Verdi for Actors!

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

Il Trovatore

January 31 through February 9, 2014
Elk's Ballroom, Alameda
http://viragotrovatore.brownpapertickets.com/

Prepared by Dennis Chowenhill, Ed.D.

Virago Resident Dramaturg

Verdi as Dramatist

            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. 

Some Musical Preferences

            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.

Censorship

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’s work conditions

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.