Today is Halowe’en in the United States. Now a capitalist jamboree, Halowe’en probably has its roots in the Celtic festival of Samhain, a time when the natural and supernatural worlds were believed to be in especially close communication.

Verdi is not an artist one immediately associates with the occult. (Remember the demons in Giovanna d’Arco? Not his finest hour!) Then again, one underestimates Verdi at one’s own great peril. Falstaff, that miracle of his old age, reminds us that magick in its many forms was well within Verdi’s means.

Here, then, the opening of Act III, Scene 2 of Falstaff, set at midnight under Herne’s Oak in Windsor Forest. Plot synopsis here; the artists in this 1982 Salzburg Festival performance include the great Giuseppe Taddei as Falstaff, Francisco Araiza as Fenton, and Janet Perry as Nanetta. Herbert von Karajan conducts.

Like Shakespeare’s Macbeth in the British theatre, La forza del destino is known in Italy as the unlucky opera. Verdi experienced its “evil eye” when the prima donna fell ill and the whole production had to be put off from January to November 1862. For him and Strepponi this meant two winter journeys to Russia; on their first return trip they nearly froze (and their stock of wine did) in an unheated railway carriage on the 120-mile stretch through Lithuania… In 1869… he ended the tragedy on a note of austere Christian resignation, and launched it again in Milan, incidentally making peace with La Scala now that Merelli was no longer in charge.
—John Rosselli, The Life of Verdi

Rosa Ponselle, Ezio Pinza, and Giovanni Martinelli set down the “austere” final trio from the 1869 Forza in 1928, and it remains one of the great performances of this music.

(Correct me if I’m wrong: in addition to Padre Guardiano, Pinza also sings the few lines of Don Carlo, Leonora’s brother, at the beginning of the scene, no?)

Italian critics see the revised ending of Forza as “Manzonian,” advocating forbearance and faith in God’s wisdom and mercy, key themes in Manzoni’s novel I promessi sposi (“The Betrothed”). I just learned that Edgar Allen Poe reviewed I promessi sposi in 1835!

This is what the agnostic and anticlerical Verdi wrote about I promessi sposi in 1867 to his friend Countess Maffei: “It is not only a book, but a consolation for humanity. I was sixteen years old when I read it the first time…” He goes on to say that his enthusiasm for many other books, even those of the greatest renown, did not survive re-reading.“But for that book, my enthusiasm is unchanged—indeed, the better I have come to know humanity, the greater [my enthusiasm] has become. And the reason why is that that book is true; as true as the Truth. Oh, if only artists could understand once and for all this true, there would no longer be artists of the future and the past; nor purist, realist, idealist painters; nor classic and Romantic poets; but true poets, true painters, true musicians.”

There are many stunning recordings by Rosa Ponselle at her foundation’s website. A good weekend to all!

Il corsaro, with a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave based on Lord Byron’s poem The Corsair, received its world premiere on 25 October 1848.

Verdi wrote the opera for the publisher Francesco Lucca (a former Ricordi associate), who insisted that Verdi compose it at a time that didn’t suit him. Verdi did not even visit Trieste for the prima, though the cast included the tenor Gaetano Fraschini, one of his favorite singers, as Corrado and Marianna Barbieri-Nini (who had created the rôle of Lady Macbeth) as Gulnara. Verdi broke with Lucca as soon as he had fulfilled his contractual obligation with this work.

Francis Toye deemed Il corsaro the worst opera that Verdi wrote. Even in Italy, it went unperformed for nearly a century (1864–1963). On the other hand, as an NPR commentator wrote, “When it comes to opera, Verdi on his worst day was more than a match for just about everyone else in the business.” As for me, I heard this opera performed by Opera Orchestra of New York with a strong cast and found it only fitfully interesting.

Today’s selection is Medora’s cavatina “Non so le tetre immagini,” which she sings as she accompanies herself on the harp. Beverly Sills, who was never renowned as a Verdian, made a surpassingly beautiful recording of this aria in 1970. Maria Callas recorded in in 1969 (the clip is from a rehearsal under Nicola Rescigno), and Montserrat Caballé also set down a very fine performance.

Correggio, “The mystical marriage of Saint Catherine of Alexandria with Christ,” c. 1526.

Michele Lessona’s Volere è potere (“Where there’s a will, there’s a way”) was an early self-help book in Italy. The volume I have consulted is an anastatic reprint of the second edition, from 1869.

The pages of the book feature proverbs printed along each of their four margins. The first page of Chapter 9, devoted to Verdi, includes these admonitions: He who thinks too much does nothing; No one looks at the spots on a snake’s skin; A liar needs a good memory; and Better an egg today than a chicken tomorrow. (As far as I can tell, the proverbs have nothing to do with the chapter contents. I simply offer these as a representative sample.)

The chapter on Verdi is full of inaccuracies: for example, that Verdi’s first wife and two young children died between April 1 and June 22 of 1840. In fact, the baby girl died in 1838, the baby boy in 1839, and Margherita Barezzi on 18 June 1840.

What follows, then, is to be taken cum grano salis, though it is hard to imagine why Lessona or Verdi would lie about these matters.

Rainy days for him are those of long readings, of which he partakes with youthful ardor. He frequently rereads passages from the Bible, and after Dante he delights in Ariosto: he has an insatiable admiration for Ariosto’s descriptions and, above all, his storms and battles. He does not deem it necessary to dislike Tasso simply because he is a great admirer of Ariosto. He is intimately acquainted with our good writers and the best of foreign writers. He is a connoisseur of painting: he loves Guido Reni, and the Bolognese School, but most of all Correggio, in whom he discerns something of Raphael’s grace and Michelangiolo’s strength.

This view [of a “creative ascent” in Verdi’s works], colored as it was by the idea of progress—that of talent marching toward its perfection—had the disadvantage of grading the operas, setting the earlier ones lower than the last, as though Otello were superior to Rigoletto, which in turn was preferable to Nabucco. Insofar as the last operas seemed to approach the concept of unified, or through-composed, music drama and the idea of progress had for decades been embodied in the conviction that German-style music drama was opera’s highest achievement, Verdi’s evolution tended to be equated with a struggle between conventional, Italian-style opera and music drama…

Today, when a plurality of aesthetic forms in opera is taken as an established fact, the problem is not to note the “improvements” the composer made to a conception that has its own inner logic but to understand this logic and see why at a certain juncture it ceased to serve his dramatic thought.
—Gilles de Van, Verdi’s Theater: Creating Drama Through Music

Today’s musical selection is the final scene from Ernani (1844), recorded in 1983 at La Scala and starring Plácido Domingo in the title rôle, Mirella Freni as Elvira, and Nicolai Ghiaurov as Silva. Riccardo Muti conducts, and the production is by Luca Ronconi.

(Dear friends, I do know that blog entries have been heavy on Muti of late, and I promise to offer more variety going forward!)

No, Verdi’s erotic opera, his Tristan und Isolde, will be Un ballo in maschera. La traviata is still a battle. Compassion for Violetta certainly tugs at the heartstrings of the man Verdi, but Violetta is nonetheless a sister to Ernani, to Carlo Moor, to the Corsair, to those outlaws on whose behalf Verdi has heretofore waged battle. In fact, Violetta dies with extraordinary solemnity for a fragile, ethereal creature: the slow, tragic chords that sound, andante sostenuto, are, to be sure, marked with an extreme pianissimo (pppp) that befits the character’s fragility, but they carry within themselves an intrinsic austerity, restrained and threatening: trumpets play a major role in the orchestration, as if one of Beethoven’s heroes were dying, or a Siegfried. Violetta dies a hero and a martyr.
—Massimo Mila, La giovinezza di Verdi

In this clip from the 1991 La Scala production of La traviata by Liliana Cavani, Tiziana Fabbricini is Violetta, Roberto Alagna is Alfredo, and Paolo Coni is Giorgio Germont. Riccardo Muti conducts.

In an 1879 letter to his friend Clarina Maffei, Verdi expressed his distaste for réclames (marketing and puffery) and wrote that he wasn’t one for idle compliments. He also mocked the self-importance and pretensions of various musical capitals:

La Scala is the greatest theatre in the world.

In Naples: The San Carlo is the greatest theatre in the world.

In the past, they said in Venice: La Fenice is the greatest theatre in the world.

In Saint Petersburg: The greatest theatre in the world.

In Vienna: The greatest theatre in the world (and this I would endorse)

In Paris, then, the Opéra is the greatest theatre of two or three worlds!

In the 1870s, Verdi took the Manzoni Requiem on tour to various European capitals, and he raved about the Vienna Philharmonic. His admiration for the orchestra is documented by that rather surprising parenthetical admission in his letter to Maffei and in other correspondence.

The Aida clip at the start of this post is a promotional video. Still, it is interesting because Maestro Nikolaus Harnoncourt knows of what he speaks and rightly comments on Verdi’s admiration for the Wiener Philharmoniker.

(The clip is sad, too, because two of the artists shown—Vincenzo La Scola and László Polgár—left us recently and much too soon.)

The following clip, instead, features the Ballo prelude played by the orchestra of the Wiener Staatsoper under Claudio Abbado. Sadly, most of the excerpts from the remarkable 1990 Salzburg Ballo, including one that I posted here, have been removed from YouTube. I find that the Viennese players have the ideal tone for this music: warm, elegant, humane.

A good weekend to all!

The Swedish baritone Ingvar Wixell died on 8 October at the age of 80.

He was much admired for his Verdi rôles, including Rigoletto (which he filmed with Ponnelle and Pavarotti), Amonasro, Simone Boccanegra, Falstaff, Renato, and the Conte di Luna.

Oddly, according to Wikipedia, Wixell

performed all the songs in the competition to select Sweden’s Eurovision Song Contest 1965 entry. The winning song was “Annorstädes Vals” (Elsewhere Waltz), which Wixell went on to perform at the international final in Naples.

This clip of Don Carlo’s Act III scena from La forza del destino is from Paris in 1981. The video quality is rather poor, but Wixell’s cultivated, soft-grained voice is heard to good advantage.

The Gramophon website offers an obituary with a clip from the Eurovision contest.

You know all about Verdi and Mozart, right? How Verdi claimed to have an indigestione of Don Giovanni, thanks to his teacher Lavigna’s zealous love for the score? How Verdi knew Teresa Saporiti, the first Donna Anna, who lived to the great age (bless her!) of 105 or 106? How Verdi reportedly met Karl (a.k.a. Carlo) Mozart and played through Don Giovanni for him? And how Don Giovanni is all over Rigoletto, Ballo, Forza, and Falstaff?

Well, if you don’t know these things, I plan to tell you about them in the not-too-distant future.

For now, I just wanted to let you know that I reviewed Don Giovanni, that honorary appendage to the Verdi canon, for The Classical Review.

Ramón Vargas, the Metropolitan Opera’s Don Ottavio, gave a truly stunning performance of “Dalla sua pace.” It was slow and soft and rapturous, much like Anselmi in the second verse of “Quando le sere al placido.” And it was thrilling, because it was the merest wisp of breath away from disaster.

I think that Mr. Vargas could well come to grief some other time (though I certainly hope he does not), because that possibility cannot be excluded when you walk the tightrope without a safety net.

The performance won a long and loud ovation, though it did not please everyone. The response of a very knowledgeable friend of mine was, “What’s with all the unsupported singing?” I did not hear it that way. For me, it was some of the most courageous, beautiful, and heartfelt singing that I have heard in more than thirty years of opera going, all the more remarkable because no one ever expects Don Ottavio to steal the show in Don Giovanni.

Why don’t more people sing like that? Easy: withering of pallonarum. It’s a widespread infirmity, certainly not limited to operatic tenors: ask yourself why we have no Machiavelli, Napoléon, or Franklin Delano Roosevelt today. The answer: atrophy of pallonarum.

Bon week-end à tous !