of a draw, and few students showed up. Undeterred, Da Ponte lobbied intensely for an Italian opera house in Manhattan. It opened its doors in 1833 and closed them in 1836.

  The would-be impresario took American indifference to Italian and to opera personally. “I, the creator of the Italian language in America,” he wrote to a friend in Italy, “I, the poet of Joseph II, the author of thirty-six dramas, the inspiration of… Mozart! After twenty-seven years of hard labor, I no longer have a pupil.” Yet Da Ponte, who died at age eighty-nine in 1838, felt that importing Italian culture to America was an even greater contribution than the operas he wrote for Mozart.

  Da Ponte may have been ahead of his time. With nineteenth-century romanticism, opera, always extravagant, reached new heights—and depths. Ever more intense, Italian opera became known as melodramma, a generic term for any story set to music that took on new meaning as the scope of the plots considered operabile (suitable for opera) expanded. Death, once banished from the stage, moved front and center. Corrosive hatred, which engenders a greater range of scabrous emotions, trumped plaintive love. Opera halls echoed with burning cries such as “Vendetta!” (“Vengeance!”), “Io tremo!” (“I tremble!”), and “O rabbia!” (“Oh, rage!”).

  New operas were written and performed at an astonishing rate—five hundred, according to one count, in a single decade of the early nineteenth century. All of Italy seemed seized by melomania, a mania for music. Every city boasted at least one opera house; traveling companies brought operas to towns and villages. No other form of entertainment could compete with opera’s wild popularity.

  The quality of the libretto didn’t always justify such enthusiasm. “If you want to write a smash-hit opera,” Carlo Pepoli, a composer of the time, counseled with caustic irony, “write an outlandish libretto in seven parts, which has a weird and terror-filled subject. Give it the most horrible title. Don’t bother about the epoch or the whys and wherefores: only muddle up everything without any continuity, neither verse nor prose, and it will be like a steamship, which gives off spume, spray, smoke, and noise.”

  But one popular form of romantic opera—bel canto (beautiful singing)—was anything but noise. Its premier composer, Gioacchino Rossini (1792–1868), son of a musician and singer, began his musical training early and produced the first of his thirty-nine operas, La cambiale di matrimonio, at age eighteen. For an opera he called Almaviva, Rossini turned to the same libretto that another composer of the day, Giovanni Paisiello, had used for his popular Il barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville) more than twenty years previously. Rossini composed the music at lightning speed in twelve days, by his account. Paisiello’s fans were so irate that they sabotaged the premiere in Rome in 1816 by whistling and shouting during the entire first act. But not long after the second performance, the opera scored such great success that the title Il barbiere di Siviglia perman
ently attached itself to Rossini’s score.

  Rossini, whose more serious operas include Otello and William Tell (with its rousing overture), had other priorities. After Il barbiere’s tumultuous opening night, Rossini wrote to its soprano (who would later become his wife), “What interests me more than music is the discovery that I have made of a new salad, which I hasten to send to you.”

  A reference to pasta actually made its way into the libretto of Il barbiere.

  “Siete ben fortunato,” Figaro tells the Count. “Sui macheroni il cacio vè cascato.” (“You are very lucky; the cheese has landed on the macaroni.”) This phrase, instantly understood by any Italian, is the English equivalent of “landing butter-side up.”

  Although he lived the last thirty-nine years of his life as a revered cultural icon in Paris, Rossini would eat only pasta from Italy—and, according to an oft-repeated tale, rebuked a Parisian shopkeeper who tried to sell him pasta from Genoa when he had asked for Neapolitan pasta. “If he knows his music as well as he knows his macaroni, he must write some beautiful stuff,” the merchant commented. Rossini considered this one of the greatest compliments he ever received.

  The sophisticated gourmand inspired a host of recipes alla Rossini, including tournedos, cannelloni, filet of sole, and pheasant supreme—all, as one chef put it, “worthy of the great gourmet-musician.”

  No dish, however sublime, might seem worthy of Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901), the Michelangelo of Italian opera. In more than thirty operas this maestro of maestri (nicknamed Peppino by generations of fans) gave “Italians” a unifying language and helped meld the patchwork of independent states and occupied territories into a unified nation.

  The son of a poor tavern owner in a bleak village near Busseto in Emilia-Romagna, Verdi described himself as “the least educated” of composers. Yet he read voraciously and memorized large chunks of the Bible. At age twelve the musical prodigy became the village organist and wrote hundreds of pieces for the local band and church choir. Milan’s prestigious music conservatory rejected his application, but after private training, Verdi qualified to become Busseto’s music director. He fell in love with the daughter of his first patron, married, had two children, and wrote two operas—one a moderate success and the other hissed off the stage at the Teatro alla Scala.

  Then, in the span of three tragic years, Verdi’s young children and cherished wife died, probably of infectious diseases. On “the threshold of nothingness,” as one biographer put it, words pulled Verdi back into the world of music—and back to life. One night an impresario in Milan shoved a rejected libretto into his hands. Alone in his room, Verdi threw the manuscript onto a table.

  “Without my knowing why,” he later recalled, “I found myself staring at the paper in front of me and saw these verses: ‘Va, pensiero, sull’ali dorate.’ ‘Go, thought, on golden wings.’” Although intrigued by the phrase from the biblical story of Egypt’s Hebrew slaves yearning for their home, Verdi forced himself to go to bed. “I couldn’t sleep. I got up and read the libretto not once but two or three times, so that by morning I knew all of it by heart.”

  The libretto became Nabucco, which premiered in 1842. The chorus “Va, pensiero,” the poignant lament of the enslaved captives longing for their homeland, became an unofficial anthem for Il Risorgimento (the resurgence), a nationalistic movement that was sweeping the fragmented peninsula.

  “The tune made him, then and for all time, the singer of his people’s liberty,” wrote an early biographer. Verdi gave voice to his countrymen’s longing for freedom and unity. The day after Nabucco opened, people were singing the song in the streets. Another nationalistic opera, La battaglia di Legnano (The Battle of Legnano), began with the cry of “Viva Italia!”—enthusiastically echoed by audiences. At the end of the third act, the hero Arrigo, locked in a tower, decides to risk death rather than the dishonor of missing the fateful battle. Donning his sash, he cries, “Viva Italia!” and jumps from the window. At one performance, a young man carried away with patriotic fervor leapt from a fourth-tier box into the orchestra pit. (Or so the story goes.)

  As nationalism grew, its advocates shouted, “Viva V.E.R.D.I.!” and scrawled the letters on walls across Italy—not only in homage to the composer, but as an abbreviation for “Vittorio Emanuele Re D’Italia,” the Piedmont king who had promised to liberate Italy from its foreign occupiers. Attila, one of Verdi’s lesser works, included a line that stirred millions of patriotic souls: “You may have the universe if I may have Italy.” I personally concur, but Alessandra, the opera diction coach who knows every nuance of Italian librettos, puts her own spin on this phrase: “You may have the universe if I may have Verdi.” She convinced me to use his music as the soundtrack of my life as I worked on this book.

  With his greatest hits (and there are many) downloaded onto my iPod, for many months I worked out, ran errands, drove the California coast, hiked the Marin headlands, folded laundry, and flew back and forth to Italy with Verdi in my head—and eventually in my heart. Not a day goes by without “Va, pensiero” wafting into my brain. The thumping anvil chorus from Il trovatore has kept me from screaming during many a traffic jam. In moments of pure bliss, “Io son, io son felice” (“I am, I am happy”) from La traviata floats through my mind.

  When my daughter and I saw an unforgettable production of Rigoletto in Florence’s Boboli Gardens on a summer night, we couldn’t stop humming the duke’s infectious “La donna è mobile” (“Woman is flighty”), nor could others in the audience. We kept hearing snatches of the refrain as we walked back to our apartment on the Arno, as if the great maestro had come back to life for an encore (a bis, from a Latin term for “two times,” in Italian).

  Verdi brought a new quality to opera: ruvidezza, a roughness, a pounding, a grinding, an underground rumbling that produced a visceral effect aptly called furore. I think of it as the musical equivalent of Michelangelo’s terribilità. As his often scathing letters to his beleaguered librettists reveal, Verdi intervened in every stage of preparing a libretto, from the content and structure of individual scenes to the vocabulary of the lyrics. Once the libretto was finished, he would recite it over and over as he stomped around his farm in the Po Valley until music finally flowed from the words.

  Verdi haggled over every syllable of La traviata (which translates as “she who strayed”) with the librettist Francesco Maria Piave. Then he had to take on the censors. “Una puttana deve essere puttana” (“A whore must be a whore”), he wrote, complaining that they wanted to make the courtesan Violetta “pura e innocente.” “If the night shone like the sun,” he argued, “it would no longer be night.” After the opening-night audience in Venice laughed pitilessly at the final curtain, the maestro wrote, “Was it my fault, or the singers’? Time will tell.” Time has spoken: I doubt if a week passes without a performance of this masterpiece somewhere in the world.

  Verdi insisted on strong situations, strong emotions, strong contrasts, and the strong language he called parole sceniche, dramatic words “that carve out a situation or a character.” In La traviata (the opera I would want with me if I were stranded on a desert island), croce e delizia (torment and delight) sear themselves on our hearts as Violetta (sempre libera, always free) yields to quell’amor, the love that pulses through the universe.

  What were the theatrical words, le parole sceniche, of Verdi’s life? Croce, for sure, caused by crushing losses. Delizia, also, with his companion Giuseppina Strepponi, the soprano who first sang his Nabucco, in a half-century-long relationship that scandalized his hometown. Vendetta? Verdi’s operas vibrate with hate, and he held fierce grudges for decades. L’Italia, without a doubt. “Siamo Italiani, per Dio! In tutto! Anche nella musica!” (“We are Italian, for God’s sake—in everything, including our music!”), this proud Italian thundered as Wagner’s influence seeped into Italy.

  Verdi’s genius glowed long and bright. Working with the librettist Arrigo Boito, a poetic virtuoso, he composed Otello at seventy-four and
Falstaff at eighty. On January 21, 1901, at age eighty-eight, Verdi, whose music seemed as vital as air to generations of Italians, died. According to the maestro’s precise instructions, his funeral was simple and silent, “without singing or music.”

  The transfer of the maestro’s body to its final resting place at the Casa di Riposo, the rest home he had built for retired opera singers, provided an opportunity for a more fitting addio. Hundreds of thousands, including the royal family and government officials, joined the cortege. At the cemetery, Paganini led a chorus of more than nine hundred singers in “Va, pensiero.” Without prompting, the entire crowd joined in the chorus that had helped forge a nation.

  A new generation of composers, including the Milan iconoclasts called scapigliati (the messy-haired or disheveled ones), demanded verismo, which translates as both “truth” and “realism.” Rather than creating grand epics, they strove to express the real passions of real people. Verismo’s voice “does not speak or sing—it yells! yells! yells!” said Pietro Mascagni, an impoverished music teacher in Apulia who became an overnight sensation with the landmark verismo opera, Cavalleria rusticana. When I watched a DVD of this opera at a seminar on Italian opera at ItaLingua, my language school in San Francisco, I could barely keep track of who betrayed whom, but the “yelling” was divine.

  The first Italian composer to sweep me off my feet in my grad-school days was the last of Italy’s operatic princes, Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924). “Almighty God touched me with his little finger and said, ‘Write for the theatre—mind you, only for the theatre,’” Puccini said. “And I have obeyed his supreme command.” This incorrigible bon vivant was, as one biographer commented, perfectly equipped—mentally, emotionally, and musically—to make his spiritual home “in that place where erotic passion, sensuality, tenderness, pathos, and despair meet and fuse.”