This is the only such page known to exist for any Verdi opera, although similar pages might figure among the unexamined treasures in the composer’s home at Sant’Agata. And for La traviata there is also an exceptional number of sketches without text that do not form part of longer continuity drafts, suggesting that at other points in his quite hurried work with this opera Verdi tried out melodic ideas without having poetry in hand. For the most part, however, the sketches for Verdi’s operas currently available (essentially complete materials for Stiffelio, Rigoletto, La traviata, Aroldo, Un ballo in maschera, and La forza del destino, as well as smaller sections from another ten operas) show unmistakably that the composer developed his musical ideas with a particular set of words in mind. Even when sketches seem to be textless, a careful reading of Verdi’s correspondence with his librettists can often explain the apparent discrepancy.
There is a fine example in the opera Verdi first conceived in 1857 as Gustavo III, then, prompted by censorial objections, transformed into Una vendetta in dominò at the end of 1857, and finally—with its premiere shifted from Naples to Rome, still because of censorship—transformed into Un ballo in maschera.15 The passage comes at the end of the elaborate introduction, which comprises almost half the first act, when the Swedish king, Gustavo (later the Governor of Boston, Riccardo) and his courtiers (later citizens of Boston) decide to pay a visit to the den of the witch Ulrica, whom the “Primo giudice” (Chief Justice, a title that worked equally well in Stockholm or Boston) seeks to remove forcibly from the realm (colony).
We know exactly when Verdi was working on this final section of the introduction, because he made the following request to his librettist, Antonio Somma, on 26 November 1857:
Excuse me: some bother on my account! It would assist me greatly in the stretta of the introduction to move this stanza to the end of the scene:
Gustavo: Dunque, signori, aspettovi
.......................alle tre
Nell’antro dell’oracolo,
Della gran maga al piè.
Tutti: .........................
........................alle tre
Nell’antro dell’oracolo,
Del1a gran maga al piè.
It would serve my needs if you could find me a parola sdrucciola instead of “al tocco,” and could include “alle tre.”... And then adjust it so that the Tutti can sing the entire stanza.16
In an undated letter, probably sent on 2 December, Somma produced the text we all know:
In the second line is Verdi’s requested sdrucciolo (“in-co-gni-to,” with its accent on the antepenultimate syllable) and his desired “alle tre.”
In the draft of the introduction, although Verdi had entered words everywhere else, he did not put words in this passage, for he clearly was dissatisfied with Somma’s original second line, “Al tocco delle tre” (when the clock strikes three). Instead, the melody he drafted, essentially identical to the final tune, left space for the sdrucciolo that would become “incognito,” a word at the beginning of the second line that mirrors rhythmically the sdrucciolo at the close of the first line (“a-spet-to-vi”). Verdi also left room for the memorable outburst, “alle tre.” In example 11.2, the text Verdi already had in hand is placed in square brackets; the text he requested of Somma is indicated in curly brackets. Ultimately the composer so much wanted to emphasize “alle tre” that he inserted extra measures to allow his singers to hold the high note longer. These changes were made only after he had entered the passages in his skeleton score, during work on Un ballo in maschera.18
Why is this example important? It demonstrates as clearly as possible that the lack of text in Verdi’s sketch here does not mean he conceived this melody without words. He worked directly from Somma’s original stanza and tried to capture its character and brio, but as he composed the music he decided that at a certain point he wanted a rhythmic effect that would have been impossible with Somma’s words. Hence the request for a modification of the original stanza. But Verdi knew exactly what he wanted the revised version to say and how he wanted the revised text to be constructed, and he drafted the melody with that ideal text in mind. Somma supplied him with an appropriate revision, and the story had a happy ending. That was not always the case. Occasionally Verdi cobbled together words of his own in order to create the text/ music fusion he had in mind. But rarely did he conceive his music independently of the text to which it would give life.
EXAMPLE 11.2. GIUSEPPE VERDI, UN BALLO IN MASCHERA, INTRODUZIONE (N. 1), MM. 470–479, THEME OF THE STRETTA AS SKETCHED FOR GUSTAVO III, WITH THE IMPLICIT TEXT AND THE MODIFICATIONS REQUESTED BY VERDI.
SAME MUSIC, DIFFERENT TEXTS
Generations of critics have lambasted the language of Jacopo Ferretti, the Roman librettist responsible for Rossini’s La Cenerentola and for many Donizetti texts, but their barbs are misplaced: Ferretti’s poetry is hilarious (and delectably bawdy).19 Indeed, most of the librettists working in Italy during the nineteenth century were thorough professionals, able men of the theater, who knew how to construct a text for music and had a fair ability to produce acceptable verses. And even when their inexperience showed (as in the case of Piave for Verdi’s Ernani),20 the composers were standing by their side to give them guidance. Much of the criticism directed at these librettists derives from ignorance. How often I have read scathing commentary on the dramaturgy of Rossini’s serious operas from critics who, in their failure to know eighteenth-century neoclassical drama, center their perplexity on the sole artist through whom this drama circulates today, Rossini. In their ignorance of the poetic diction of Italian verse or verse-drama of the first half of the nineteenth century (that of Leopardi, Monti, or Manzoni), they assume that “sacri bronzi” (sacred bronzes) sound only on the operatic stage, in the melodramas of Verdi.21 As Piero Weiss has correctly stated, “Risorgimento librettists spoke the same language as other poets of their time. It was not an ‘irrational’ or ‘surrealist’ language, nor was it ‘utterly worthless.’ It was Romantic, fiery, uneven; above all it was contemporary, and its message was understood.”22 Without knowledge of Romantic drama, the theater of Hugo, Dumas, Schiller, or Guttierez, or the dramatic verse of Byron, it is impossible to judge the accomplishments of the music theater of the period.
But something else is at work. The Wagnerian paradigm has accustomed us to the notion that music and text are uniquely connected and indissolubly linked. That the same music might support different texts seems, from a post-Wagnerian perspective, more than a little suspect. Yet Italian composers during the first sixty years of the nineteenth century did not share such scruples, even if their views changed over that lengthy period. Nowhere is the problem more intensely represented than in the music of Rossini, a composer who patently refused a unitary vision of the relationship between words and music.
He was not alone. The 1854 treatise by the Viennese music critic Eduard Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, set forth a program that assigned to music a role independent of any effort to bind it to words. Hanslick’s famous example was the renowned aria from the Orphée et Euridice of Gluck, “J’ai perdu mon Euridice, / Rien n’égale à mon malheur” (I have lost my Euridice, nothing equals my sadness), whose expressivity had long been celebrated. Yet what would happen, he asked, if we simply changed the words to “J’ai trouvé mon Euridice, / Rien n’égale à mon bonheur” (I have found my Euridice, nothing equals my joy)? Music and words would form a new union, every bit as satisfying as the original.23
Many similar examples can be found in the operas of Rossini, but the best known is probably Elcia’s aria at the conclusion of the second act of Mosè in Egitto, the opera first performed in Naples during the Lenten season of 1818.24 Elcia, a Hebrew, is secretly married to the son of Faraone (the Pharaoh), Osiride. They are torn between their love for one another and their allegiance to their respective peoples. At the end of the second act, Faraone is intent on punishing the Hebrews (putting their leader, Moses, to death) and wedding his son
to an Armenian princess. Elcia appears and in the cantabile of her aria begs Osiride to accept his father’s will. In the tempo di mezzo he arrogantly refuses and, instead, moves to strike down the chained Mosè, when a lightning bolt descends and strikes Osiride dead. In the cabaletta of her aria, Elcia sings of the “tormenti” and “affanni” (torments and agitation) that tear open her heart: “Tutto di Averno, o furie, versate in me il furore” (Furies, pour into me all the fury of Hell). The music flies along, vivace, in E major, its vocal line replete with arpeggios and scales. The rhythmic intensity is regularly interrupted by freer passages, in which Elcia sobs “È spento il caro bene” (My beloved is dead), with the chorus and other soloists joining her laments. The whole cabaletta forms an effective tableau upon which the curtain falls at the end of the second act.
When Rossini revised Mosè in Egitto in 1827 to produce the second of his four French operas, Moïse et Pharaon, he reused this cabaletta theme but assigned it to a different character. Instead of being sung by Elcia (Anaï in Paris), the desperate lover of the son of the Egyptian ruler, Osiride (Aménophis in Paris), it is sung by Aménophis’s mother, Sinaïde. In a cantabile very similar to that of Elcia, she begs her son to accept the hand of the foreign princess. During the rewritten tempo di mezzo, however, Aménophis yields to her pleas, at which point she launches into the cabaletta. While changed in many respects from the original composition in Mosè in Egitto, the principal tune is identical, but its text now reads: “Qu’entends-je, ô douce ivresse! / Il est fidèle à l’honneur” (What do I hear, oh sweet joy! He is faithful to his honor). The music flies along, vivace, in E major, its vocal line replete with arpeggios and scales. Example 11.3 offers the first phrase with the two texts.25 The musical setting seems every bit as appropriate to the changed dramatic situation as it did to the earlier one. The trappings into which the main theme is inserted are, to be sure, very different; hence, Rossini did not attempt to graft an entire piece into a new dramatic situation. Nonetheless, the main melody remains intact and clearly serves both operas well. Hanslick couldn’t have invented a better example.26
Rossini himself explained his attitude toward the relationship between text and music on several occasions.27 In a letter from his last year, 1868, to the Italian critic Filippo Filippi, he wrote, “I will remain forever unmovable in my conviction that Italian musical art (especially in its vocal part) is all ideal and expressive, never imitative, as certain materialist pseudo-philosophers would want it to be.”28 But he had no need of an anti-Wagnerian stance in order to hold such convictions. Particularly revealing is a passage from a conversation with Rossini published for the first time in 1836 by Antonio Zanolini, a Bolognese friend. While it seems unlikely that Rossini himself phrased his ideas in these specific terms, they capture beautifully the nature of his art:
EXAMPLE 11.3. GIOACHINO ROSSINI, MOSÈ IN EGITTO AND MOÏSE, ARIA ELCIA (N. 10), MM. 160–163, AND ARIA SINAÏDEI (N. 10), RESPECTIVELY, PRINCIPAL THEME OF THE CABALETTA.
Musical expression is neither so clear nor so explicit as the meaning of words, is neither so evident nor so alive as painting, with all its artifices and illusions, but it is more pleasing and more poetic than any other poetry. [...] Music produces marvelous effects when coordinated with dramatic art, when the ideal expression of music joins the true expression of poetry and the imitative expression of painting. Then, while words and deeds express the most minute and concrete particularities of the emotions, music proposes for itself a more elevated, ample, and abstract goal; music is, in a manner of speaking, the moral atmosphere that fills the place in which characters of the drama represent the action.29
In this conception of the coordination between words and music, the same music can easily serve to accommodate different “atmospheres” or idealize different contents. Words provide semantic suggestions, rhythmic relationships and stresses to which the composer responds. He is not immune to the particularities of the text; but his music does not “express” the emotions voiced by the poetry.
Thus Rossini felt perfectly justified in reusing music that had been composed for a particular opera in another circumstance. These reworkings rarely involve such vastly different situations as in the cabaletta from Mosè in Egitto and Moïse; in almost every case, the transported music seems fully successful in its new home. Still, one can understand Rossini’s uneasiness in the world of European Romanticism, where the principle of “originality” seemed ever more important, when during the 1850s Ricordi issued the composer’s complete works in reductions for piano and voice, opening the secrets of his compositional practice to any casual glance. While agreeing to assist, on 24 February 1852 he wrote to Giovanni Ricordi: “I will not fail to furnish to Sig. Stefani all that depends on me for the edition about which you spoke to me, an edition that, unfortunately, will bring all my miserable stuff back to light.”30 He returned to the matter many years later, in a letter of 14 December 1864 to Giovanni’s son Tito:
The edition you have undertaken will give rise (and with reason) to much criticism, since one will find in diverse operas the same pieces of music: the time and money given me to compose were so homeopathic [i.e., infinitesimal], that I barely had time to read the so-called poetry I was to set to music: the only thing that touched my heart was supporting my beloved parents and poor relatives.31
Leaving aside the sentimentality of the expression, the issue remains. Rossini’s music was usually written to a text, but it was not indissolubly linked to that text. On the other hand, the sounds, rhythms, and character of the words provided the bases from which the music developed. When Rossini decided to reuse a theme or a piece in a later opera, it was he who gave orders to a poet to adapt new verses and a new dramaturgical situation. Words and music, in short, go together intimately but not uniquely.
In the same manner one understands Rossini’s later obsession with setting again and again the same verses by Metastasio:32
Mi lagnerò tacendo
Della mia sorte amara;
Ma ch’io non t’ami, o cara,
Non lo sperar da me.
Crudele! in che t’offesi,
Farmi penar così?
I will lament in silence
Of my bitter fate;
But that I not love you, dear,
Do not hope that from me.
Cruel one! how have I offended you,
That you give me such pain?
Rossini set these words to music many times, a particularly poignant situation for a composer who at the age of thirty-seven had abandoned a theatrical career that had brought him to the height of European fame. He wrote hundreds of album leaves to this text, all of which can be grouped as one of some twenty-five basic settings, and then employed the Metastasian verses again toward the end of his life as the basis for much more elaborate settings in his late music, the so-called Péchés de vieillesse. The poetry is hardly distinguished. Indeed, a writer who gives voice to silent lamenting is standing on slippery ground. Yet Rossini responded in an impressively varied way to these verses.
In this late music, however, there is a new and fascinating phenomenon. Again and again Rossini wrote “ideal” music to these words, creating with his music many different worlds in which the Metastasian verses could come alive. Then, at a second moment, he gave those ideal worlds a new reality by arranging for original poetry to be underlaid to the music he had already written. To this end he turned most often to a Parisian friend, Émilien Pacini, whose task was to breathe in the “moral atmosphere” created by the music and give it specificity.33 Pacini did so by seeking to capture in his text the character of Rossini’s music: in one case its playfulness and eighteenth-century qualities of wit and grace, in another its barcarole-like demeanor, in another its stark drama, in another its Spanish rhythms and figurations. Thus the music, while not uniquely tied to a text, does have purely musical characteristics that suggest some kinds of verbal analogies rather than others. Example 11.4 shows the first phrase of Rossini’s “Mi lagnerò t
acendo” setting to which Pacini later added a text called “Ariette Pompadour,” in which an eighteenth-century French beauty boasts of her ability to turn every head, as if she were a new Madame de Pompadour.34
EXAMPLE 11.4. GIOACHINO ROSSINI, “MI LAGNERÒ TACENDO” AND ARIETTE POMPADOUR, MM. 37–40, TWO TEXTS SET TO THE SAME MUSIC.
Why did Rossini commission these new texts? His obsessive biographical reasons for returning to the Metastasian verses had by now become an obsessive aesthetic doctrine as well. Yet with the public performance of these compositions in Paris during the late 1850s, at the famous samedi soirs in Rossini’s home, this obsession needed to be disguised, if only to allow the music to be performed without drawing attention to the aesthetic challenge it posed. Thus, Rossini’s aesthetic stance became the basis for an elaborate game of disguises and masks. The composer who retired in silence, aware that his aesthetic roots led backwards into a more classical relationship between music and text, expressed his stance by clothing the same brief text in a myriad of different musical settings, of “moral atmospheres.” Then, as if to mask the mask, he had these compositions provided in turn with a series of texts that seem to “express the most minute and concrete particularities of the emotions.” And when Rossini’s late music became the object of praise by modern critics, unaware of these derivations, for having achieved a close symbiosis of music and text, the irony came full circle.
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