Verdi - Il Trovatore (Karajan)

×

Verdi - Il Trovatore (Karajan)

Close

IL TROVATORE

“Should you go to the Indies or the heart of Africa, you will always hear Il Trovatore.” Thus Verdi to his friend Count Arrivabene in 1862. And indeed a hundred years ago Il Trovatore was without doubt the most popular of all Verdi’s operas. It was parodied in countless burlesques. Theatrical satires such as Lauro Rossi’s Il Maestro e la Cantante quote from it more widely than from any other opera. Our own W. S. Gilbert twice borrowed the motif of “baby-swapping” in the knowledge that the audience would recognise its source; and of course the melodies of “Il balen”, the Miserere, “Stride la vampa” and the Anvil Chorus accounted for the repertoire of many a barrel organ and street piano throughout Europe until beyond the turn of the century.
The perspective of our own day places Il Trovatore as the centrepiece of the so-called romantic trilogy of Verdi’s middle years, flanked by Rigoletto and La Traviata – all three attaining a perfect equilibrium of thought and feeling within the scope of the Italian post-Rossinian tradition. But the balance of popularity has shifted rather towards La Traviata; while the cognoscenti have always favoured Rigoletto. Indeed many German-orientated writers have roundly condemned Il Trovatore as a backsliding from the dramatic truth and originality of the earlier opera. Intellectual disapproval north of the Alps has been met by irrational enthusiasm south of them (the conductor Giannandrea Gavazzeni once defined Il Trovatore as the Italian St. Matthew Passion) and nowadays it is not difficult to claim the opera as an early example of the “theatre of cruelty” or the “theatre of the absurd” and the like. Such comparisons would have seemed very odd to the composer.
The tendency of criticism in the past has been to look for connecting threads throughout an artist’s œuvre, as though seeking out the Platonic form of which all his works are an imperfect reflection. In artists with the range of Mozart, Wagner or Verdi (not to mention Shakespeare) this method can be misleading. It takes for granted that each of their works will be based on a similar dramatic premise; that the man who wrote Rigoletto and La Traviata, about an evil hunchback and a demi-mondaine respectively, is interested above all in the complexities and developments of human character. How could he have his heart in a plot in which three out of the four characters are mere puppets whose interest lies almost entirely in their situations? As well ask how Mozart could have reconciled himself to the artificialities of Così fan tutte after the natural humanism of Figaro. The nineteenth century of course did ask that question and produced the wrong answer – whereby Così fan tutte was relegated to a low place in the Mozart canon. Similar assumptions should not induce us to underrate Il Trovatore.
Yet, ironically, it seems that when Verdi himself first proposed the subject of Antonio Garcia Gutierrez’s sprawling and fantastic drama he really did intend to proceed along the path of Rigoletto. According to one source, he told the librettist Cammarano as early as 1850, even before Rigoletto was finished, that he wished to make Azucena, the gypsy woman, the chief character in Il Trovatore with Leonora as a supporting role. Certainly Hugo’s Triboulet and Gutierrez’s Azucena have much in common. They are both despised and detested, and both nurture a passion for vengeance. Also they are both parents with a deep and redeeming fund of parental love. They could almost be said to form a pair like Hugo’s Triboulet and Lucrèce Borgia, and one might even wonder whether Verdi might have chosen the latter as his subject, if Donizetti had not forestalled him. True, Azucena’s situation is more bizarre than those of her counterparts in Hugo; for the son whom she loves so deeply is not her own; while her thirst for vengeance is more like an intermittent hallucination than a conscious motive force. But it was the fantastic aspect that most appealed to Verdi at the time, since in his experience strange dramatic trouvailles produced new and original forms; and he conveyed as much to Cammarano through their mutual friend De Sanctis. “The more novelty, the freer the forms that he presents me with the happier I shall be.”
But in Cammarano he had mistaken his man. It is true that the poet had had considerable success with unlikely operatic subjects (Luigi Rolla for Federico Ricci, Belisario and L’Assedio di Calais for Donizetti, both lacking in the traditional love-interest) but only at the cost of moulding them into those cabalettas, cavatinas, concertati and strette of which Verdi was becoming impatient. When Cammarano’s scheme for Il Trovatore arrived the composer made no attempt to conceal his disappointment. “I may be mistaken,” he wrote back, “but it seems to me that various situations don’t have their former power and originality, and above all that Azucena hasn’t retained the novelty and strangeness of her character.” Cammarano’s suggestion of a conventional mad scene for her in the last act he found intolerable. He appended a scheme of his own which is very similar to that of the finished opera; but it was clearly a compromise. Il Trovatore with Cammarano was going to be very different from Rigoletto with Piave; and the composer concluded by saying that he was perfectly willing to choose another subject if Cammarano would prefer. However the poet accepted Verdi’s scheme as a basis, and in due course the composer was able to write to him – “Just continue Il Trovatore in the way that you’ve done the introduction and I’ll count myself lucky.”
Work on it proceeded very slowly. Cammarano was a born procrastinator; and there was no urgency in the matter since the projected performance at Bologna in the winter of 1851 had been cancelled due to the failure of composer and management to agree to terms. Verdi himself was distracted by various domestic worries – the death of his mother, the illness of his father, the management of his newly acquired estates, not to mention a stay in Paris to arrange a contract with the Opéra that would result in Les Vêpres Siciliennes. Il Trovatore was still an embryo when in the summer of 1852 Verdi was shocked to read in a theatrical journal that Cammarano had died. De Sanctis arranged for the young poet Leone Emmanuele Bardare to take over where Cammarano had left off. “The last words he wrote,” De Sanctis said, “eight days before he died, were those of the tenor aria,” i.e. “Di quella pira” which brings down the curtain on Act III.
From this it might be concluded that the whole of Act IV is Bardare’s work.
In fact Cammarano had finished the libretto according to Verdi’s original specifications with Azucena as the female lead. All that remained to be written were the extra verses and adjustments (often very considerable ones) that Verdi required of his librettists in the final stages of composition. But since he had begun the opera, his ideas on its working out had changed; and Bardare now had the task of expanding the part of Leonora into a principal, as well as writing a new romanza for the Count in Act II to replace one in Act III and adjusting the conclusion of Act II so as to avoid the stretta which Cammarano had written. The finished result presents a symmetrical alternation of eight contrasted scenes; each built round one or more finite numbers. It would seem that even after death Cammarano exercised a classicising influence on Verdi.
But the symmetry of Il Trovatore has nothing static about it. Rather it derives from the tension of opposing forces held in equilibrium; and this in turn can be traced to the area in which Il Trovatore most notably breaks fresh ground: namely Verdi’s discovery of the potentialities of the mezzo-soprano voice. Except in his two “prentice works”, Oberto, Conte di San Bonifacio and Un Giorno di Regno, he had previously confined it to comprimario roles such as Federica d’Ostheim in Luisa Miller and Maddalena in Rigoletto. In Il Trovatore the mezzo-soprano first appears as the female equivalent of the baritone, standing in the same relation to the full soprano as the baritone to the tenor. How this discovery came about can only be guessed. Some writers link it with Viardot-Garcia’s performance of Fidès in Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète which Verdi could hardly have missed since he was in Paris at the time of its first performance in 1849. But Fidès is a “madre nobile” throughout; Azucena is a more violent, complex character. It is significant that Verdi’s first choice for the appropriate singer was one Rita Gabussi-De Bassini who described herself as a soprano, though the roles that she created suggest a lower range. Chief among these was Giovanna la Pazza in Federico Ricci’s opera La Prigione d’Edimburgo, the wild, halfcrazed creature who steals the heroine’s baby and lulls it to sleep with a crooning melody curiously foreshadowing “Stride la vampa”. In general until the mid-century, with the exception of those who specialised in breeches-roles, mezzo-sopranos and sopranos encroached on each other’s territory to such an extent as to make the two categories hard to distinguish in respect of dramatic character. In Il Trovatore all that is changed. In no other opera are the two voice-types more contrasted. Indeed the polarity between Azucena and Leonora is so fundamental as to form one of the structural principles of the opera. Leonora is the epitome of everything lyrical: an aristocrat who expresses herself in long flowing melodic lines which extend themselves endlessly in Bellini’s manner. Azucana is a woman of the people, speaking a demotic language, mostly in 3/8 or 6/8, full of short-breathed rhythmic patterns. Lyrical by fits and starts, she is otherwise the essence of everything dramatic. When Leonora tells a story as in “Tacea la notte” we are not in the least interested in the events she describes, only in the ebb and flow of her lyrical feeling. When Azucena begins her narration “Condott’ell’era in ceppi” we follow every detail with breathless attention. Apart from her opening “Stride la vampa” which is not strictly speaking an aria at all, but rather an inserted song like “La donn’è mobile”, Azucena’s solos are open in form; Leonora’s for all their spaciousness are closed. Each singer tends to move within her own tonal area: Leonora round A flat major, D flat major and related keys. Azucena round E minor, G major, A minor and С major. Each dominates alternate scenes of the opera. Act I Scene I belongs to Azucena, even though she does not appear in it: for Ferrando’s narration is couched mostly in her language and her tonality: and by the end of the scene her invisible presence has become so palpable that it is no wonder that the Count’s retainers flee in terror. Leonora sets the tone for Scene II in both first and second acts. Not until the second scene of Act III does the balance shift. Manrico begins his aria “Ah sì ben mio” in the zone of Leonora, whom he is about to marry. But the news of his mother’s peril transports him into Azucena’s world. Hence the short jagged rhythms, the С major tonality of “Di quella pira”. In Act IV Scene I Leonora is in the ascendant throughout; while Scene II reverses the change in the previous act. This time Azucena gives place to Leonora, with the two worlds reconciled in the course of the terzetto, even though the woman have no communication with one another since one of them is asleep.
The musical languages of Azucena and Leonora both belong to the post-Rossinian tradition of Italian opera; but here their separation concentrates the essence of each to an extraordinary degree. The melodies of Leonora, the Count (who, as an aristocrat, belongs to her world) and Manrico as Leo-nora’s lover have a wider trajectory than many singers find comfortable; while the repeated rhythmic figures of Azucena, Ferrando and Manrico as Azucena’s son have a driving insistence which infects the whole opera and makes it unique in the repertoire. Characters express themselves with a repetitive vehemence that is almost worthy of Janäcek. Over and over again the music seems to acquire greater impetus by being hemmed in by the conventional bounds of Cammarano’s balanced verses, just as the pressure of water mounts behind a dam. Summing up the character of Il Trovatore, Bernard Shaw wrote in 1915 “It has tragic power, poignant melancholy, impetuous vigour and a sweet and intense pathos that never loses its dignity. It is swift in action and perfectly homogeneous in thought and feeling. It is absolutely void of intellectual interest; its appeal is to the instincts and to the senses all through.
If it allowed you to think for a moment it would crumble into absurdity like the gardens of Klingsor.” There speaks the Wagnerian. Parsifal is almost all reflection; there is no other opera in which the characters themselves reflect so little as in Il Trovatore, and partly for that reason it remains unsurpassed as music theatre.
Despite Caruso’s famous dictum that for II Trovatore all you need are the four greatest singers in the world, the cast that first led the opera to victory at the Teatro Apollo, Rome, was not especially outstanding. Emilia Goggi who created Azucena was no more than a reliable old-stager; Giovanni Guicciardi (Luna) was at the beginning of a short career which seems not to have outlasted the decade. Far more distinguished was Rosina Penco, a handsome, Spa-nish-looking beauty and a fine artist whose services Verdi tried (without success) to secure again. Carlo Baucardè had already made a name for himself in the Italian premieres of Donizetti’s Poliuto and La Favorita and he had been Halévy’s choice for Fernando in his Shakespearean La Tempesta in London in 1850. He did not, however, sing the famous high С in “Di quella pira”, which in any case Verdi never intended. This was first imported by the tenor Enrico Tamberlick, creator of Alvaro in La Forza del Destino. A verbal tradition handed down amongst tenors has it that before venturing this effect in Milan he approached Verdi to obtain his permission; he had tried it out several times in the provinces, he told the composer, and the public had always clamoured for it thereafter. “Far be it for me to deny the public what it wants,” Verdi had answered dryly, “just so long as it’s a good top C…”

© Julian Budden, 1978