Divas and Scholars

by Philip Gossett

  The problem of Verdian sources has perturbed scholars since serious textual work began on the Verdi canon during the 1960s. When John Ryden, then editor-in-chief at the University of Chicago Press, first suggested to me that Chicago might be interested in collaborating with Ricordi on the publication of The Works of Giuseppe Verdi, one of my main concerns was that the Verdi heirs, some of whom still inhabit the Villa Verdi at Sant’Agata, near Parma, had always resisted sharing with scholars the composer’s musical manuscripts thought to be in the heirs’ possession. The principal autograph manuscripts for Verdi’s music, those on which a critical edition would primarily be based, are located in the Ricordi Archives, but there was good reason to suspect that other autograph manuscripts (sketches for the major works from Luisa Miller on, passages later replaced from works such as Simon Boccanegra and La forza del destino, alternative arias or instrumental pieces, and juvenilia) were preserved at Sant’Agata where the composer made his home for more than fifty years. Verdi was not a man who would wantonly destroy important papers, particularly those of musical significance, although he may have requested shortly before his death that the manuscripts preserving his earliest compositions be destroyed.59

  Gaining access to those sources has occupied our attention since we began work on the Verdi edition. Indeed, the order in which we have published volumes in the edition has not been chronological but has been determined, in part, by the availability of sources. We began with Rigoletto because Verdi never prepared alternative music for it, and the sketches for the opera, as we have seen, were reproduced in a facsimile edition in 1941. The political context of this facsimile is clear from its preface: it was published as part of the celebrations on the fortieth anniversary of Verdi’s death, “decreed by il Duce, longtime and enlightened admirer of Verdi.”60 Despite this publication, the family still did not want to show us the original manuscript. As volumes of the critical edition have appeared and as the new scores have been adopted by important conductors, however, the family has begun to understand our work better and has become more cooperative. With their help, our knowledge of the art of Verdi has greatly increased. Here is one example.

  Following the death of Rossini in 1868, Verdi conceived a project in which all the most important composers of Italy would collaborate on a composite Mass to honor the first anniversary of the older composer’s death. In 1869, then, Verdi prepared his own contribution, the final movement, “Libera me.” For a complicated set of political and practical reasons, this Mass, although fully prepared, was never performed. A manuscript of the entire composite Mass languished in the Ricordi Archives, some sections in the hands of its various composers, some sections—including Verdi’s “Libera me”—in manuscript copies.61 It was clear, however, that the “Libera me” Verdi prepared for the composite Mass later became the basis for the “Libera me” he included in his own, complete Messa da Requiem of 1874, composed after the death of the great Italian literary figure whom Verdi so deeply admired, Alessandro Manzoni.

  When plans were made to prepare the critical edition of the Messa da Requiem, edited by Professor David Rosen of Cornell University, it seemed essential that the 1869 “Libera me” figure as an appendix. We had access to the copyist’s manuscript at the Ricordi Archives, but it was filled with mistakes: an edition based on that source would have required massive editorial interventions, whose relationship to Verdi’s original could not be confirmed. At that point the Istituto di Studi Verdiani had the wonderful idea of preparing an edition of the entire composite Mass for Rossini, David Rosen to be joined by a group of young Italian scholars, each of whom would be responsible for one piece. The editing was accomplished, and the very first performances ever of the Mass were planned for Stuttgart (11 September 1988) and Parma (15 September 1988), under the direction of Helmut Rilling, who himself conducted a later revival at the New York Philharmonic. With this splendid occasion before them, the Verdi family offered Rosen access to the autograph manuscript of the original “Libera me.” Indeed, the event was so memorable that they allowed its publication in facsimile, with an opening statement by the then president of Italy, Francesco Cossiga.62 Thus, the critical edition of Verdi’s Messa da Requiem could provide documentation for this stage in the history of Verdi’s work on the music. It turned out that the original version of the “Libera me” was musically compelling in itself, and there have been several later performances with great success, including a particularly moving one by Riccardo Muti and the orchestra and chorus of La Scala in November 2000 to inaugurate the Verdi celebrations of 2001.

  Soon after, the editors of The Works of Giuseppe Verdi began to discuss with the Metropolitan Opera of New York a production of Verdi’s Stiffelio to take place in October of 1993—with James Levine conducting and Placido Domingo in the title role—as part of celebrations for Domingo’s twenty-fifth anniversary on the stage of the Met. We were eager to proceed, but the problems of the censored text and the absence of much of the autograph weighed heavily on us. How could we do justice to Verdi’s music and drama without knowing exactly what he had written? Finally, both Ricordi and the Istituto di Studi Verdiani explained to the Verdi heirs the significance of the occasion and the importance original materials might have for future performances of a major but unknown Verdi opera. The family agreed to see what it might have, and it wasn’t long before Professor Petrobelli of the Istituto informed me that manuscripts had been delivered to Parma, where I would be welcome to join him in examining them.

  I will not soon forget the day in February 1992 when I traveled to Parma to see the Stiffelio manuscripts. At the time I was in Italy for celebrations of the Rossini bicentennial. On the previous night, Claudio Abbado had conducted a revival of Il viaggio a Reims in Ferrara (the very revival at which Placido Domingo appeared as the “king”); on the following night I was scheduled to be in Bologna, where Abbado, Ruggero Raimondi, and I were to be inducted as honorary members of the Accademia Filarmonica di Bologna, the oldest musical society in Italy, which counted among its membership Rossini and Mozart. I traveled to Bologna via Parma, where, at the Istituto di Studi Verdiani, Petrobelli and I studied the treasures the family had put at our disposal. To our immense joy, they had shared with us the autograph manuscript of the music Verdi had written for Stiffelio and not reused in Aroldo (only a few pages were missing), as well as the complete sketches for both operas, almost sixty pages of them.63 It was the first time since the publication of the sketches for Rigoletto in 1941 that anyone had seen a major Verdian sketch.

  The Stiffelio manuscripts proved to be of the utmost importance. With this material available, Kathleen Hansell, music editor at the University of Chicago Press, was able to prepare an excellent critical edition of the score, and several scholars could examine Verdi’s sketches.64 The most astonishing changes were in the libretto of the work. Instead of the pallid censored text that Verdi was forced to accept in Trieste, the autograph manuscripts revealed the original words of the opera. Where previously available sources refer to “l’empio” (the villain) or to “il Giusto” (the just one), Verdi originally invoked the names of “Judas” and “Christ”; where in other sources Stiffelio returns to his senses during the second-act finale by saying “Stiffelio io sono” (I am Stiffelio), the autograph has the words “Sacerdote io sono” (I am a minister).65

  The emotional center of the work is a duet, where Stiffelio demands that his wife, Lina, agree to a divorce. After trying unsuccessfully to reason with her husband, she signs the papers. Then, no longer his wife, she confronts him anew: “I am not speaking to my husband, but to a minister of the Gospel” (“l’uomo del Vangelo”—a phrase the censors had changed to “l’uom di santo zelo,” the man of sacred zeal).66 She then continues: “Even on the cross He opened the paths of heaven to sinners. It is no longer a woman who begs you, but a sinner.” Stiffelio (whose given name is Rodolfo) tries to stop her, but she will not be silenced. “Rodolfo, ascoltatemi” (Rodolofo, listen to me), she says; at least, that
is what the secondary sources show. But those are not the words Verdi set to music. Instead, in Verdi’s autograph manuscript, Lina, freed from her marital bonds, turns on her former husband and demands: “Ministro, confessatemi” (Minister, confess me). Verdi set those “parole sceniche,” a phrase he often invoked for words that sum up and embody a drama, so that they can be clearly understood.67 His understanding of Protestant theology may not be quite right, but the increased dramaturgical power of the scene in its original form is striking.

  The sketches for Stiffelio have provided many new insights into the opera, but one of the most fascinating things we learned from them bears on Verdi’s next opera, Rigoletto. Verdi had a great deal of difficulty finding the theme for the cabaletta of Lina’s principal aria, at the beginning of the second act. In this section, she addresses the man who seduced her:

  Perder dunque voi volete68

  Questa misera tradita!

  Se restate, la mia vita

  Tutta in pianto scorrerà!

  So you wish to destroy

  This poor betrayed woman!..

  If you remain, my life

  Will know only tears!..

  The melody Verdi ultimately chose is not one of the opera’s finest moments. But among the versions of this cabaletta that he tried out is a very well-known tune (example 5.2). That the innocent Gilda’s “Caro nome” was originally sketched for the betrayed Lina’s “Dunque perdere volete” has implications for our understanding of Verdi’s treatment of text and music and, more generally, his compositional process.69

  EXAMPLE 5.2. GIUSEPPE VERDI, STIFELLIO, A SKETCH FOR THE CABALETTA OF THE SCENA ED ARIA LINA (N. 6).

  Before these implications can be fully investigated, however, scholars will need to have wider access to Verdi’s sketches and other manuscripts. The Verdi family has since allowed the editors of the critical editions of La traviata, Un ballo in maschera, and La forza del destino, Fabrizio Della Seta, Ilaria Narici, and myself (with the late William C. Holmes) to examine the fascinating sketches for those operas, and there is every reason to hope that they will continue to be helpful in the future.70 Certainly our ability to solve the many problems surrounding Simon Boccanegra, Falstaff, and even Aida will depend heavily on that continuing cooperation. What there is to be gained is an even stronger presence of Verdi’s own voice on today’s operatic stages.

  Although Tancredi, Il viaggio a Reims, and Stiffelio represent spectacular stories in the work on critical editions of the music of Italy’s major nineteenth-century composers, they are hardly unique. Rossini’s Petite Messe solennelle led me to the Chateau d’Offémont in Saint-Crépin-aux-Bois, just outside Compiègne, where Count Jacques Pillet-Will, a descendant of the family that originally comissioned the work, shared with me a manuscript of the Mass that Rossini had given to the count’s illustrious ancestors. It revealed an even earlier version of the work—from 1864—than had previously been known. First performed at the Rossini Opera Festival during the summer of 1997 in the presence of Countess Elizabeth Pillet-Will (sadly, Count Jacques had died earlier that year), this version proved to be musically compelling, and it has since circulated widely in Italy and elsewhere.71 Preparation of the critical edition of I masnadieri led its editor, Roberta Marvin, into the whirlwind surrounding the musical archives of the Covent Garden opera house as that venerable institution was in the process of self-destructing during the mid-1990s. As a result, she managed to find fascinating evidence for the artistic interactions between a well-known prima donna, Jenny Lind, and a still relatively young composer, one Giuseppe Verdi, in his first musical experience outside his native soil.72

  Musical editions exist on the page, not in the theater; but all theatrical presentations begin with a printed score and parts. These documents have their own stories, and the history of the scores generally available during most of the twentieth century, especially for operas written between 1800 and 1870, is not a happy one. Critical editions of this repertory engage with the history of each work, seeking to recognize the social systems that underlay its composition, first performances, and revivals; tracing its transmission; remaining sensitive to the participation of composers, librettists, singers, publishers, and instrumentalists. Editors—and other scholars on whose labors they build—must find and evaluate sources, struggle with their contradictions and uncertainties, seek feedback from performers, proofread over and over in order to eliminate inadvertent error (not even the best edition is error-free). There is romance, to be sure, but also much Sitzfleisch. Through all of this, however, the critical editions continue to recognize the composer as the central figure in the Italian operatic landscape and to seek where possible to reproduce his voice as fully and accurately as possible.

  INTERMEZZO

  6

  SCHOLARS AND PERFORMERS:

  THE CASE OF SEMIRAMIDE

  THE CHIMERA OF AUTHENTIC PERFORMANCE

  Musical scholarship and musical performance are often represented as occupying hostile worlds. The mutual dependence that actually governs these spheres engenders, perhaps inevitably, a certain degree of mutual distrust. Similar divisions are deeply embedded throughout Western culture, where theory and practice are treated as binary opposites: economists versus business executives, computer scientists versus software hackers, critics versus artists. “Thinkers” and denizens of “ivory towers,” on the one hand, jut up against “doers” and inhabitants of the “real world” on the other. The word “academic” is regularly used by those in and out of institutions of higher learning to set theoretical discourse apart from the practical world. In the arts, where the creation of new works or the representation of old ones is linked to the idea of “inspiration,” even “divine inspiration,” the imagined gulf sometimes seems unbridgeable.

  Over the past quarter century, much of this controversy in music has centered on the efforts of musicologists and some performers to look beyond the present and the immediate past when thinking about the performance of older musical compositions or repertories. Such concerns, of course, are hardly new. From the moment in which musicians sought to perform music on which the ink had already dried, the problem of coming to grips with the music of an earlier time arose in one form or another. In the medieval cathedral of Notre-Dame, the compositions of Léonin (written in the latter part of the twelfth century) were reinterpreted by Pérotin and his followers in the next generation. Renaissance musicians debated the appropriate way to interpret musical notation that indicated only incompletely the presence of sharps or flats. The growing number of instructional manuals during the seventeenth century for interpreting the notation of ornaments in Baroque music or for accompanying concerted music from a keyboard instrument through the realization of a so-called “figured bass” testify to a common practice that was neither so common that it did not have to be explained nor so certain that controversies did not arise with regularity.1

  But the problems intensified when two historical forces intersected: musical antiquarianism led to the recovery of repertories for which there were few guides in contemporary artistic life, while musical modernism was alienating many twentieth-century audiences from the music of their own time. Thus, diverse repertories—often bearing with them only the most modest indications of how their notations might be interpreted by performers—were introduced into the living musical museum. As long as the repertories under discussion were primarily the concern of those involved in the study and performance of music before the time of Bach, squabbles about the way to perform a Machaut ballade, a Josquin motet, a Frescobaldi organ prelude, or a Monteverdi madrigal were generally confined within a relatively small community of scholars and performers. During the past decades, however, as the questions began impinging on music closer to our own time—music still dear to performers and audiences—these issues became increasingly real to an ever-wider public.

  The case of late Baroque music is instructive. There is simply no continuous editorial or performing tradition for all but a few of t
he works of Bach, Handel, and the composers of their time. When Bach’s major vocal music began to be resurrected (partly under the leadership of Felix Mendelssohn) in the 1820s and 1830s, it was necessary to invent a style of performance. It is hardly to the discredit of the Romantic sensibility that musicians of the era depended heavily on their own sound ideal.2 Yet it was not long before the developing field of musicology, particularly in Germany, began to investigate Bach’s art. A critical edition of the complete works was prepared,3 documents and archival records from Bach’s life were consulted, theoretical treatises and critical writings of the epoch were analyzed. From this intensive study arose a new understanding of the music of Bach, the circumstances for which it was written, the forces by which it was performed, and the sound ideal of the late Baroque era in music. Gradually these ideas found a sympathetic reception among performers, many of whom were themselves active researchers. The harpsichord was reborn.4 Recorders and baroque trumpets were developed, and techniques for playing them relearned and then mastered. String players and singers recognized that the techniques appropriate for a Brahms symphony or a Wagner opera might not be the same as those required for a Bach concerto or a Handel oratorio. It is only later that they would be asked to consider whether the techniques they used in Brahms and Wagner might need reexamination in their turn. But first, through this revolution in public sensibility, performances of late Baroque music took on new life.