The worst detail of this recording, though, comes near the end of the first act. Bellini worked over his conclusion intensively. Not only do there exist many sketches and drafts; there were even crucial changes between the first printed edition and all later ones, changes the publisher, Ricordi, attributed explicitly to the composer. Most obvious is the introduction of an offstage chorus of druids (together with a stage band) at the end of the act,76 but detailed modifications in the cabaletta deeply touch the structure of the music. David Kimbell has argued that Bellini’s earliest published version of this passage is so much more interesting than the modified version that it should be favored in modern performances.77 The inclusion of this earlier version in Parma during the spring of 2001 demonstrated the theatrical viability of a conclusion to the first act of Norma that focuses exclusively and equally on the three protagonists of the opera, with no external chorus to distract attention from their plight. Since Serafin did not have access to this version, however, I will restrict myself to the less radical but still unusual music known from modern printed editions.
Norma and Adalgisa have just learned that Adalgisa’s suitor is none other than Norma’s lover and father of her children, Pollione. He protests that he loves only Adalgisa; Adalgisa asserts that she can never accept the hand of a traitor; the furious Norma lashes out at both of them. Norma begins the final “Allegro agitato assai” of the act alone, in a tormented passage of short melodic fragments in G minor (“Vanne, sì: mi lascia, indegno”). The music arrives on the dominant, then shifts to a glorious melody in G major (“Te sull’onde, e te sui venti”), where she vows that her fury will pursue him everywhere, on the waves, in the wind. In its definitive version,78 this melody consists of a four-measure antecedent phrase (ending on the tonic), a more cadential four-measure consequent phrase (with a strong arrival at the high g), which shifts to the relative minor at the last moment, and an even more powerful two-measure conclusion that brings the tune to its highest point, a, before settling back to the tonic (example 8.4).79
EXAMPLE 8.4. VINCENZO BELLINI, NORMA, SCENA E TERZETTO FINALE (N. 5), THE MAJOR MODE THEME IN THE FINAL ENSEMBLE.
There is no transition. The repetition of this minor/major cabaletta theme begins immediately, but the G-minor theme is sung now by Pollione, with Adalgisa providing counterpoint. He insists that his love for Adalgisa is stronger than himself and she asks for “mari e monti” (seas and mountains) to be placed between her and the traitor. After the arrival on the dominant, the four-measure antecedent of the G-major melody is sung by all three in unison. At this point Bellini strikingly modifies his earlier procedure. The four-measure consequent (closing on the tonic, not on the relative minor) and the two-measure conclusion is sung only by Adalgisa and Pollione. Before the theme comes to a cadence, though, Bellini assigns to Norma alone the four-measure consequent (ending on the tonic), so that there is no rest, as her furious curse on their love keeps the tension building. Then he assigns this same desperate phrase to Pollione, also overlapping Norma’s statement. Only at that point do the “sacred bronzes” sound from the temple and the druids sing from inside on a diminished-seventh chord, the act rapidly proceeding to its conclusion (example 8.5). The overlapping repetitions of Norma and Pollione are marked “rinforzando sempre e stringendo” (always getting louder and faster). Introducing these unusual repetitions is how Bellini built tension in the scene and focused the conflict at the end where it belongs, on Norma and Pollione. And what does Serafin do? He cuts both overlapping repetitions (the third through the eighth measures in example 8.5), leaving what amounts to an identical repetition of the way the G-major conclusion to the cabaletta theme was heard the first time, when Norma sang it alone. He has reduced Bellini’s carefully planned variant to banality.
EXAMPLE 8.5. VINCENZO BELLINI, NOSMA, SCENA E TERZETTO FINALE (N. 5), THE OVERLAPPING STATEMENTS OF THE PRINCIPAL MELODY BEFORE THE FINAL CADENCES.
Even if we accept the principle that some cuts in Bellini and Donizetti are legitimate, following the practice of the composers themselves, we must not overlook their use of repetition. To throw out the way in which Bellini constructed this scene to reach a powerful conclusion, thereby returning his music to the most common conventional structure, is perverse. But that is where the hunt for extraneous measures took Serafin in this recording of Norma. Unless we think about Bellini’s music with sensitivity, we can easily follow Serafin into that artistic wasteland.
The Operas of Verdi
Verdi’s career as a composer for the theater lasted some fifty-five years, a long time by any measure. When he produced his first opera at the Teatro alla Scala in 1839, Donizetti had not yet written La favorite or Don Pasquale; when he produced his final opera at the same theater in 1893, Puccini’s Manon Lescaut had just had its premiere in Turin. From the moment Nabucco was performed in 1842 until the premiere of Falstaff more than fifty years later, every new Verdi opera was an event in the Italian and European musical spectrum, and many “made history” in the sense that they changed contemporary perspective on the nature of Italian opera. With the possible exception of a very few operas written under difficult circumstances during the 1840s, there is no evidence that Verdi wrote his music with less than complete commitment. No singer imposed his or her will on Verdi (even though the composer was mindful of their abilities and needs); no librettist escaped his insistent request for revisions.
Around him, however, other histories were being made, most particularly the Wagnerian history of music-drama and its Italian reception. And, as is the fate of every artist with a long career, Verdi saw himself hailed as an innovator, exalted as the supreme master of the art, and scorned as an old codger who stood in the way of progress in the arts. When Aida had its premiere in 1871, some contemporary critics shouted scandal because individual scenes have concluding sections that function as cabalettas, even if their form is treated with considerably more freedom than in Verdi’s earlier operas. In private correspondence Verdi defended the continued viability of the cabaletta convention, but he was stung by the criticism.80 How could he not have been? He had lived to see many of his early works treated as superannuated relics. Nabucco, read as a drama of the Italian Risorgimento, escaped; a heavily cut Ernani continued to circulate occasionally; and the surviving canon skipped to the trilogy of the early 1850s.
As with Rossini, Serafin and Toni provided their intolerant vision of Verdi’s three most beloved operas in the starkest terms. They loved these works when they seemed to adumbrate the future and loathed them when they were rooted in the past. Rather than accepting the particular moment in history to which Rigoletto, Il trovatore, and La traviata belonged, they recommended extensive cuts to create a more continuous dramaturgy, à la Puccini.81 Rigoletto’s second-act aria, “Cortigiani, vil razza dannata,” was their ideal. It is constructed in three continuous and interrelated sections: a passionate “Andante mosso agitato” in C minor, in which the jester lashes out at the courtiers and attempts to enter the room in which the Duke and Gilda are locked; a “Meno mosso” in F minor, where, in tears, Rigoletto pleads with Marullo, the most responsive of the group; and finally a lyrical cantabile in D major, “Miei signori, perdono, pietate,” where he begs them to give him back his daughter to an accompaniment featuring arpeggios in the solo cello and a poignant English horn doubling the melody at the sixth. The order of these sections is determined not by convention (cantabile, tempo di mezzo, cabaletta) but by dramaturgical necessity. Verdi moves the music where he feels it must go.82 While the phrase structure and melodic shape are quintessentially Verdian, the underlying conception shows a willingness to respond to the exigencies of the drama that marks the maturing composer. There are many equally splendid and innovative moments throughout Rigoletto, La traviata, and even Il trovatore.
Are we supposed to believe, then, that the composer fell asleep when he wrote the second-act aria for the Duke in Rigoletto, not to mention the major arias for Violetta, Alfredo, and Germont in La traviata? E
ach concludes with a formal cabaletta: a cabaletta theme, a short instrumental transition, a repeat of the theme, and concluding cadences. (In the Germont cabaletta, only the second half of the theme is repeated, a technique amply represented in early Rossini.) The repetition of the theme is justified dramaturgically only in the case of Violetta, who hears (or imagines) a reprise of Alfredo’s “Di quell’amor” from offstage. Sure enough, “Sempre libera” is the one cabaletta in La traviata that usually escapes the scalpel. In the Serafin and Toni universe, however, it is not just the orchestral transition and ensuing repetition of the other cabaletta themes that must be removed: the entire sections are consigned to operatic oblivion.
No one would deny that the only one of these four cabalettas to rise to genius, musically and dramaturgically, is “Sempre libera.” But each cabaletta has its musical and dramatic role, and omitting them entirely leaves gaping holes. The Duke learns from the courtiers in the tempo di mezzo of his aria that Gilda is in the palace. Instead of reacting with “Possente amor,” he bounds offstage like a panting schoolboy. Alfredo learns from the maid, Annina, that Violetta is selling her possessions to support their country idyll. Instead of expressing his emotions in “Oh mio rimorso! oh infamia!” he hops the next stagecoach to Paris. Germont’s nostalgic “Di Provenza il mar, il suol” is followed by a more direct plea from father to son in the cabaletta, “No, non udrai rimproveri.” Not allowing the young man a moment to interact with his father, the cut propels Alfredo on his second headlong departure of the act (when he sees Flora’s letter of invitation to her party). It is a bit comic in the best of circumstances; coming directly after the cantabile, it is intolerable.
Without their cabalettas, these scenes become a series of disconnected lyric moments, with no focus or closure. They make no structural sense and often no dramatic sense. There have been times in the history of Italian opera performances, particularly between the 1940s and 1960s, when such niceties seemed irrelevant, but I feel little nostalgia for those practices, however much I continue to love many voices associated with them. Thus, except for cases in which the repetition of the cabaletta theme is motivated musically or dramaturgically, I have long felt that the cabaletta problem in middle Verdi is best resolved by singing the cabaletta theme once and cutting to the cadential phrases. The themes themselves are worthy (especially when sung well), and by including them it is possible to maintain the basic dramatic and musical shape of the scenes, without insisting on the repetition structure of the traditional cabaletta, whose raison d’être seems slippery in the absence of the kind of ornamentation they were meant to receive.83 I admit freely that what I advocate is pushing these works a bit forward in the historical continuum, toward a time when Verdi maintained the function of the cabaletta but not its typical structure. Push too far (by eliminating them altogether) and the remaining sections are disembodied dramaturgical and musical fragments; don’t push at all (by performing them complete, without ornamentation) and the repetitions seem mechanical. Nor do I find my own solution ideal: the resulting pieces often seem short, and their proportions are not quite right. Yet each new production of an opera has its own needs, and even in the case of these cabalettas an individual response is preferable to a rigid methodology. As long as we perform Italian opera, these problems will never be definitively resolved: they will continue to demand thoughtful solutions from performers.
Cuts within cabalettas are responses to the particular historical valence of the cabaletta in the early 1850s, and they do not justify eliminating every repeated passage in a Verdi opera. The situation is quite different, for example, with two other passages frequently omitted in La traviata, the second strophes of Violetta’s “Ah! fors’è lui,” the cantabile of her first-act aria, and “Addio del passato,” her aria at the beginning of the final act. These passages have a structure that is less typical, but hardly unknown, in nineteenth-century Italian opera: two parallel strophes; they belong to the romanza tradition.84 Each of the La traviata strophes in both compositions begins in a minor key and concludes in the parallel major (the third-act romanza brings each strophe back to the minor at the very end). The text of the section in minor is independent in the two strophes, projecting a different dramatic quality, while that in the major is either the same (in “Addio del passato”) or repeats crucial words (“Ah! fors’è lui”), thereby underlining the parallelism between the strophes. Romanze of this kind were particularly important among the countless songs written to be sung by amateurs in music making at home.
While Rossini used romanze only rarely in his operas (Mathilde’s “Sombre fôret” from Guillaume Tell is his masterpiece in this genre), a similar strophic structure underlies one of Donizetti’s most beloved compositions, “Una furtiva lagrima,” Nemorino’s romanza from L’elisir d’amore. Donizetti, however, allows himself considerable freedom in composing this piece. The text consists of two parallel strophes, each with five settenari and a concluding quinario:
Una furtiva lagrima
Negl’occhi suoi spuntò:
Quelle festose giovani
Invidiar sembrò:
Che più cercando io vo?
M’ama, lo vedo
Un solo istante i palpiti
Del suo bel cor sentir!..
I miei sospir confondere
Per poco a’ suoi sospir!..
Cielo, si può morir;
Di più non chiedo
A furtive tear
Glistened in her eyes:
Those happy youths
She seemed to envy:
What more am I looking for?
She loves me, I can see.
To feel for a single instant
The beating of her beautiful heart!...
To mix my sighs
For a moment with her sighs!...
Heavens, I could die then,
I ask nothing more.
As in the classic romanza, the musical setting of each strophe begins with basically the same melody, in B minor, but Donizetti introduced slight variants between the strophes. For example, while the accompaniment is identical for “Invidiar sembrò” in the first strophe and “Per poco a’ suoi sospir” in the second, the melody in the second strophe is deliciously modified to introduce descending motion by step, a melodic detail that has been associated with the “sospir” (sigh) throughout the history of vocal music. (Later, as we shall see in chapter 9, Donizetti prepared even more elaborate ornamentation for the second strophe.)
Each strophe concludes in the major, but Donizetti gave his melodic instincts free reign even when this meant modifying the poetic structure. At the end of the first strophe, the music moves to the relative major (D major) for “M’ama, lo vedo” (which he rendered as “M’ama, sì, m’ama, lo vedo, lo vedo” in order to obtain sufficient text for his musical needs). In the second, where Donizetti wanted an even longer passage in the parallel major (B major), he continued to use all the music of the minor section but arranged it so that only the first four settenari were declaimed to this music (rather than all five, as in the first strophe), with many internal repetitions of words. Thus, both the last settenario and the quinario of the second stanza were available for the concluding major passage, allowing a more expansive conclusion for the second strophe, with a final cadenza to bring the number to a close. With this kind of formal manipulation defining Donizetti’s art, it is impossible to reduce “Una furtiva lagrima” to a single strophe.
Verdi’s treatment of the form in La traviata is more regular, and snipping out one of the two strophes is consequently more easily done. But why would one want to do it? Here are some reasons I have heard expressed:
1. Everything significant is heard the first time: there is no reason to repeat it. I find this a singularly unconvincing argument. Try it on Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who regularly colored each strophe of a song in Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin differently. The texts of Verdi’s sections in minor are entirely different in the two strophes, and anyone
sensitive to the interaction of words, music, and dramatic action can make us hear the melody in a new way. The two strophes of “Addio del passato” are particularly diverse: in the first, Violetta sings of her lost dreams of happiness and the absence of Alfredo; in the second, the mood turns even darker, as she starkly describes her fate (“no tear or flower will mark my grave, no cross with my name will cover these bones”). Furthermore, Verdi wrote quite different expressive marks in his autograph manuscript for the two strophes, providing a singer with ample suggestions for characterizing each strophe.85
2. Singing both strophes tires out a singer. An opera singer undertaking a major Verdi role should not be excessively tired by two strophes of a largely quiet and relatively short melody sitting firmly in her middle register, even if it requires great concentration and mastery to sing it well. But for many a young singer, the truth is that she has been told by her teacher (whose own teacher heard it from someone else) that she should cut as much as possible so as to prepare for that greatest of moments in La traviata when she interpolates a high e as the penultimate note of “Sempre libera.” Better still, why doesn’t our Violetta sit out the act, and sing a few high e at the end, allowing the audience to react as if she were a contestant in the high jump in the Olympics? I am willing to admit the possible virtues of vocal athleticism and can even accept that particular e (another subject for the next chapter), but not at the price of denaturing Verdi’s score.
Divas and Scholars Page 39