A (orchestra) A (orchestra) opening material (chorus) A (chorus).
This musically superfluous repetition of the orchestral introduction is not present in the autograph of the opera, nor in any source other than materials deriving from the French premiere. When Elizabeth Bartlet first prepared the manuscript of her new critical edition, which in principle takes as its main text the version of the opera performed under Rossini’s direction in Paris, she placed this repeat directly in the score, marking it as a suggested cut. During the first performances of the new edition at La Scala in 1988, however, Riccardo Muti accepted the repeat, leaving the stage director, Luca Ronconi, trying desperately to invent appropriate action. After that experience, we removed the superfluous music from the score, mentioning the repeat in a footnote. A conductor might still decide to repeat those bars, but the edition does not encourage him to do so.
Similar problems surround other musical forms in Rossini operas. Under what circumstances, for example, is it legitimate to abbreviate the cabaletta of a duet? Rossini employed a number of different formal designs in these circumstances. Sometimes the theme is sung partly in counterpoint, partly in harmony by both characters, who then repeat it after a brief transition.54 Sometimes the theme is sung by one character, then by the other; after a brief transition it is again heard twice, first sung by one, then by the other, but usually with the first character providing a counterpoint to this final appearance of the melody.55
A1 A2 trans. A1 A2+1.
While this formal procedure can be effective, as long as the first statement of the theme in the reprise is varied, Rossini in a duet in Mosè in Egitto restricted the theme to only two appearances, A1 followed by A1+2, after which the music proceeded directly to cadential material.56 More interesting still is the way Rossini abbreviated a more leisurely structured duet from Il viaggio a Reims (for Corinna and Cavalier Belfiore) when he adapted it to be sung by Comte Ory and the Comtesse Adèle. Having originally written a piece in the standard design (A1 A2 trans. A1 A2+1) for Il viaggio a Reims, when he reused it in Le Comte Ory he omitted the A1 after the transition, so that the cabaletta has the structure: A1 A2 trans. A1+2.57 Were we to make a similar abbreviation in other duets, we would not be contradicting Rossini’s own practice.
A full-length Rossini duet consists of a substantial opening section (primo tempo) of confrontation (Allegro), a cantabile (Andante), a short tempo di mezzo (transitional), and the concluding cabaletta (Allegro).58 Rossini also wrote pieces he labeled “duettinos”: sometimes they are in one lyrical section (“Vivere io non potrò” for Elena and Malcom in La donna del lago or the remarkable duettino in Zelmira accompanied only by English horn and harp); sometimes they resemble full-length duets minus the internal cantabile (as in the first-act duet for Semiramide and Arsace, in which, however, Rossini integrates into the first section some elements that might be appropriate for a cantabile).59 In one case, Rossini composed a full-length duet, then decided for dramaturgical reasons to remove its cantabile: a moment of quiet reflection during the confrontation between Desdemona and Otello in the third act of Otello, at the end of which the Moor kills his wife, must have seemed out of place. In the autograph manuscript one can still see where pages were removed, and the original printed libretto even provides the words, but no copy of the music is known to survive.60 Does this kind of evidence justify introducing an analogous cut into a full-length duet, not reduced by its author? Was Richard Bonynge justified in omitting the splendid cantabile “D’un tenero amore” of the Arsace-Assur duet in his 1966 recording of Semiramide?61 Whatever our answer, this further bow to the primacy of his wife and prima donna, Joan Sutherland, did not sin against Rossinian style.
Similar problems, finally, can be raised concerning the cadential formulas that pepper Rossini’s scores. A series of repeated cadential phrases (sometimes with variants internally), usually of decreasing length, concludes almost every lyrical solo or ensemble section in a Rossini opera. Here is a list, for example, of the cadential phrases in the first act of L’Italiana in Algeri:
N. 1: Introduzione
2×4 + 2×4 + 2×2 + 3×1
N. 2. Cavatina Lindoro
2×10 + 2×5 + 2×2 + 3×1
N. 3. Duetto Lindoro—Mustafa
2×2 + 2×2 + 2×2 + 3×1
N. 4. Coro e Cavatina Isabella
2×4 + 2×1 + 2×2 + 3×1
N. 5. Duetto Isabella—Taddeo
2×7 + 2×2 + 3×1
N. 6. Aria Mustafà
2×6 + 2×2 + 3×1
N. 7. Finale Primo
2×8 + 2×5 + 4×1
As phrase length decreases, possibilities for melodic or harmonic individuality, already limited, become negligible: form becomes formula. Italian critics and audiences accepted this cadential convention without hesitation, but its reception north of the Alps was more equivocal. In commenting positively on many aspects of Le Comte Ory, for example, Berlioz scornfully remarked on “the famous Italian final cadence, the stupid, insipid formula, reproduced thirty or forty times in the two acts.”62 Here, too, the internal repetitions—at least in arias and duets—were not meant to sound the way they were written: the singer was expected to ornament repetitions, and there is abundant contemporary evidence—to be examined in chapter 9—documenting how this was done. Simply to remove the repetitions of each phrase leaves the music limpingly asymmetrical. If a modern performer wishes to abbreviate a cadential section, it is far preferable to remove entirely one phrase (with its repetition), but there should be a good, practical reason for making such a cut (a tiring singer, for example). The few seconds saved in performance need to be measured against the resulting sacrifice in the carefully established proportions of Rossini’s art.
In the musical environment of Rossini’s operas, making internal cuts in individual numbers is like printing a sonnet sequence and leaving out occasional lines. It can be done, of course, but what one loses is an integral element of the formal clarity that draws us to the works in the first place. If one tries to modify Rossini’s music by pushing it too far along the stylistic continuum, it will resist and ultimately lose its distinctive character. Far better to eliminate entire numbers and play the music one does choose to play as Rossini conceived it.
Donizetti and Bellini
By the 1830s, the situation had changed markedly. The concern for musical balance and formal symmetry, so essential to Rossini, became less pressing. It is not sufficient simply to listen to an opera or examine a printed edition to understand this phenomenon. What reveal it most clearly are the autograph manuscripts of operas by Bellini and Donizetti. Again and again, these composers wrote musical numbers following Rossinian patterns, then thought better of it, tightened up the dramatic motion, crossed out internal repetitions, eliminated cadential formulas, and rewrote cabalettas to vary their formal shape. Unlike the almost pristine clarity of the autograph manuscripts of Rossini and Verdi, those of Bellini’s Il pirata and Norma or Donizetti’s Anna Bolena and Don Pasquale show the composers in furious struggle with their material. Their music, as a result, can be decidedly out of balance, often suggesting Rossinian models while denying their proportions. Donizetti, in particular, used various techniques to sacrifice Rossinian formal balance to dramatic intensity. He would draft the final vocal cadence of a passage, following it a measure later by a new idea in the orchestra, then elide the cadence and the new idea so that the music feels more continuous. He would prepare an orchestral introduction to a solo melody, then eliminate measures of harmonic preparation or repeated repetitions of the tonic (what jazz singers refer to as “vamp until ready”). He could be ruthless with the cadential section of a solo aria, instinctively writing a cadential design à la Rossini, then crossing out a unit or eliminating internal repetitions. After devising well-behaved cabalettas, he forced them into asymmetries.63
Sometimes Donizetti would enter into the heart of a solo passage and excise what seemed to him its longueurs. In her aria in Anna Bolena, Giovanna Seym
our, having admitted to the King that she still loves him, begs him to spare Anna’s life. Donizetti originally opened this scene with a full orchestral introduction, anticipating the main theme of the cantabile “Per questa fiamma indomita.” Later he eliminated the orchestral introduction, except for one measure of vamp: presumably he did not want Giovanna, who has not yet begun her plea, to indulge in a staring match with Enrico while the orchestra goes about its business. For the cantabile he originally drafted an arch design (ABCB’D), with A (the principal theme) and D (the cadential phrase) balancing one another. Having orchestrated the entire melody, however, Donizetti crossed out all of B' and half of D. The resulting cantabile is rhythmically undifferentiated (one of the sections he omitted is the only one that had provided rhythmic variety) and harmonically unbalanced, but Donizetti apparently preferred this structure to the regularity of his original idea.64 Whether we find the result thoroughly satisfactory will depend on where we place ourselves historically with respect to Anna Bolena; there is no absolute answer.
Donizetti himself cut the choral movement that begins Anna Bolena in precisely the same way that the Metropolitan Opera cut the analogous section in Semiramide. Although the longer Anna Bolena chorus was entirely orchestrated, Donizetti abbreviated it before the opera was copied or printed. Only in the autograph does one realize that the chorus was conceived as:
A (orchestra) A (chorus) B (contrast) A' (partial reprise of chorus)
cadential phrases.
The extended form is used with great subtlety. In the first choral presentation (A), the courtiers sing in whispered fragments about Enrico’s growing disaffection with Anna and his new love for another, while the principal melodic material is carried by the orchestra. The contrasting section (B) is striking for a new rhythmic figure in the accompaniment, dynamic contrasts, and a dependence on diminished-seventh chords. The partial reprise (A’) continues the accompanimental rhythm in strings and timpani, while the chorus—foretelling Anna’s fate—is finally assigned the principal melody. However effective this piece was as an opening to the opera and an inventive use of the typical Rossinian choral structure, Donizetti attacked its regularity by slashing and burning his way through individual phrases, thereby reducing it to:
A (orchestra) A (chorus) cadential phrases.
And so the piece has always been known. Impatient modern musicians did not have to wield their scissors: Donizetti had already done the job.
Making small internal cuts in Donizetti’s operas, following the practice of the composer himself, then, is less damaging than doing the same thing with the music of Rossini. There is a wonderful letter from Donizetti to Luigia Boccabadati, preserved in the Nydahl collection (Stiftelsen Muikkulturens Främjande) in Stockholm, written on 8 September 1836. In it, the composer suggests to the singer a whole range of possible cuts in his Lucrezia Borgia. Referring to one of the choruses, for example, he urges, “Take out useless repetitions,” sounding practically like Serafin. Nonetheless, even in the operas of Donizetti and Bellini such cuts need to be accomplished with sensitivity. When many of the major Italian operas of the 1830s first returned to the operatic stage as vehicles for the art of singers like Maria Callas, Joan Sutherland, and Beverly Sills, it seemed easy to snip out large chunks of music not associated with the divas or obeying formal conventions considered expendable. Recordings made in the 1950s and early 1960s document this practice, and one of the several recordings (some official, some pirated) made of performances of Norma with Maria Callas (this one with Christa Ludwig as Adalgisa and Franco Corelli as Pollione), under the baton of Tullio Serafin, gives some sense of how the cutting was accomplished.65
Norma is the story of a Druid priestess in love with a conquering Roman proconsul (Pollione), and mother of his two children, who is rejected for a younger initiate of the temple of Irminsul (Adalgisa). First performed at the Teatro alla Scala of Milan on 26 December 1831, Norma brings together many dramatic themes that dominate Italian opera: love, jealousy, friendship, conflict between nations, motherhood, and sacrifice.66 Bellini was particularly taken with his heroine and lavished on her some of the finest music he was ever to compose. Furthermore, in writing to the singer who would be his first Norma, Giuditta Pasta, he insisted that the role was “encyclopedic,” that it made a wide range of vocal and emotional demands on the heroine, surely one of the reasons why generations of prima donnas have been attracted to the opera.67 A great Norma must be convincing not only in her prayer to the chaste goddess of the moon (“Casta Diva”), but also in the furious jealousy with which she accuses Pollione, the understanding and empathy she shows to the unfortunate Adalgisa, and the declamation with which she contemplates murdering her sleeping children. Writing about Pasta’s performance in the latter scene during a summer 1832 revival of Norma in Bergamo, Bellini remarked, “She sings and declaims in a way that draws forth tears . . . Even I wept! . . . And I wept for all those many emotions I felt in my soul.”68 When shortly before his untimely death in 1835 Bellini contemplated a revision of his score, his plan was to prepare “a new cavatina and aria for Valini [Pollione]; a duet between him and Adalgisa in the first act, replacing the original one, which is cold; a piece for Lablache [in the role of Oroveso, Norma’s father] in the second act, either a [solo] scene or a duet; and finally a new overture, as well as retouching the instrumentation here and there.”69 Did the composer realize that this list of pieces includes every number of the opera (with the exception of the brief introduction to the first act) in which Norma does not appear? But the revision was not to be, and the Norma we know today is, for the most part, the work Bellini composed in 1831.
Bellini prepared his opera with care. There are many melodic sketches, rejected passages in skeleton score, internal modifications in the autograph manuscript.70 But Norma, too, was composed at a particular historical moment, and later musicians felt a strong urge to abbreviate its contents, particularly by eliminating “unnecessary” repetitions. Serafin’s procedures are typical of the 1950s, and they continue to be imitated by conductors and singers who grew up listening to those performances, either in the theater or on recordings.
Some cuts fall into precise categories. When Bellini wrote (and left intact) a standard cabaletta in a solo aria, Serafin usually eliminates the transition after the first statement of the theme and the repetition of that theme. This happens to Pollione’s cabaletta in the first scene of the opera, “Me protegge, me difende,” and to the cabaletta following Norma’s hymn to the moon, “Ah! bello a me ritorna.” Bellini would not have expected these cuts. More likely, a singer would have ornamented the reprise, as in the operas of Rossini.71 Likewise, in repeated cadential units of decreasing length, Serafin omits one or more phrases in Norma’s cabaletta, the duet for Adalgisa and Pollione, the duet for Norma and Adalgisa in the second act, and even the duet for Norma and Pollione that opens the finale of the opera. Most of these cuts are not disruptive.
We must remember, after all, that Bellini had already made numerous and elaborate cuts in his autograph manuscript, adjusting the musical and dramatic proportions better to reflect his 1831 perspective. In the first-act finale, for example, a canonic movement for Norma, Adalgisa, and Pollione begins with Norma’s “Oh! di qual sei tu vittima.” As Bellini originally conceived this scene, it continued with Adalgisa singing the same melody (Norma providing an accompaniment), followed by Pollione doing the same (Adalgisa adopting what Norma had sung to accompany her, and Norma introducing additional material). Cadential phrases brought the section to a close. Formal procedures of this kind were common during the 1810s and 1820s.
In the course of the original season, Bellini eliminated the Adalgisa statement of the melody, so that the passage goes directly from one voice to three.72 Rossini seems to have made a similar cut in a standard canonic movement for three voices in Maometto II (1820), when he revised it for Le Siège de Corinthe (1826).73
Likewise, in the duet for Norma and Adalgisa that opens the first-act finale, Be
llini originally built his cabaletta with a theme for Norma (“Ah! sì, fa core e abbracciami”), followed by an exact repeat for Adalgisa (“Ripeti, o ciel, ripetimi”). A brief transition leads to a repetition sung by both together, with Norma taking the melody and Adalgisa providing an extensive accompaniment. At a later moment, probably during the opening season, Bellini himself removed the transition and the repeat, developing a part for Norma during Adalgisa’s solo to make up for the resulting lack of a true passage a due.74 If Bellini hadn’t been there already, Serafin would surely have jumped in.
Still, it is important to be sensitive to more than the melodic distinction of a passage. In the cabaletta of the duet for Adalgisa and Pollione, for example, Bellini wrote a theme for Pollione (“Vieni in Roma”), begging Adalgisa to follow him; this theme is repeated immediately by Adalgisa as an aside (“Ciel! così parlar”), in which she expresses her uncertainty about what to do. The composer toyed with transitional material between the two presentations, but ultimately continued directly to Adalgisa’s statement of the melody.75 A brief “Più mosso,” melodically undistinguished, provides contrast and gives Pollione a chance to plead more energetically. It leads back not to a repetition of the main theme, but to a passage using its tempo, with brief, strangled phrases for the lovers. Adalgisa finally agrees to join him, motivating a single reprise of the cabaletta theme, with a new text and the voices in alternation. Brief cadential phrases (“Più vivo assai”), including a reprise of the “Più mosso” for orchestra, close the duet. Serafin omitted the “Più mosso” and the reference to it in the final orchestral cadences. While the latter cut is harmless, the former leaves an unsatisfactory structure. What should have functioned as a contrast, by virtue of the change of tempo and character, disappears. Instead the music moves directly from Adalgisa’s strophe to the same tempo for her change of heart—which is therefore musically and dramaturgically unmotivated. Everything seems woven from the same undifferentiated cloth. Even if the music Serafin cut is trivial (it certainly isn’t inspired), the omission disturbs the shape of the piece. Whether what is gained in terms of the raw emotion of Adalgisa’s situation justifies the omission is something each interpreter needs to face individually.
Divas and Scholars Page 38