About the so-called “traditional” version of the opera, Zedda was less incisive. He stated that its readings, “even if they may have been produced and taken hold while Rossini was alive, find no confirmation in a written source.”24 In fact, there is no evidence that anything resembling the Ricordi material was in use during Rossini’s lifetime. The “traditional” Barbiere was a deformed version prepared long after Rossini’s death, for reasons that may have seemed pressing at the time but have no validity today, such as filling out Rossini’s chamberlike orchestration with heavier sounds; avoiding Rossini’s characteristic use of the piccolo; facilitating the process whereby Rosina became a high soprano, rather than a Rossinian contralto/mezzo-soprano. Instead of deriving from a long-standing performance tradition, the old Ricordi edition simply reflected editorial decisions in the late nineteenth century to print an easily available score of Il barbiere di Siviglia (perhaps one then in use at the Teatro alla Scala), rather than searching out Rossini’s manuscript. Even Zedda’s critical edition has not completely erased the unfortunate effect of that decision on the performance history of Rossini’s opera.
CLAUDIO ABBADO AND A TENOR ROMEO
Critical editions of musical works are different from those of literary works. While the critical edition of a poem or a novel can be read with pleasure, its details dissected by the devoted scholar, its obscurities and its curiosities enjoyed by the informed amateur, a critical edition of a musical work is not intended for the library or the study alone. It is intended to be used as the basis for performances.25 When the work is as much a part of the popular imagination as Il barbiere di Siviglia, the first performance based on a new edition can become a cultural event. On 9 December 1969 La Scala was the site, an extraordinary cast was assembled (featuring Teresa Berganza as Rosina), and Jean-Pierre Ponnelle was the stage director. The man entrusted with bringing the new Barbiere to light was not Zedda but rather the rising star of Italian conductors, Claudio Abbado.
Abbado at that moment was the object of controversy. Having become interested in Bellini’s setting of the Romeo and Juliet story, I Capuleti e i Montecchi, he had prepared a new performing edition of that opera, which he conducted at La Scala on 26 March 1966. He altered the arrangement of the voices by substituting a tenor as Romeo for the mezzo-soprano required by Bellini, who had followed a tradition to which many Rossinian opere serie (Tancredi, La donna del lago, Semiramide) belong. Abbado’s aim was comprehensible: he wanted to revive Bellini’s opera in a way the public might more easily accept, since few works being performed during the 1960s featured female heroes en travesti. Neither Francesca Zambello (the stage director) nor I will ever forget the conversation of two elderly women during a rehearsal of Rossini’s Bianca e Falliero almost twenty years later, at Greater Miami Opera in 1988, before supertitles had transformed audience understanding: “Do you see what I see?” one whispered to the other, “two women—making love?”
But Bellini’s score was not so easily manipulated. He had planned the music with certain effects of sonority, and a tenor Romeo was decidedly not what he had had in mind. Perhaps the most impressive moment in the opera occurs at the end of the first-act finale, when, from opposite sides of the stage, the forcibly separated Giulietta and Romeo sing in unison an archetypical Bellinian melody, “Se ogni speme è a noi rapita,” over a sottovoce staccato accompaniment from male soloists and the all-male chorus. The significance and the beauty of the passage lies in those two female voices, lost in one another, soaring over the male ensemble, intoning a melodic idea that goes on and on in ever-inventive and rhythmically subtle detail, thirty-one measures of continuous melody (“melodie lunghe, lunghe, lunghe,” as Verdi described Bellini’s melodies).26 Substitute a tenor for the second woman’s voice, and the magic is gone.
The implications of the revised vocal scoring were broader still. In an opera as dependent upon ensembles as I Capuleti e i Montecchi, Bellini’s delicate web of vocal parts unravels when Romeo is recast as a tenor. In their duet, Romeo and Tebaldo (the latter played by the young Luciano Pavarotti in Abbado’s production) frequently sing in parallel sixths, with Romeo above Tebaldo. One cannot transpose Romeo down an octave and hope for acceptable results: the music is not conceived for two male voices in thirds.
Nor did Abbado’s interventions stop with the vocal parts. Despite Bellini’s considerable talents, he was far less expert in handling orchestral sonority than Rossini or Donizetti. The autograph manuscripts are replete with alterations that suggest insecurity, not an idealized search for perfection.27 The resulting sound is often heavy, for Bellini began with a larger orchestra than Rossini’s and kept most instruments playing too much of the time. Similar problems are not unknown to the German symphonic tradition. Should orchestras today play Schumann’s symphonies or a revision of them by another composer (say, the composer-conductor Gustav Mahler) or conductor (a Georg Szell or a Leopold Stokowski)? Schumann, after all, was an active participant in the first performances of these symphonies, working directly with his conductor (Felix Mendelssohn) and making alterations where he felt artistic results obtained during rehearsals and performances were unsatisfactory.28
Bellini had similar responsibilities: he was contractually required to rehearse his new operas and to participate in their first three performances. The sound was verified directly in the theater by the composer. If we think that Bellini’s operas are worth performing, then they are arguably worth performing as they were conceived, with problems of balance resolved through careful control of orchestral size and seating, the use of dynamic gradations, and so forth.29 But Abbado chose instead to “revise” Bellini’s orchestration, and his interventions were present on every page of the score.
Abbado’s Capuleti might have circulated in this form had not the dean of Italian music critics, Fedele d’Amico, blown the whistle. In a sharply worded article he deplored the operation, lamenting that Bellini’s beautiful opera lay fallow while this pointless “revision” was allowed to circulate.30 Abbado appears to have taken this criticism to heart. His edition of I Capuleti e i Montecchi was withdrawn from circulation shortly thereafter; and when the first performance of a nineteenth-century Italian opera based on a critical edition, Zedda’s Barbiere di Siviglia, was planned for La Scala, it was Abbado who took command.
Abbado’s Barbiere was a revolutionary reading of the opera. Not only did he employ the critical edition, but he adhered to the text with almost fanatical strictness. No significant cuts were sanctioned and few ornaments were permitted. This was a performance with a message: Rossini was to be presented at a level of precision usually reserved for the German masters.31 The slapstick antics that the work had endured for decades were replaced by a clean and eminently funny staging by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, where physical action emerged from the music. The singing was elegant, while the orchestral execution brought out every detail of the Rossinian palette.
Yet not everyone approved. Isolated voices, paying no heed to the evidence of the sources and insisting on a “tradition” invented at the end of the nineteenth century, preferred the old Ricordi version. (As late as 1989 Giuseppe Patané made it a point of honor that his recording of the opera did not use the critical edition.)32 And there was the more complicated objection of those who wondered whether this was how a Rossini opera should be performed. Did purging the opera of the vocal fireworks that coloratura sopranos had appended to melodic lines never written for them in the first place also mean that a mezzo-soprano Rosina or a contralto Rosina was compelled to sing only the notes printed in the score? Did eliminating traditional licenses (speeding up, slowing down, introducing pauses for stage business) also mean that the music had to be performed with quasi-metronomic regularity?
Abbado’s performance had been technically perfect, but still there were complaints that it lacked the wit and the vivacity that characterized Rossini’s art. And in a transference that has become standard, uncertainties about the performance grew into doubts about the edition. Is
that what it meant to use a “critical edition”? Did the new edition encourage, or even require, this kind of performance? Was spirit the price of scholarship?
THE SIEGE OF LA SCALA
One year later a different Rossinian production graced the same theater. The work was L’assedio di Corinto, and it was given on 11 April 1969 under the direction of Thomas Schippers. It also marked the debut at La Scala of two of the greatest American singers of our time, Beverly Sills and Marilyn Horne. With several changes in the score and cast (and, sadly, without the presence of Horne), this production was imported to New York six years later (7 April 1975) for the arrival of Sills in the promised land of the Metropolitan Opera, after her two decades’ wandering in the desert of the New York City Opera. Schippers and his colleagues subjected Rossini’s score to alterations far more drastic than those imposed by Abbado on I Capuleti e i Montecchi. Although they did not reorchestrate the music, they cut and rearranged so much of it that large parts of the opera were unrecognizable.33 From a serious work of music drama they concocted a showpiece for two prima donnas.
L’assedio di Corinto has a complicated history, as we saw in chapter 1. The opera was originally written as Maometto II for the Teatro San Carlo of Naples in 1820. Rossini revised it first for Venice to open the carnival season of 1823 (on 26 December 1822), and in 1826 he used it as the source for Le Siège de Corinthe, his earliest opera in French. This version was then translated back into Italian (badly) as L’assedio di Corinto. But the versions performed by Schippers at La Scala and the Met were not merely this retranslation into Italian of Rossini’s French opera, but a conflation of the various versions, to which—on the recording and in New York—was added an extraneous piece (from a revision of the opera by another composer) to favor even more the part of the soprano.34
The original Maometto II and Le Siège de Corinthe are both coherent works of art, but they are very different. The unusual dramaturgical and musical design of Maometto II, Rossini’s most innovative Italian serious opera, must have bewildered his contemporaries, even among the relatively sophisticated public of Naples. What Rossini calls a terzettone in his autograph manuscript—a big fat trio—is a continuous musical composition that occupies almost a third of the first act. Anna’s heroic scene at the end of the second act opens with some of the most difficult and expressive florid music that Rossini ever wrote, but instead of concluding with an elaborate rondò, the opera’s final moments witness the arrival of the Turkish forces, Anna’s abrupt suicide, and the shocked reaction of Maometto and the rest of the cast.35
In the best neoclassical tradition, Maometto II is a tragedy of love and honor, focused on four principal characters: Paolo Erisso, a tenor, the leader of the Venetian colony at Negroponte; Anna, a soprano, his daughter; Calbo, a contralto en travesti, a Venetian warrior in love with Anna; and Maometto II , a bass, the leader of the besieging Turkish forces. Anna and Maometto had fallen in love at an earlier time and in a different place, with Maometto in disguise; but now they must play out their personal story in hopeless circumstances. She betrays her beloved in order to save her father and her people, weds Calbo (whom she respects but does not love), and ultimately kills herself before her mother’s tomb.
In Le Siège de Corinthe, Rossini transformed his Neapolitan masterpiece into a nascent French grand opera, in a style that would strongly influence Meyerbeer.36 The protagonists become Greeks and Turks instead of Venetians and Turks, to reflect the political events of the 1820s;37 but this was the least significant alteration. The vocal lines of the Italian original were greatly simplified, following the more declamatory style in use at the Opéra in Paris.38 In further homage to French traditions, Rossini expanded the spectacular elements of the score. Choruses, dances, and pantomimes often overwhelm those elements of the tragedy that remain from Maometto II. A scene of prophecy for a new character (Hiéros) and a group of Greek soldiers invoking Marathon, exalting martyrdom, and promising a glorious future for Greece foretells the conclusion of Le Siège, a mass suicide, rather than the individual suicide of Anna.39 Almost every detail of this scene (except the mass suicide) was imitated by Verdi in the well-known scene that concludes the third act of Nabucco.
These alterations in dramaturgy were accompanied by changes in the solo roles. Heroic parts en travesti were not acceptable in French opera; hence the contralto role of Calbo was transformed into the tenor Néocles. Since Calbo’s original aria (“Non temer: d’un basso affetto,” with its cabaletta “E d’un trono alla speranza”) is a quintessential solo for coloratura contralto, and absolutely inappropriate for a tenor, Rossini replaced it with a new aria for Néocles (“Grand Dieu! faut-il qu’un peuple qui t’adore”). Rather than lose the Calbo aria altogether, Rossini modified its cabaletta for the soprano (now called Pamyra) and allowed it to conclude her major aria (derived from the incomplete aria that Anna had sung at the end of Maometto II, before her suicide), which in Le Siège opens the second of the opera’s three acts. Then, in order to provide solo music for Pamyra near the end, before the mass suicide, Rossini inserted the prayer for Anna that had been included within the terzettone from Maometto II. The manipulations, although they sound complicated when described, produce a perfectly coherent work.
While most scholars and performers are convinced that Maometto II is musically and dramatically more powerful than Le Siège de Corinthe, there are legitimate reasons to favor one opera or the other. But Schippers tried to merge the two. His fundamental error was to imagine that Le Siège could be performed with a contralto (Horne) as Néocles and a high soprano (Sills) as Pamyra. Each decision had unhappy ramifications. By reintroducing the hero en travesti into a French opera written for tenor, Schippers found himself forced to turn to Maometto II to find appropriate music for Horne’s aria. The resulting piece was of a monstrously large size, and it was constructed on the assumption that more is better (the kitchen sink principle, we might call it), drawing freely on music written for both Calbo and Néocles.
The presence of a coloratura contralto in Le Siège compromised the work’s general shift to a simpler vocal style, even when singers’ interpolations are taken into account. With Néocles now reassigned Calbo’s original cabaletta, the Pamyra aria at the beginning of the second act suddenly found itself without a concluding movement. What should one do? Choose a cabaletta, of course, any cabaletta, and stick it in. Sills sang one from Ciro in Babilonia, an opera written by Rossini early in 1812, with a ludicrous result. From the elaborate orchestral web of Rossini at his most mature, the sound suddenly dissolved into the Cimarosan ideal of his youth.40 (One could argue that if this music was to be added, it should at least have been reorchestrated in the style of Maometto II.) And as if that were not sufficient, Sills vocalized along with the rambunctious orchestral theme between the two statements of the cabaletta theme, strewing high notes hither and yon (example 4.2). She needed to have something to sing, after all, since her effective tessitura was so much higher than what Rossini wrote for either Anna or Pamyra. With the soprano’s line regularly transposed up an octave, ensembles sounded unbalanced.
EXAMPLE 4.2. GIOACHINO ROSSINI, CIRO IN BABILONIA, ARIA AMIRA (“VORREI VEDER LO SPOSO”), ORCHESTRAL THEME BETWEEN STATEMENTS OF THE CABALETTA THEME, TO WHICH BEVERLY SILLS VOCALIZED IN LE SIÈGE DE CORINTHE.
Despite this travesty of the music of Rossini, the ladies sang their hearts out, and L’assedio di Corinto was a triumph for the prima donnas. In the case of Marilyn Horne, it continued her demonstration of what Rossini’s vocal lines could be when sung by an artist with the requisite technical skills. Still, just as voices were raised against Abbado’s Barbiere, many protested this operation. Few knew the opera well, of course, and almost no one had even a passing acquaintance with Maometto II, but a vocal score of L’assedio was available from Ricordi, and some had even heard the reprise of the opera at the Maggio Musicale on 4 June 1949, with a young Renata Tebaldi as Pamyra. I threw in my two bits at a well-attended public lecture at the New York P
ublic Library at Lincoln Center, to which music critics flocked, the night before the opening.41 For my pains I earned this barb from Sills: “I think some so-called musicologists are like men who talk constantly of sex and never do anything about it.” 42
The contrast between Abbado’s Barbiere and Schipper’s Assedio embodies two extreme approaches to the performance of Italian opera. For the one, the text of an edition, especially a “critical edition,” is—in principle—sacrosanct and must be respected in every detail; for the other, an opera is an entertainment and can be freely manipulated as long as the result is a good show. Since the music of Rossini was largely unknown and unknowable during the late 1960s, the second approach seemed feasible. But the controversy that greeted the La Scala revival of L’assedio di Corinto had one important result: it gave impetus to the formation of the Edizione critica delle opere di Gioachino Rossini.
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