BYRON, "Corsair", VERDI, "Corsaro"

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"“Conrad’s Divided Self:” Verdi’s Vision of the Byronic Hero in Il Corsaro. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the long-standing archetypes of heroism were reshaped in the European consciousness by the events of the French... more

"“Conrad’s Divided Self:”

 

Verdi’s Vision of the Byronic Hero in rhe opera "Il Corsaro"

 

By courtesy of Jamie Meyers-Riczu.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the long-standing archetypes of heroism were reshaped in the European consciousness by

 

(a) the events of the French Revolution

(b) the exploits of Napoleon and

(c) the aesthetics of the Romantic Movement.

 

During this period, perhaps no “heroic” figure enjoyed greater popularity on the European continent than English poet and aristocrat George Gordon, Lord Byron.

 

Byron’s international persona—characterized by his deep personal melancholy and libertarian ideals—embodied a type of heroism that brought him wide-spread fame and made him a figure to be emulated by artists and revolutionaries of all types.

 

This new figure, commonly referred to as the Byronic hero, incorporates the tropes of the established Romantic hero types along with Byron’s own subjective musings and experiences.

 

The semi-autobiographical treatment of Byron’s poet protagonists created a sensation all over Europe.

 

Particularly in ITALIA, Byron and his poetry found a following among the Italian NATIONALISTS who desired freedom from the yoke of Austrian rule.

 

"IL CORSARO" (1814), a romance -- in three canti -- of a pirate chief’s battle against an unjust ruler, resonated especially among those oppressed by foreign dominion.

Verdi was certainly not a stranger to the issues surrounding Italian nationalism.

 

Scholarship on Verdi often analyzes his operas from the “Years in the Galleys” as allegorical references to Italian oppression.

 

Byron’s popularity in Italy makes it tempting to analyze Verdi’s Byron-inspired opera Il Corsaro (1848), written with librettist Francesco Maria Piave, as a synthesis of both Byron’s and Verdi’s overtly political stance.

 

However, the political note in Il Corsaro is the most subdued of all Verdi’s early operas.

 

The opera’s opening scenes present Corrado as a figure of the Noble Outlaw.

 

Understood within the tropes of this Romantic hero type, the audience might rightfully expect Corrado to act aggressively in liberating the oppressed from foreign rule.

 

By the opera’s second act, Corrado becomes too stagnant a figure to act out any revolutionary fervour.

 

Corrado’s persona therefore becomes a riddle.

 

He is simultaneously active and passive, a paradoxical mix of two contradictory hero types, the Noble Outlaw and the meditative observer suffering from Weltschmerz.

Although out of place as a political allegory, Verdi’s Il Corsaro remains faithful to the complex ambiguities of the protagonist in Byron’s poem.

 

Unable to develop the protagonist through the anti-dramatic narrative passages that the original poem relies on, Verdi and Piave use conventional opera seria scene and aria structure but alter the focus to emphasize character rather than plot in order to portray the full range of this Byronic hero within a dramatic form.

 

Through the interactions between Corrado, the melancholic and passive

 

Medora

 

and the aggressive and active

 

Gulnara,

 

 the subtle details of “Conrad’s divided self” are mirrored by the opera’s heroines and writ large across the stage.

 

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By analyzing in detail Piave’s libretto and Verdi’s musical representations of character and action, we may argue that Verdi, as a keen and sensitive dramatist, presents the Byronic hero in the amalgam of actions and psychological tensions experienced by Corrado, Gulnara and Medora.

 

This composite figure of the Byronic hero in Il Corsaro is traced through musical references in the Prelude as well as in key scenes in the opera.

 

Particularly, in Corrado’s duet with Medora in the first act, Verdi juxtaposes active and passive characteristics of the Byronic hero only to invert this contrast later in the climatic duet with Gulnara in the third act.

 

In the first duet, passive Medora pleads with Corrado to abandon his determination to act, while, in the second duet, active Gulnara pleads with Corrado to act as he languishes in passivity.

 

Thus, Verdi ingeniously employs the operatic trope of the love triangle—along with scene and musical structure—to present a subtle yet complex portrayal of the Byronic hero within the framework of typical early nineteenth-century opera seria."