Gypsy Woman

Gypsy Woman

Despite Verdi’s interest in adopting plots that could reflect tensions of his time, his preference was to select fictional rather than nonfictional stories.  Like a lot of writers, Verdi saw the potential for greater truth in the shaping of original characters.   Verdi wrote to a friend:

To copy the truth may be a good thing but to invent the truth is better, much better. . . . It may be that he, Papa (Verdi’s reference to Shakespeare),might have found himself with some Falstaff but he would have difficulty finding any scoundrel as scoundrelly as Iago . . . to copy the truth is a fine thing, but it is photography, not painting.

And Verdi’s preference among fictional stories was to find those that offered the most mystery, the exotic, the most emotionally intense.  Verdi instructed his librettist for Il Trovatore, “the more unusual and bizarre the better.” 

Yet Verdi’s penchant for the fictional and unusual was always shaped by his interest in characters who remain for us essentially human.  This is one of the distinctions between Verdi and Wagner, who composed during the same era as Verdi.  Wagner preferred characters that were larger than life, mythical, so that they appeared more as symbols and archetypes than as merely human characters.  Verdi, by contrast, brought out as much as possible the human features of his characters so that we could see ourselves in them.  Manrico and Leonora are driven by forces with which we are immediately familiar—tyrannical abuses of power, jealousy, insecurity, frustration, and the singular passion of love.  Even when disapproving of the actions of Il Conte, we recognize him and know his motivations and excesses are partly our own, if only on a different scale.

When Verdi discovered Garcia Gutiérrez’s El trovador, the source of Il Trovatore, he was drawn immediately to Azucena, the gypsy woman, who apparently had the right combination of the exotic and the familiar, armed with mysterious powers but driven by distinctly human passions.  After a diva complained to Verdi about her role as Azucena, Verdi responded, “it is a leading role—even the very most important role, more beautiful, more dramatic, more original than the other one” [of Leonora].   At the death of the librettist who had written most of Il Trovatore, Verdi guided the replacement librettist to revise the opera in order to make it more of a two-woman opera, expanding the role of Azucena.  An indication of Verdi’s perception of the importance of this role is his first choice for a title for the opera: La Zingara (the Gypsy Woman). 

-Dennis Chowenhill, Virago Resident Dramaturg
www.viragotheatre.org
Il Trovatore 1/31-2/9
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