Virago dramaturg Dennis Chowenhill, Ed.D. always creates a comprehensive and fascinating Actor Packet for the first rehearsal of each production.
Here's a sneak preview of his packet for the cast of our upcoming opera,
Il Trovatore. Trovatore performs January 31, Feb 2, 7, and 9 at the elegant Elk's Ballroom, Alameda. http://viragotrovatore.brownpapertickets.com/
Actors’ Packet
Virago Theatre Company
 |
Elizabeth Baker as Azucena, Alex Boyer as Manrico,
Eileen Meredith as Leonora & Jo Vincent Parks as Count di Luna |
January 31 through
February 9, 2014
Elk's Ballroom, Alameda
http://viragotrovatore.brownpapertickets.com/
Prepared by Dennis
Chowenhill, Ed.D.
Virago Resident Dramaturg
An
important feature of Verdi’s approach to drama was his clear preference for
working from fictional characters rather than from historical ones. His model for this preference was
Shakespeare. Verdi wrote to a
friend:
To copy the truth may be a good thing but to
invent the truth is better, much better.
There seems to be a contradiction in these three words, invent the truth, but just ask Papa [Verdi’s
reference to Shakespeare]. It may
be that he, Papa, might have found himself with some Falstaff but he would have
difficulty finding any scoundrel as scoundrelly as Iago . . . and yet they are
true. . . . to copy the truth is a fine thing, but it is photography, not
painting.
Among
fictional stories, Verdi’s preference was for those that offered mystery,
adventure, excitement. He also
preferred intimate love scenes, high treason, the exotic, and opportunities to
dramatize the tragic consequences of tyranny. In a letter to the
librettist Salvadore Cammarano regarding the libretto for Il Trovatore, Verdi specified, “the more unusual and bizarre the
better.” But for all this, Verdi’s
preference was to begin with characters at a human level. This is one of the differences commonly
noted between the characters of the operas of Verdi and Wagner (born the same
year as Verdi). In Wagner the
characters are larger than life, mythic, symbolic of universal forces: Tristan and Isolde, for instance, impress
us as archetypes dressed as human characters. Wagner animated weltanschauung
and dialectic. Verdi, by contrast,
animated Othello and Desdemona as flawed individuals driven by their human
passion for each other. His
Manrico and Leonora struggle not so much against archetypal forces as against
familiar tyrannies and jealousy.
One
of Verdi’s chief interests in Garcia Gutiérrez’s El trovador, the source of Il
Trovatore, was the character of the gypsy woman, Azucena, which he felt had
great dramatic potential as an enhanced character driven by distinctly human
passions. Once commenting to a
friend about this role, Verdi observed, “it is a leading role—even the very
most important role, more beautiful, more dramatic, more original than the
other one [that of Leonora].” An
indication of this is Verdi’s original intention of calling the opera La Zingara (The Gypsy). Later,Verdi seized on an opportunity to
expand also the role of Leonora. After
Cammarano had died, before completing his libretto for Il Trovatore, and Verdi had commissioned Leone Emanuele Bardare to
complete it, Verdi revised the opera to make it more of a two-woman opera, which
was also closer to his original intent.
As
a composer, Verdi wrote primarily for the voice. His instrumentation, which developed during his fifty-four
years of composing operas, was supportive of the voices, and occasionally
imitative of them. One of his
career-long goals was to get his melodies and the expression of the singers to
accommodate as closely as possible the narrative and character tensions of the
story, which motivated him to move away from the strictly bel canto style of classic opera
seria. While composing Macbeth, six years before Il Trovatore, instead of following his
usual practice of beginning with melodies, Verdi started with the scenes
themselves, from which he generated the melodies. For his composition of Il
Trovatore, he shifted his focus back to the creation of melodies, but he
remained influenced by his experiment with Macbeth,
and the new approach became dramatically evident in his last two plays, Otello and Falstaff. Verdi’s advice to Cammarano regarding
the libretto Verdi had in mind for Il
Trovatore indicates his interest in adapting the music to the story:
If in operas there were no more cavatinas, no
more duets, no more trios, no more choruses, no more finales, and if the whole
opera were one single piece, I would find that more reasonable and right. For this reason, I tell you that it
would be a good thing if, in the beginning of this opera, the chorus could be
left out (every opera begins with a chorus); if Leonora’s cavatina could be
left out; and we begin right off with the Troubadour’s song, and make one
single act out of the first two acts [of Gutiérrez’s El trovador]; for these isolated pieces and the changes of scene .
. . make me feel that they are numbers from a concert rather than an
opera. If you can do it, do it.
As it
happens, Cammarano wrote a very traditional libretto, with the classic chorus
at the beginning, despite Verdi’s wishes.
The era of the
Risorgimento in Italy began a couple of years after Verdi’s birth, and the
struggles of that era affected all aspects of his life. Italy, under the control of the Papal
States, and the separate empires of Austria and France, struggled for five
decades through successive victories and defeats toward its eventual
unification as a nation at the end of Verdi’s life. One of the ways that this affected Verdi’s artistic life was
that his work was subjected to censorship, particularly of the Church, which
was actively invested in controlling not only individual publications and
performances, but the extent to which grand secular artistic expressions (like
opera and theater) should be encouraged in the first place. Verdi’s response to censorship was
defiance, and his favorite mode of defiance was the adoption of stories that
told of rebellion against tyranny.
The best known example of this is the chorus of the Hebrew slaves in Act
3 of his opera Nabucco (eleven years
before Il Trovatore), “Va, pensiero,
sull ali dorate.” From the
outset—the 1842 premiere performance of the opera at La Scala—the Italian
audience seized on the opportunity to identify with the Hebrews daring to dream
of liberation from the tyranny of Nebuchadnezzar. “Va pensiero” became the anthem of the Risorgimento, often
sung spontaneously by participants at political rallies. The censors in Italy somehow did not impede performances of
this opera, though when it was performed in London the title had to be changed
to Nino, as it was regarded as
improper to depict Biblical characters in theater. A few years
later, Verdi’s first draft of Rigoletto,
based on Victor Hugo’s play Le Roi
s’amuse, was stopped by the Austrian censors, one of whom regarded it as
“repugnant” for its “immorality and obscene triviality.” The real objection? That the story represented a monarch as immoral and
lascivious.
In
1848 when the popular rebellion in Milan known as the “Cinque Giornate” (Five Days
of Milan) was staged, Verdi moved back to Milan from Paris to be present. When the rebellion failed, he returned
to Paris and wrote his opera, La
Battaglia di Legnano, telling the story of the Italian Lombard League in
1176 defeating the Holy Roman Empire.
The
subtexts continued. In Il Trovatore we witness the tyrannous behavior
of the Conte di Luna, Prince of Aragon, who plans an abduction of Leonora and
eventually executes Manrico, primarily because Leonora loved him. This exposé of tyrannical behavior
escaped the attention of the censors, but they prohibited Verdi from allowing a
depiction of Leonora being carried out of the convent by Manrico. The violation of a convent, especially
by a man carrying off a woman who had sought refuge, was unacceptable. Verdi’s accommodation was to have
Leonora first faint (preventing the impression that she willed to be released from
the convent), and have Manrico carry her off in the company of others.
When
Il Trovatore was produced in Naples,
censors were summoned to stop the performance, which they did after Act 2. In this case, the loud reaction of the audience eventually
resulted in a continuation of the performance, beginning at Act 3, where it had
left off.
It
is worth noting that Verdi’s work to support the independence of Italy did not
go unrecognized when the unification was complete. In 1861, when the first Parliament of Italy was formed,
Verdi was elected a member. Twenty-three years later, when the
Kingdom of Italy was established, Verdi was named a Senator.
Verdi
finished composing Il Trovatore in
1853, during the era of his career that is often regarded as his middle period. He was just coming out of the era of
his career that he himself dubbed “the years of the galley slave,” a nine-year
period during which he produced fourteen operas. Both Nabucco, his first
successful opera, which helped to launch his career, and Rigletto come from this earlier period.
There
were practical reasons for Verdi’s intense rate of production before his operas
started making him wealthy. Copyright
regulations began during Verdi’s career, but when he began there were none to
protect composers. Also, after the first year of the
release of a new opera, a composer had no royalty guarantees. The royalties after that were dependent
primarily on the personal relationship that a composer or his agent (if he had
one) had with the theater owners. Thus,
composers survived by producing a lot, and at a steady pace. The demands of these conditions have
been cited as the causes of the breakdown of other composers of this era. They may have contributed, for example,
to Donizetti’s mental breakdown that resulted in his being institutionalized,
and also to the early retirement of Rossini, who after completing thirty-nine
operas within twenty-one years retired altogether from composing operas, though
he lived for another thirty-nine years.
The
main factor that changed these conditions was the development of new printing
techniques. With the possibility
of having several copies of a work in distribution, the publishing houses took
an active interest in establishing copyright privileges, which resulted not
only in the control of how scripts were used but in composers receiving
royalties more regularly. Even
with the early copyright regulations, however, Verdi was not protected to his
satisfaction, and on two occasions he traveled personally to London to prevent
pirated productions of Il Trovatore. Watchful of such problems, Verdi was early to connect himself
to a publishing house, and he managed to select one of the most powerful, Riccordi
Publishing (who later also handled the works of Puccini). Giulio Riccordi, grandson to the founder of the company, had
a personal relationship with Verdi and eventually influenced him to complete
the operas of the last period of his career.
In
the first half of Verdi’s career the demands on a composer were also
impressively broad. The composer was expected to produce his
own works, by arrangement with the theater owners, a process that usually began
with the theater contacting the composer to express its interest. The composer then was expected to work
at the theater as the stage supervisor, as well as the set and costume
manager. This of course gave the
composer much control over how the work would appear, though it also caused the
conductor always to be dividing his time up among several overlapping
responsibilities, all of which could be even more burdensome if the composer
was still revising his music during rehearsals. Finally, the composer was expected to conduct at least the
first three performances of the production. These work demands were the standard until Verdi reached his
latest period, at which time other conductors were commissioned to handle productions.
The
intensity of Verdi’s productivity during this era of his career is well
illustrated by the conditions under which he composed Il Trovatore. Within four months of his producing his
opera Stiffelio, Verdi completed Rigoletto, then turned his attention to Garcia
Gutiérrez’s El trovador, the Spanish
story he had had in mind for more than a year. During the same time, in 1851, while he was living in Paris
with Giuseppina Strepponi, he saw a performance of The Lady of the Camellias, the story from a novel of Alexandre
Dumas (fils) that Dumas had adapted for the stage. Inspired by the play, Verdi began immediately writing music
for it, which became his first efforts with La
Traviata. Cammarano, the
librettist commissioned for the Gutiérrez play, had been stalling, trying
Verdi’s patience for at least two years.
Once Cammarano had sent Verdi enough of a libretto (though still
unfinished) Verdi began working on Il
Trovatore.
Typically
for Verdi at this time of his career, he did a good deal of his writing during
rehearsals, responding to how his work was being animated in performance and to
the particular strengths of his performers in rehearsals. The rehearsals for Il Trovatore were being held at the Teatro Apollo in Rome, where it
was scheduled to open. During the
day Verdi thus worked on Il Trovatore. At night in his hotel room in
Rome he concentrated on the composition of La
Traviata.
Verdi’s
work on Il Trovatore had also been
complicated by the death of Cammarano, which had left Verdi temporarily with an
incomplete libretto. Both Il Trovatore and La Traviata were completed in the early months of the year, Il Trovatore opening in Rome in March,
and La Traviata opening at the Teatro
La Fenice in Venice in April. (The
same year in Zurich, the exiled Wagner was working on his libretto for the Ring.)
To
the intensity of Verdi’s work conditions must be added the intensity of the
artist himself. He was well-known
for his high standards, and for the harsh criticism he had for theaters that
produced his work unsuccessfully.
During rehearsals he was as demanding of his performers as he was of
himself as a composer. Famously,
when Verdi was rehearsing Macbeth, he
required the performers of the Act 1 duet “Fatal mia donna” to run through it
150 times.
