Divas and Scholars

by Philip Gossett

  For at least one Rossini opera, an unauthorized revision ended up in print, confusing generations of music critics and performers, even today. Rossini’s Il Turco in Italia, first performed at La Scala on 14 August 1814, started life under unfortunate circumstances. Just a year earlier Rossini had written L’Italiana in Algeri for Venice, and the opera had an immediate and widespread success. (As late as 1830, a Venetian critic could think of no better way to emphasize how much the public had liked Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi at its premiere than by comparing its reception to that of L’Italiana, first performed seventeen years earlier.)52 The composer himself brought L’Italiana with him to Milan, where he directed a well-received revival at the smaller Teatro Re during the spring of 1814.53 Perhaps to capitalize on that success, Rossini and the librettist assigned to him by the Teatro alla Scala, Felice Romani (near the beginning of his career), decided to compose an opera whose theme is ostensibly the reverse: not an Italian lady who goes to Algeria in search of her beloved, but a Turkish prince who comes to Italy in search of the delights that Italian women legendarily bestow on their favorites. In fact, Romani’s libretto is not completely original: the idea behind it, as well as many verses and details (including the presence of a poet who attempts to control the action but instead is controlled by it), are taken from a libretto of the same name by Caterino Mazzolà, written for the theater in Dresden in 1788, where it was set to music by Franz Seydelmann.54

  The characters in Il Turco in Italia are very different indeed from those in L’Italiana in Algeri. Fiorilla, the heroine of Turco and married to Don Geronio, is an outrageous flirt, who flits from man to man dropping favors and demanding obedience but whose wiles are delicious to watch; Isabella, the heroine of L’Italiana and a lady of spirit and strength, is devoted to her beloved Lindoro but knows how to use a woman’s weapons to advance her aims. Elvira, the wife of Mustafà in L’Italiana, is cardboard, too good, too true—one understands why Mustafà wants to send her away; Zaida, whom Selim (the Turk) unjustly sentenced to death before the curtain rises in Turco, has independence and fire, and her reconciliation with Selim provides the impetus for the opera’s happy ending. L’Italiana’s Mustafà is a buffoon, easily manipulated by Isabella; Il Turco’s Selim has stature and character, despite his roving eye, and the role is really that of a basso nobile. Taddeo, too, the gallant attached to Isabella in L’Italiana, is a thoroughly comic character, while Don Geronio in Turco employs much the same vocal style but is a more sympathetic presence. The reconciliation of Don Geronio and Fiorilla takes place only after he pretends to send her back to her parents, and Fiorilla’s realization of her folly is set by Rossini to an aria of repentance with great strength and beauty. (Beverly Sills, in the New York City Opera revival of 1977, sang it as if it were a facetious “mad scene,” at the end of which she threw herself on the ground, then lifted her head and winked at the audience, bringing down the house but completely falsifying the opera.)55 Over the whole enterprise is the poet, Prosdocimo, whose genial presence keeps the work moving ahead with witty comments on the convenienze of Italian opera.

  The Milanese were probably unconcerned with these details, for they took it for granted that Rossini was palming off on them an inversion of his earlier work, with music indistinguishable from it.56 After this poor reception, Il Turco in Italia made its way only slowly on Italian stages. Rossini himself returned to the work for a Roman revival in 1815, removing two and a half of the three numbers prepared by an unknown assistant in Milan (leaving only the secco recitative and the end of the second-act finale), and adding several new numbers of his own composition. This revised authorial version, completely unknown until the publication of the critical edition, provides many interesting suggestions for modern performances.57 It is not to that Roman Turco I wish to turn, however, but to another, nonauthorial version.

  Ferdinand Paër (1771–1839), an Italian composer living in France and serving as director of the Théâtre Italien during the late 1810s and early 1820s, decided to produce Il Turco in Italia for his Parisian audiences.58 He was under pressure from the authorities to bring more works by Rossini into the repertory of the theater. Reports had been circulating about this new genius in Italy whose works were beginning to dominate Italian theaters, yet few of them had found their way to Paris. There were those, among them Rossini’s first biographer, Stendhal, who felt that Paër was making a determined effort to keep the Parisians from knowing Rossini’s operas, since knowledge of those works might lead to a rejuvenation of the Théâtre Italien’s repertory, sweeping aside operas by composers of Paër’s generation.59 Rather than simply performing Rossini’s opera, however, Paër patched together a compendium of pieces from several works: he cut many pieces from Turco, while inserting parts of Rossini’s La Cenerentola and other operas, an aria by Fioravanti, and still other pieces by composers unknown. This was the concoction presented to the Parisian public as Rossini’s Il Turco in Italia on 18 May 1820. Few in Paris could have known the difference, of course, because the score had never been performed or printed in France. The immediate result was to destroy the effect of the first performances of La Cenerentola two years later, when Rossini was accused of having borrowed extensively from Il Turco in Italia in writing the later opera. Thus, the manipulation of one score cast doubts on the quality of two.60

  What made this particular adaptation so disastrous was that the music publishers of Paris soon printed not Rossini’s Turco in Italia but Paër’s adaptation. Through almost two centuries, critics (beginning with Stendhal) have used these scores as the basis for their discussion of Rossini’s opera. Books and program notes are still being written that claim that in La Cenerentola Rossini borrows extensively from Il Turco in Italia. Indeed, an American reprint publisher, Kalmus, continues to keep one of these French scores in print as Rossini’s Il Turco in Italia, without giving its readers any warning. As recently as the spring of 1997, when I assisted in preparing a production of the opera for the Teatro Ponchielli of Cremona and La Scala of Milan, under the direction of Riccardo Chailly, there were still singers who were confused by those reprinted scores. If, as Stendhal opined, Paër sought to discredit Rossini’s operas, in this particular case he succeeded far better and for a far longer time than he could ever have imagined possible.

  It is generally agreed today that if you are going to perform Rossini’s Il Turco in Italia at all, you probably should avoid Paër’s adaptation. But similar efforts at “adapting” and “revising” have been made in our time. One Rossinian example is the version of La gazza ladra made for a performance at the Teatro Nuovo of Pesaro in 1941 by the composer Riccardo Zandonai (also at the time director of the Conservatory in Pesaro, founded by and named for Rossini), who revised, reorchestrated, and abysmally mistreated the original score, to what end it is difficult to imagine. His version, needless to say, soon disappeared, almost without a trace.61 So has the version that the brilliant German stage director Günther Rennert prepared during the 1950s of Il Turco in Italia. Whatever one may think of this adaptation, and many admired it greatly, it was absurd to grant it permanence by putting it into print. Yet that was precisely what Ricordi did in 1962, making it possible for many years to purchase Rennert’s Turco, but not Rossini’s.

  CHOOSING AMONG AUTHORIAL VERSIONS

  Authorial variant versions sometimes involve little more than the substitution of one or more musical numbers (usually arias) for others with similar structural functions. But there are also striking examples of large-scale changes in the overall structure and dramaturgy of entire operas, often involving cross-cultural adaptations from France to Italy or vice versa (Rossini’s Maometto II and Le Siège de Corinthe, Bellini’s I puritani, Donizetti’s Poliuto and Les Martyrs, and Verdi’s Don Carlos are famous and complex examples). In general, we can conceptualize the process of deciding which version to perform in terms of a grid in three dimensions on which to measure our alternatives. These dimensions involve: (1) aesthetic and analytic matters; (2
) historical circumstances; and (3) the practical conditions of modern performance.

  Aesthetic and Analytic Matters

  Aesthetic and analytic matters involve our individual judgments concerning the relative musical worth of alternative versions, the musico-dramatic character of each piece, and the larger dramaturgical consequences of adopting one version rather than another.

  Many issues need to be considered in judging relative musical worth: the quality of invention, the coherence of each variant in the context of the entire work, the tonal implications of different key schemes (both between adjacent numbers and within the opera as a whole), the vocal style, and so forth. We should presume neither that the results of different parts of our inquiry will reinforce one another nor that unanimity of opinion is possible. Few musicians today would argue that the quality of invention in Lady Macbeth’s aria “Trionfai!” in the original, 1847 version of Verdi’s Macbeth is superior to that of the revised aria he prepared for Paris in 1865, “La luce langue.” Still, the new piece belongs to a different stylistic world from the rest of Lady’s music, especially her first-act aria, “Vieni! t’affretta!” and even her remarkable sleepwalking scene, neither of which Verdi altered for Paris.62 And proceeding from “La luce langue” to the following, unrevised chorus of murderers is a bit like stepping from the pages of Joyce’s Ulysses into his Dubliners.

  The new aria for Lady Macbeth also changes the nature of her character both musically, by replacing a virtuoso showpiece with a more inward, lyrical moment, and dramatically, by introducing an element of self-doubt that is lacking in the earlier composition; hence, the choice between the two is significant for developing a coherent approach to the role. There are similar examples throughout the repertory. An Isabella in L’Italiana in Algeri who sings the lengthy, loving, and heroic cavatina, “Cimentando i venti e l’onde,” which Rossini added to the opera for a revival in Vicenza immediately after the original 1813 Venetian season,63 announces herself in terms very different from one who shows off her wares as a sexual commodity in the risqué (and frequently censored) “Cruda sorte” (see chapter 3). The choice between them affects the pacing of the opera, the character of the protagonist, and her further interpretation of the part. A young and frisky singer may prefer “Cruda sorte!”; a more mature one, “Cimentando.” The opera can support either interpretation. Likewise, the love between Percy and Anna in Donizetti’s Anna Bolena is presented in a more lyrical and passionate vein in their duet “Sì, son io che a te ritorno” than in the composition it replaced during the course of the opera’s first season at the Teatro Carcano of Milan during the carnival of 1831, “S’ei t’abborre, io t’amo ancora,” a much darker piece. The alternatives need to be weighed in that light.64

  On some occasions, alternative versions have dramaturgical implications that affect fundamentally the way we perceive an opera. The interaction of Ernani and Silva and the significance of Ernani’s dreadful oath are transformed when the final section of their duet at the end of the second act of Verdi’s Ernani is replaced by the aria for Ernani Verdi wrote just a few months after the opera’s premiere (9 March 1844) for a performance with Rossini’s protégé, the young Russian tenor Nicola Ivanoff, that opened the following carnival season at the Teatro Ducale of Parma (26 December 1844).65 Such changes are even more striking when they affect the final moments of an opera. As we have seen, Rossini’s tragic Otello was provided with a happy ending by the composer himself, who had earlier replaced the happy ending of Tancredi with a tragic one. The effect is equally startling, although the plot is unchanged, when a superb but exhibitionistic concluding rondò for the prima donna and surviving assembled cast in Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia (first performed at the Teatro alla Scala on 26 December 1833) is replaced by a more intimate final scene for Lucrezia and the son she has poisoned: that is the substitution Donizetti made for performances at the Teatro alla Scala beginning on 11 January 1840.66 At the same time, however, Donizetti seems to have made peace with his Scala Lucrezia, Erminia Frezzolini, by adding a florid, cadenza-laden cabaletta (“Si voli il primo a cogliere”) to Lucrezia’s romanza in the opera’s prologue (“Come è bello”).67

  Historical Circumstances

  The second dimension of our grid consists of the specific events that lead a composer to create an alternative piece and the implications of those events for the way we evaluate the resulting music. Among such circumstances are cases in which a composer replaces music originally written by an associate, revisions that result from actions of political censors, and changes introduced to suit the needs or desires of specific performers. As we discuss these situations, we will face again and again different compositional attitudes to the problem of “definitive” and “nondefinitive” revisions.

  Faced with sharp pressures of time, early nineteenth-century composers occasionally called on younger colleagues to prepare recitative and even complete musical numbers for their operas, or else they borrowed music from one of their own earlier operas. Sometimes the music in question is integral to a work: the second-act finale of Rossini’s Il Turco in Italia, for example, is by another composer, and the opera cannot be performed without using at least its concluding sections.68 (It would be comforting to believe, but it is unlikely, that Rossini assigned this piece to a collaborator out of impatience with its relatively conventional resolution to a most unconventional libretto.) Most of the time, though, the principal composer can easily replace those pieces by another composer or those borrowed from an earlier opera, especially in the absence of a looming deadline. Still, subsequent performers may not always choose to follow the principal composer’s last word. When Rossini worked against the clock to complete Matilde di Shabran for performance in Rome at the Teatro Apollo on 24 February 1821, he entrusted two entire musical numbers, as well as part of a third, to the young Giovanni Pacini, who probably prepared all the secco recitative as well. Just a few months later, for a revival in Naples at the Teatro del Fondo on 11 November 1821, under the name Bellezza e Cuor di ferro (Beauty and Heart of Stone, we might call it), Rossini eliminated all Pacini’s contributions except for the secco recitative, while adding several new pieces of his own. In this case, the new Rossini compositions had a limited circulation outside of Naples since he had recast the role of the poet Isidoro in the local Neapolitan dialect.69 Equally interesting, in Rome Rossini had introduced as the penultimate number of the opera an aria for Corradino, “Anima mia, Matilde,” derived almost without change from the tenor cavatina (“S’Ella m’è ognor fedele”) in an earlier Neapolitan opera, Ricciardo e Zoraide (Naples, Teatro San Carlo, 3 December 1818). But it was one thing to borrow a number from Ricciardo e Zoraide for an opera having its premiere in Rome, quite another to present the same piece to a Neapolitan public who knew the previous opera well. Thus, for the Teatro del Fondo, Rossini replaced the Corradino aria with a duet for Corradino and Edoardo (a trousers role), “Da cento smanie, e cento.” But what do we do with tenors who want to sing an aria at that point in the opera? There are reasons in favor of each solution.

  Italian opera houses in the first half of the nineteenth century, furthermore, worked under difficult and constantly evolving political conditions. Censors played an active role in determining what could or could not be presented at a particular moment. In extreme cases, entire operas were revised, while other operas were banned outright. Verdi knew very well that the censors in Naples were likely to object to the subject of Gustavo III when, in the autumn of 1857, he began to sketch his opera about the assassination of the Swedish king.70 Nonetheless, he urged the librettist, Antonio Somma, to complete his work while they awaited further notice. After the governmental objections were received, poet and composer spent Christmas of 1857 together at Sant’Agata, devising the modified libretto, Una vendetta in dominò, with the action moved to a middle-European duchy. Convinced that they could now proceed, Verdi finished sketching the opera and laid out his entire skeleton score. In early January he traveled to Naples, prepared
to deliver that skeleton score to the copyists so that they could prepare parts for the singers. Staging and musical rehearsals were scheduled to begin at once, during which Verdi was to orchestrate the work. What he could not have expected was Felice Orsini’s foolhardy attempt to assassinate Napoleon III in Paris on 14 January 1858. As a result of this incident, in which there were several deaths and many injuries, a newly sensitized censorship in Naples grew even more intractable, and Verdi was informed that not even Una vendetta in dominò would be permitted. The censors submitted to him a new text, with the plot moved to medieval Florence, Adelia degli Adimari, which Verdi contemptuously refused (calling it Adelia degli Animali).71 More than another year would pass (following further battles with censors in Naples and Rome) before Verdi’s opera would emerge from these trials as Un ballo in maschera. But work for the critical edition of Un ballo in maschera has revealed that—from what Verdi would have considered the creative point of view—Una vendetta in dominò was in fact completed, and it is possible to reconstruct that opera (with a fair degree of probability) as Verdi conceived it. Some relatively simple orchestration is all that is needed to bring it finally to the stage.72