Not only are Rossini’s own manuscripts of complete operas filled with fermatas and instructions such as “a piacere” and “secondando il canto,” invitations for singers to interpolate cadenzas, but more than thirty separate manuscripts in the composer’s hand survive in which he wrote out variations and cadenzas. They are found in public and private collections in Italy, France, England, Germany, Japan, Canada, and the United States. Some provide ornamentation for a single piece; others are collections of ornaments for several pieces.15 They pertain to recitative, arias, and duets. The earliest, written during the 1820s through the early 1840s, were prepared for singers with whom Rossini worked in the theater or whom he coached, such as Giuditta Pasta and Giulia Grisi.16 The latest, penned in the 1850s and 1860s, provided ornamentation either for professionals still engaged in singing Rossini’s music (Adelina Patti) or for dilettantes (Matilde Juva).17 Manuscripts prepared for dilettantes can be particularly instructive, since the composer might include details that would have seemed obvious to a professional.
EXAMPLE 9.1. GIOACHINO ROSSINI, IL TURCO IN ITALIA, FINALE PRIMO (N. 7), PREPARATION FOR THE STRETTA (MM. 510–516).
According to a frequently repeated anecdote, Rossini objected to the freedom with which singers ornamented his music. Having suffered through the elaborate embellishments introduced by the last great castrato, Giambattista Velluti, at the 1813 premiere at the Teatro alla Scala of his Aureliano in Palmira, the anecdote continues, the composer vowed to write all vocal lines exactly as he wished them sung. However amusing this story may seem, it is totally without substance.18 One duet from Aureliano involving Velluti was even printed with the ornamentation he introduced in Milan, and his interventions are quite tame.19 Although Rossini’s written melodic lines do become more florid as his career continued, at no point did he ever attempt to specify completely the kinds of variations and cadenzas that would be tailored (whether by the composer or others) to the talents of individual singers.
While we have less evidence concerning the vocal ornamentation that Bellini, Donizetti, or the young Verdi might have countenanced, there do exist some suggestive sources. A manuscript in the hand of Donizetti is an arrangement for piano and voice of Nemorino’s “Una furtiva lagrima” from L’elisir d’amore of 1832. As we saw in chapter 8, the piece consists of two strophes: the first begins in B minor and modulates to the relative major (D major); the second also begins in B minor, but concludes in the parallel major (B major), with a cadenza underscoring the final cadence. In the original, the passages in B minor are essentially the same in each strophe. In his arrangement, Donizetti provides some ornaments for this second strophe (as in example 9.2).20 His manuscript also includes two alternative concluding cadenzas.The first variant is included in the principal text, the second is given as a footnote. It is clear, in short, that Donizetti did not consider his original cadenza to be sacrosanct.
EXAMPLE 9.2. GAETANO DONIZETTI, L’ELISIR D’AMORE, ROMANZA NEMORINO, SECOND STANZA, WITH DONIZETTI’S OWN VARIATION.
An example from the hand of Verdi is found within his autograph manuscript of Nabucco. First performed at La Scala in March 1842, the work had a notable success and was revived at the same theater the next autumn, under the composer’s direction. At that time, the role of Fenena, daughter of Nabucco, was assigned to a soprano, Amalia Zecchini. Since the original Fenena, Giovannina Bellinzaghi, was a mezzo-soprano, Verdi was obliged to alter the vocal line of her most important solo, Fenena’s fourth-act prayer. He entitled the manuscript containing the revised melody, “Preghiera Fenena puntata per la Zecchini” (Fenena’s Prayer adjusted for Zecchini). Not only did Verdi raise the tessitura of the part, he also made the vocal line more florid and provided variations for passages simply repeated in the original. Example 9.3 gives a sample of Verdi’s original and “puntata” versions.21
Our knowledge concerning ornamentation actually applied by singers in Italian and French operas during the first half of the nineteenth century does not derive exclusively from manuscripts prepared by composers. Additional information comes from singers’ notebooks, printed editions purporting to preserve the ornamentation of individual singers, anonymous annotations in printed music or manuscripts, and pedagogical treatises.
Because they can be associated with the practice of important contemporary artists, the notebooks in which Laure Cinti-Damoreau and Adelaide Kemble jotted down ornamentation for individual arias or entire roles are of immense interest. Cinti-Damoreau was a French singer who worked closely with Rossini at the Théâtre Italien between 1824 and 1826 (she was the original Contessa di Folleville in Il viaggio a Reims) and then moved with him to the Opéra, where she created the soprano leads in all four of his French operas (including Mathilde in Guillaume Tell). Later she taught singing at the Conservatoire in Paris and published a treatise on vocal technique.22 At Indiana University, there are seven manuscript notebooks, almost entirely in Cinti-Damoreau’s hand, filled with ornamentation for works written during the 1820s and 1830s, most of which were actively in her own repertory.23 Adelaide Kemble, on the other hand, was British. She was born in 1814, and her short career spanned the years from 1835 to 1843. In 1838 she went to Italy, where she studied with Giuditta Pasta at the older singer’s home on Lake Como and performed in major Italian theaters. Kemble, too, left a notebook, with ornamentation for arias and duets (especially those written for soprano and mezzo-soprano) by Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and Mercadante. Among other treasures, there is extensive ornamentation for Bellini’s Norma, surely influenced by her study with Pasta, who created the title role.24
EXAMPLE 9.3. GIUSEPPE VERDI, NABUCCO, FINALE ULTIMO (N. 13), FENENA’S PRAYER (MM. 59–63) IN ITS ORIGINAL VERSION FOR MEZZO-SOPRANO AND AS VERDI HIMSELF MODIFIED IT FOR AMALIA ZECCHINI, A SOPRANO.
Although the albums of “Cadenzas and variations composed and performed by the Marchisio sisters,” prepared in 1900 by Barbara Marchisio and preserved in the Cary collection of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, testify to practices of a slightly later period, they are nonetheless significant.25 Barbara and Carlotta Marchisio, contralto and soprano, respectively, were active from the mid-1850s until Carlotta’s death in 1872 (Barbara lived until 1919), frequently singing together in operas by Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti. Intimate friends of Rossini during the 1860s, they performed his Semiramide in a French adaptation at the Opéra in 1860 and later took part in the premiere of the Petite Messe solennelle in 1864.26 Rossini deeply admired their art; hence we must treat this collection of ornamentation with particular respect.
Since the vocal exploits of individual singers fascinated the nineteenth-century operatic public, music publishers—who sought commercial gain from that public—issued many individual arias with “all the ornaments” added by famous divas. There is no reason to doubt the basic accuracy of these publications, which provide us with dated evidence pertaining to particular performers. For Rossini alone, we have sets of ornaments reflecting the practices of the castrato Velluti, Emilia Bonini (who worked with the composer at the Théâtre Italien in the 1820s), Maria Malibran, Giovanni Battista Rubini (the famed tenor with whom Rossini first collaborated in Naples in 1820, before bringing him to Paris), and many others.27 None of these sets of ornaments is different in nature from the ones Rossini himself prepared, although those deriving directly from the composer are often musically more inventive.
Ornamentation added by hand to printed vocal scores, manuscript copies of an opera, or materials preserved in theater archives is more difficult to evaluate, for only rarely can such annotations be identified with individual singers or performances. Alongside ornaments similar to those of Rossini or major contemporary singers, furthermore, many puntature (adjustments) appear, simplifying vocal lines for performers unable to negotiate the original. While in principle puntature differ from ornamentation, the dividing line is sometimes slippery. Manuscript vocal parts at the Bibliothèque de l’Opéra in Paris, for example, reflect performance practice in the
temple of French operatic life, from which vulgar Italian custom was supposed to be excluded.28 But although Rossini simplified the more florid vocal lines of his Italian Maometto II and Mosè in Egitto when revising them for the French stage as Le Siège de Corinthe and Moïse, performing parts at the Opéra reveal that singers soon put back into the score many passages that the composer had so carefully taken out.
Finally, evidence concerning ornamentation is found in theoretical treatises of the period, which provide instruction for young singers.29 Two of the most important are those of Cinti-Damoreau, who published her Méthode de chant in 1849, and Manuel García, son of the tenor who created the role of Count Almaviva in Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia. The first edition of the son’s Traité complet de l’art du chant was issued in Paris in 1840.30 Didactic works not only provide important evidence but also suggest the spirit in which ornamentation was taught by its most distinguished practitioners. These words of advice are proffered by Joséphine Fodor-Mainvielle, a singer who worked very closely with Rossini during the 1820s, in a passage entitled “On moderation in ornaments”:
In the hope of having themselves applauded by an ignorant or unreflective crowd, singers overload their vocal line with ornaments, with fermatas, with high and low notes, neither expected nor desired by the leader of the orchestra, who is reduced to stopping his army, which, to follow the caprice of the singer, is obliged to make the most awful mistakes. [...] We do not exclude, certainly, the possibility of adding ornaments, but they should not oblige us to alter the rhythm. The words should be our guide; conforming ourselves to them, we can be certain to give the music being sung the character the composer intended.31
Knowing the mechanisms of applying ornamentation, in short, is only a first step. As Cinti-Damoreau expressed it:
I do not offer them [examples of ornaments and cadenzas] to you to be performed at any cost, despite your physical capabilities and your character. I propose these models of variations, rather, so that later your taste will lead you, within your individual means, to invent others that suit you properly.32
VOCAL ORNAMENTATION: RECITATIVE
Cinti-Damoreau’s advice is exactly right: young singers, coaches, and conductors should study contemporary evidence concerning vocal ornamentation in order to develop, first, their knowledge of what a composer and his singers would have recognized as appropriate and, second, their taste in devising ornamentation that suits the needs of a modern singer. What is most encouraging about contemporary evidence is its consistency. The Rossini manuscripts, notebooks of specific singers, printed editions with variations, and added ornamentation in secondary sources offer a reasonably uniform picture. Let us review the basic techniques employed by singers during the first half of the nineteenth century, beginning with recitative and continuing with arias.
In the performance of Italian opera from this period, the tasteful use of appoggiaturas in recitative (and often in arias) is obligatory, not a matter of choice. When a composer wrote two identical notes at the end of a phrase for a word with a feminine ending (“[a]-mo-re,” “[ri]-tor-no,” “ba-cio”), he normally intended the first note to be differentiated in pitch from the second even though his notation did not reflect this. The first note would almost always be sung a tone or semitone above the second, but occasionally it could be approached from below.33 This use of appoggiaturas carries over practices well established and documented in the eighteenth century.
Although the expectation that singers would apply appoggiaturas was becoming less widespread during the first half of the nineteenth century, the appoggiatura convention was by no means dying out. Rossini and Donizetti, born in 1792 and 1797, respectively, and actively involved in theatrical life by 1810 and 1818, rarely specified appoggiaturas in their notation: they were confident that singers knew what needed to be done. Bellini, on the other hand, born in 1801 and first active toward 1825, wrote out most appoggiaturas in his Norma of 1831, by adding grace notes. Verdi, born in 1813 and first active toward 1839, carried the process to its logical conclusion in operas such as Nabucco of 1842 or Ernani of 1844, by writing out as regular pitches in the vocal lines those appoggiaturas that would earlier have been added by singers or that Bellini would have notated as grace notes. While the need to employ appoggiaturas in early nineteenth-century Italian opera is no longer a matter of controversy, performers continue to learn the music come scritto. As mentioned in chapter 6, I had to beg Sam Ramey to begin Assur’s “mad scene” in Semiramide at the Metropolitan Opera, not as written, but as Rossini unquestionably intended it to be performed, only to have to settle for a compromise. In our opera houses we face the situation in which Norma and La traviata are performed with all necessary appoggiaturas, while Lucia di Lammermoor and Il barbiere di Siviglia often are not.
Not only were nineteenth-century singers expected to add appoggiaturas to the recitative of Rossini and Donizetti, they were free to insert turns, cadential expansions, expressive leaps, and cadenzas as part of their interpretation. In a manuscript prepared by Rossini in 1858, there is fascinating evidence of variants for Tancredi’s recitative and cavatina “Oh patria! dolce, e ingrata patria!” Because the recipient, Madame Grégoire, was a dilettante, the composer was especially precise in his notation, and every time it was possible to add an appoggiatura in the recitative, he did so.34 The first phrase, as written and as realized by Rossini, is shown in example 9.4. Rossini treats the rhythm with great flexibility throughout, paying no heed to the original bar lines but encouraging instead expressive declamation of the text. He inserts ornaments to intensify emotionally charged moments, as in the concluding measures of the recitative. Notice particularly the forte leap and cadenza on “perire” (originally the word had a masculine ending, as “perir”) and the increased pathos of the final “anima mia” (example 9.5). Similar interventions in recitative are found in manuscripts, printed editions, and pedagogical treatises associated with all those who worked in the orbit of Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti.
EXAMPLE 9.4. GIOACHINO ROSSINI, TANCREDI, RECITATIVO E CAVATINA TANCREDI (N. 3), OPENING OF THE RECITATIVE (MM. 33–35) IN ITS ORIGINAL VERSION AND AS ROSSINI HIMSELF MODIFIED IT FOR MAD.me GRE´GOIRE.
EXAMPLE 9.5. GIOACHINO ROSSINI, TANCREDI, RECITATIVO E CAVATINA TANCREDI (N. 3), END OF THE RECITATIVE (MM. 63–64) IN ITS ORIGINAL VERSION AND AS ROSSINI HIMSELF MODIFIED IT FOR MAD.me GRE´GOIRE.
As always, knowing the evidence and interpreting it on the modern stage are not the same. As recently as 1998, Renée Fleming ran into a wall of ignorance when she performed the title role in Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia at La Scala under the direction of Gianluigi Gelmetti. Gelmetti is a fine conductor, whose Guillaume Tell at Pesaro in the summer of 1995 was splendid, but he is also what the Italians call testardo, stubborn. Somehow he had gotten it into his head that Donizetti didn’t want singers to introduce appoggiaturas. There is no evidence to support this claim. Donizetti, like Rossini and the vast majority of their contemporaries, normally left appoggiaturas to the intelligence of performers. In his reluctance to add anything to a printed text, Gelmetti shares a sometimes exaggerated respect for notation with La Scala’s former music director, Riccardo Muti, but Muti only occasionally performs earlier nineteenth-century operas, where singer intervention is essential, while Gelmetti often does. In Lucrezia Borgia, then, singers and conductor were working at cross-purposes, and the developing atmosphere was fraught with tension. On opening night, general havoc reigned, the gallery hissed and booed, and Gelmetti collapsed and was rushed to the hospital. I don’t mean to suggest that appoggiaturas or ornamentation aroused all this hubbub, but they certainly played a part.
When I saw Gelmetti a few months later, recovered from his indisposition and conducting Donizetti’s late opera, Maria di Rohan (1843), at the tent then replacing the burned-out Teatro La Fenice in Venice, he reiterated his position on Donizetti. “Finally,” I replied, “you have explained to me why Verdi is a great and innovative composer. With his first well-
known opera, Nabucco, he invented the appoggiatura.” That, of course, is the logical result of the refusal to admit appoggiaturas into the operas of Rossini and Donizetti. After all, Verdi wrote out every appoggiatura he wanted in his scores, and that means essentially in all the operas he composed through the 1850s (his omissions are few in number, even if occasionally important). “If we don’t admit appoggiaturas into earlier works,” I concluded, “Verdi must have invented them in 1842, no?” My irony seemed lost on Gelmetti.
Knowing that the use of appoggiaturas in Italian opera is obligatory, however, is only a first step toward appropriate performance. Nineteenth-century practice is a guide for modern performers, not a recipe, and performers must never lose sight of who they are as musicians or of the audiences for whom they are performing. Appoggiaturas, after all, lend weight to phrase endings, applying stress and adding rhetorical emphasis to the poetic structure. Modern performance style, on the other hand, in the spoken drama as on the operatic stage, tends to flow more quickly, avoiding what are today perceived as excessive rhetorical devices. The emphatic Shakespearean declamation of John Gielgud, for example, reflected a powerfully different style from that of the more conversational Derek Jacobi. And while few today would imitate Marlon Brando’s “method” approach in the film of Julius Caesar, it was widely praised during the 1950s.
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