VERDIANA: Arpa d'or --- UNACCOMPANIED, UNISON -- inno corale --

Speranza


Everyone in this “Osteria,” in the Spanish village of Hornachuelos, repeats the refrain,
“War is lovely, long live war.” Their words
are not idle: we will meet these characters
again in the third act, engaged in a fierce
battle in Italy.

Francesco Maria Piave’s libretto for Verdi, of
course, is not proclaiming the beauty of all
wars.

Preziosilla is inviting the visitors at the
Osteria to participate in a particular kind of
war against the Germans, “eternal enemies of
Italy and its children,” to which the chorus
responds: “Morte ai Tedeschi” [“Death to
the Germans”].

These phrases were frequently
modified in the nineteenth century, with
“Tedeschi” [“Germans”] changed to “straniero”
[“foreigner”] in order to soften, as it were, the message–
but the message was nonetheless communicated.
Indeed, the connection to Italian opera and
politics was very strong, as has recently been
demonstrated anew by the distinguished
Italian historian Alfredo Banti in his masterful
book La nazione del Risorgimento (2000).

At the premiere of Verdi’s oratorio Nabuccodonosor ("Va pensiero") in 1842,
the Austrian censors tolerated the priest
Zaccaria’s invocation to the captive Hebrews
to fight against the God of the Egyptians in
the name of the God of Abraham, with the
words “che sia morte allo stranier” [“may
the foreigner die”].

In the wake of the failed
revolutionary movements of 1848, however,
renewed and strengthened censorship
cracked down on even those phrases it had
permitted earlier in the decade.

So, various
theaters modified the final phrase from
Zaccaria’s text to “che ci additi il tuo voler”
[“may you show us your will”], “contro il
barbaro guerrier” [“against the barbarian
warrior”], or “che dia morte all’oppressor”
[“may the oppressor be killed”].

The entire third act of Forza takes place in a
military camp near Velletri, just south of
Rome. Heavily influenced at this point in
his career by French grand opera, particularly
the works of Meyerbeer, Verdi sought to place
the story of his characters within a specific
social and political context. His presentation
of life in a military camp was derived from
his reading of a scene from Friedrich Schiller’s
Wallenstein. In fact, one section, the preaching
of the quasi-comic friar, Melitone, is a setting
of text taken directly from Schiller and translated
into Italian by Verdi’s friend Andrea
Maffei.

In the “Accampamento,” too, there
are choruses proclaiming the virtues of war,
“Gioja e vita al militar” [“Joy and life for a
soldier”], and a rousing, largely unaccompanied
“Rataplan” (imitating the sound of
snare drums) for Preziosilla and the chorus.
The piece was so well received that, in his
1869 revision of the opera, Verdi concluded
the act with it. Not everything is presented
in such optimistic tones, however. The
“Accampamento” also features a chorus of
peasants whose fields have been destroyed
by the war and who are reduced to begging
for bread, as well as a group of new recruits
who have been forcibly separated from their
weeping families.
While Verdi takes evident pleasure in building
this complex and varied scene, he never
loses sight of his principal characters: the
baritone Don Carlo, son of the Marchese
accidentally killed in the first act, and the
tenor Don Alvaro, son of an executed Indian
ruler (hence, to the Spaniards, a barbarian).
Previously, Alvaro’s attempt to run off with
Don Carlo’s sister, Leonora, resulted in the
confrontation that occasioned the death of
their father. Now, both Carlo and Alvaro are fighting in the Italian wars against the Germans,
but both have assumed fictitious
names. The struggles for national sovereignty
in Italy allow Verdi ample opportunity for
these two proud antagonists–who have not
previously met–to show their bravery in
the face of death, to form a friendship in
which each saves the life of the other, and to
have that friendship dissolve into murderous
hatred when their identities are revealed.
Thus, the extreme conditions of war provide
a backdrop for scenes of heroism and passion
on which the composer lavishes some of his
finest music, including an aria for Don Carlo.
The wounded Don Alvaro, who is about to
undergo surgery and may not survive, has
consigned to his “friend” a box of personal
effects to be burned should he die. But Carlo
is suspicious: who is this man? He begins to
open a secret compartment in the box with
the key the wounded man has given him, but
then he hesitates: he has sworn his faith and
honor to follow the wishes of his friend. In
the cantabile of his aria, “Urna fatale,” Don
Carlo rejects the dishonorable path. Yet, there
is a portrait in the box, not under lock and
key, and hence not subject to the oath. When
he sees that it is a portrait of his sister, Leonora,
he knows who the wounded soldier must be.
After the surgeon returns to say that he has
saved the life of the soldier, Don Carlo bursts
into the ½nal section of his aria, its cabaletta,
where he expresses his joy at the survival of
Don Alvaro, whom he now intends to strike
down for having killed his father.
Don Carlo’s
Aria, “Urna fatale,” from La forza del destino.

-----------

There are many pages in the earlier operas of
Verdi, those written during the years in which
the Italian dream of Risorgimento was still
to be achieved, where arias or choruses convey
a message of hope and the conviction
that armed struggle would be necessary to
give birth to a new country.

The texts are explicit,
and the musical settings strong and
uplifting.


In the Prologue of the 1846 Attila,
for example, the barbarian ruler and his
hordes of Huns and Ostrogoths are found in
the central square of the conquered Aquileia.
A group of warrior women is paraded before
Attila. He asks one of them, “What has inspired
such valor in you?” Odabella responds,
“Santo di patria indefinito amor!” [“Holy
and in½nite love for my country!”] While
your women hold back, she continues,

noi donne italiche
cinte di ferro il seno
sul fumido terreno
sempre vedrai pugnar

(“we,
Italian women, armed with steel, will always
be seen ½ghting on the smoke-½lled earth”)

Even more intense is Verdi’s reaction after
the Milanese uprising of March 1848, known
as the Cinque Giornate, which soon spread
to much of Italy.

Having been in Paris at the
beginning of the Cinque Giornate, Verdi
wrote to his publisher, Giovanni Ricordi, on
March 25: “I hear great news from Milan,
but nothing certain, nobody has letters directly
[ . . . ] I am in a state of great anxiety,
and most annoyed that I am here.” He did
not remain in Paris for long. His most famous
letter from this period is to Piave, written in
Milan on April 21, 1848:
You can imagine whether I wanted to
remain in Paris, after hearing there was a
revolution in Milan. I left the moment I
heard the news; but I could see nothing
Verdi sought to place the
story of his characters
within a speci½c social and
political context.
The extreme conditions
of war provide a backdrop
for scenes of heroism and
passion on which the composer
lavishes some of his
½nest music.

but these stupendous barricades. Honor
to these heroes! Honor to all Italy, which
in this moment is truly great!
The hour of her liberation has sounded,
you may be convinced of that. It is the
people who want it: and when the people
want something there is no absolute
power that can resist them.


You speak to me of music!! What’s got
into you? . . . Do you believe I want to
concern myself now with notes, with
sounds? . . . There is and must be only
one music welcome to the ears of the
Italians in 1848. The music of the cannon

. . . I would not write a note for all the
gold in the world: I would feel immense
remorse in using music-paper, which is
good for making cartridges.

That Verdi soon wished to celebrate the new
political situation through his music, however,
becomes clear in his correspondence
with the librettist Salvadore Cammarano.

In
an April 20 letter to Verdi, Cammarano excuses
his previous silence because “in this
era of political confusion, anxiety, and hopes,
civic thoughts took precedence in me over
artistic thoughts.

Now that Cammarano is
seeking a subject for a projected new opera
with Verdi, the changed political situation
has “opened up an ample terrain for our
choice,” and he suggests several subjects
that would previously have been impossible,
before turning to the subject he really wishes
to develop:

“And if within you burns, as it
does within me, the desire to treat the most
glorious epoch of Italian history, let us bring
ourselves back to that of the Lombard
League.”

After summarizing the subject of
"Barbarossa, ossia, La battaglia di Legnano", in which the Italians
in 1176 successfully fought against the German
barbarians under the leadership of
Federico Barbarossa, he concludes:

“By
God, a subject of this kind must stir every
man who has an Italian soul in his heart."


In the poetry of the ½rst act, which Cammarano
sent on June 26, the opening words are
assigned to the chorus:

viva Italia un sacro patto
tutti stringe i ½gli suoi:
esso alfin di tanti ha fatto
un sol popolo d’eroi

[Long live Italy! A sacred pact
binds together all your children.
It has ½nally made from the many
a single people of heroes!]

Verdi set this text as a simple, UNACCOMPANIED (cfr. 'ballata da salotto")
choral hymn.

In a letter of October 24 about Cammarano’s
third act, Verdi requested only one change:
the introduction of a short scene for Lida
and Rolando, so as to give the prima donna an
expanded presence.

Cammarano obliged the
composer with the scene that includes this
strophe, in which Rolando tells his wife what
to say to their son should he die in battle

digli ch’è sangue italico
digli ch’è sangue mio,
che dei mortali è giudice
la terra, no, ma Dio!
e dopo Dio la Patria
gli apprenda a rispettar.

[Tell him that he is of Italian blood,
tell him that he is of my blood,
that God judges men,
not the earth!
And after God
teach him to respect the homeland.]

As of January 1849, of course, these texts were
still possible in Rome, where Papal forces had
not yet overturned the Roman Republic, but
they were no longer acceptable in Milan,
where the Austrians were again ½rmly in control.
Although Ricordi published La battaglia
di Legnano in its original form, the Austrians
forced the publishers to destroy the plates.

Instead,
Verdi and Cammarano’s opera became
L’assedio d’Arlem, with changes in the text to
make it acceptable to the Austrian rulers.

Yet not all armed conflict, not all actions of
war, even in the name of Italy and Christianity,
could be considered just in the eyes of either
God or man.

Meyerbeer’s 1836 work for the
Paris Opéra, Les Huguenots, had put on stage
one of the worst incidents of religious intolerance
in the history of Europe, the massacre
of Protestants by the Catholic majority
on St. Bartholomew’s Eve of 1572.

As always,
the historical event served as a backdrop for
personal tragedy, in this case the love of Valentine,
daughter of one of the leaders of the
There are many pages in
the earlier operas of Verdi...
where arias or choruses
convey a message of hope
and the conviction that
armed struggle would be
necessary to give birth to
a new country.

----
Catholic faction, for Raoul, a Protestant
soldier.

Before the opera concludes, Valentine
embraces the faith of Raoul and both are
murdered, as they sing the tune of the Lutheran
chorale, “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott,”
while the Catholic soldiers chant, “Dieu le
veut, Dieu veut le sang” [“God wants it, God
wants blood”] and Valentine’s father looks
on, helpless, at his dying daughter.

The most frightening scene of the drama,
though, comes in the fourth act, where a secret
visit by Raoul to Valentine is interrupted
by the arrival of the Catholic faction, who
are plotting the massacre.

Three monks bless
the daggers and swords of the “holy cause,”
the will of God and the King.


All rush forward
on the stage, their swords and daggers drawn,
and sing (see Example 5): “Dieu le veut, Dieu
l’ordonne, non! non! grâce à personne. A ce
prix il pardonne au pêcheur repentant.” [“God
wants it, God orders it, no! no! mercy for no
one. At this price he pardons the repentant
sinner.”]

By the early 1840s, there could have been few
lovers of opera in Europe who did not know
this opera (although often with modi½ed
texts or even changed historical frameworks),
either from seeing it or from studying it
through a vocal score.

But the phrase “Dieu
le veut” had a long history.

al sangue
iddio lo vuole
iddio lo vuole

is the cry that
accompanies the Crusaders in Tomasso Grossi’s
1826 poem, I lombardi alla prima crociata, ossia Gerusalemme
the source for Temistocle Solera’s 1843 libretto
for Verdi’s opera of the same name.

For all its Risorgimento aura, Verdi’s "I lombardi alla prima crociata, ossia, Gerusalemme"
is by no means a work that looks approvingly
on the bloody history of the Crusades.

The
opera takes place in Milan, Antioch, and the
outskirts of Jerusalem, as it follows a Milanese
contingent on the First Crusade to Jerusalem
in 1096–1097.

There's a
familial history that is played out in the drama.
 Giselda, the daughter of
Arvino, a Milanese nobleman, has been captured
by the Muslim tyrant of Antioch, Acciano,
and has fallen in love with Acciano’s
son, Oronte.

Oronte, in turn, following the
lead of his mother, So½a, has vowed to become
a Christian.

In the cantabile of Giselda’s aria at the end
of the second act, “Se vano è il pregare,” she
prays for peace to her dead mother.
But in an
elaborate tempo di mezzo, Giselda learns that
her father and the Crusaders have attacked
Acciano’s palace, killing the sultan and his
son. (It turns out that Oronte still lives, although
he suffers wounds that ultimately
will cause his death.)

When her father, bathed
in blood, presents himself to his daughter,
she recoils in horror and sings:

No! giusta
causa non è d’Iddio
La terra spargere di
sangue umano

No! God does not consider
it a just cause to spill human blood”], and
concludes,

Queste del cielo non fûr parole
. . . no, Dio nol vuole!” [“These are not the
words of heaven . . . no, God does not wish
it!”].

And she predicts that the vanquished
will arise again and seek horrible revenge:
they will surge forward in torrents and
threaten all of Europe.

In the repetition of
her cabaletta theme she asserts again: “No,
Dio non vuole. Ei sol di pace scese a parlar.”
[“No, God does not wish it. He descended to
earth only to speak of peace.”]

And as the
curtain falls, she offers her breast to her father
and urges him to strike her dead.

Although the situation
is similar in Grossi’s narrative poem, his
Giselda does not pronounce any of these
words; in particular she does not say “Dio
nol vuole.”

This intervention is the work of
Solera and Verdi.

  Aria, “Se vano è il pregare,”
from I lombardi alla prima crociata.]

The “Dio non vuole” of Giselda, of course,
must be read as a direct response both to the
traditional cry of the Crusaders and to the
“Dieu le veut” of the Catholic faction in Les
Huguenots.

Even with this intertextual connection,
however, it is striking to see how
Verdi emphasizes this rejection of the spilling
of innocent blood, of the vengeful spirit
of the Crusades.

In I lombardi, Verdi and Solera
stress the moral ambiguity of the Crusades.

Preziosilla’s “è bella la guerra” does not carry
over into a war that seeks to impose the will of
one people on another of different customs
and a different religion.

It is, unfortunately, a
lesson we have still not fully grasped.

The effect of war on those
caught up in its throes
despite themselves is a
theme Verdi would explore
several times, not always
with complete honesty.

* * *
The effect of war on those caught up in its
throes despite themselves is a theme Verdi
would explore several times, not always with
complete honesty.

There is something too
beautiful about the hymn in Aida, sung by
Amonasro and the Ethiopian prisoners during
the course of the ½nale to the second act,
“Ma tu Re, tu signore possente”.

The opera ultimately makes clear that
their true feelings are anything but innocent:
it is revenge the Ethiopians want–not peace.

In Verdi’s Macbetto, however, the composer’s
½rst opera on a Shakespearian subject, he
writes a chorus for the refugees, victims of
the usurper’s efforts to preserve his corrupt
power. “Patria oppressa,” they sing: “Oppressed
homeland, we can no longer call you
our mother, because your children inhabit a
tomb. No one can speak out for those who
suffer and die.”

A text of this kind acquires meaning as
the anticipation of an event that remains to
realize itself, the ransom of the nation, of
whose story they nonetheless offer testimony.

By the mid-1840s, Verdi and his librettists
were cognizant of a genre of choruses,
a successful style with which Verdi
was already identi½ed and, perhaps, which
he might be encouraged to exploit again.

What is being invoked is a series of operatic
choruses: “Va pensiero sull’ali dorate” from
Nabucco (1842), “O Signore, dal tetto natio”
from I lombardi (1843), and “Si ridesti il leon
di Castiglia” from Ernani (1844).

All are constructed
on similar poetry: four quatrains of
decasillabi.

Later, when writing Macbeth, Verdi
asked his librettist, Piave, to write a chorus
with four quatrains of ottonari verse, with
which he hoped to “make a chorus of the
importance of that of Nabucco,” but without
“adopting the same meter.”

Piave obliged
him with a chorus whose rhythm is different
(“Patria oppressa! il dolce nome”) but which
enters the same discourse of loss, desire, and
rebellion found in the other choruses.

It is not only Piave’s words that join this
chorus to the discourse of national feeling
and desire, but also Verdi’s original musical
setting of 1847.

All these choruses are marked
by a preponderance of singing in

UNISON or
at the octave, as if intended for mass performance.

They are highly tuneful, with easily
remembered melodies and simple harmonies
–another sign of their popular provenance.

And frequently the choruses break into simple
but glorious chords in the

THIRD

 of the
four quatrains.

In Macbeth, “Patria oppressa”
opens the ½nal act, the act that will continue
with an aria for the disconsolate Macduff,
whose wife and children Macbeth has slaughtered, Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene;
and ½nally the battle and defeat of Macbeth.


Despite its modi½ed verse pattern (ottonari
instead of decasillabi), this 1847 version of the
chorus shares its basic musical shape and
style with the earlier Verdian Risorgimento
opera choruses.

It sends multiple messages.

"Patria oppressa" sends messages pertaining to the opera in which it is
embedded, as a chorus for the refugees; and
those pertaining to the audiences that are
receiving the opera, as yet another reference
to the “patria oppressa” under foreign domination–
that is, to the Italian political situation.

It should come as no surprise that even
before the 1848 revolutionary movements,
“patria oppressa” became “patria amata”
[“beloved,” rather than “oppressed,” homeland]
in Naples.

But after the revolution
failed, the text was completely replaced with
different poetry (in the same rhythm) for a
revival of Macbetto in Milan in 1849.

The sense of the piece is transformed “from an
anguished outcry against the barbaric tyranny
of Macbeth to a lament (two acts too late!)
for King Duncan.

After the unity of Italy was achieved in 1860
(although Rome would not come on board
for another decade), the Risorgimento style
no longer had the same signi½cance for Verdi
or for his audiences as it did in 1847.

Thus, in
the major revision of Macbeth he undertook
in 1865 (the ½rst performance of the new version
was in Paris, but the work was all done
in Italian), Verdi left the text unaltered but
completely changed his musical setting.

There
is no easy lyricism, but a series of melodic
fragments–set in a harmonically bitter framework–
that reflects

NOT THE ASPIRATIONS of a
people, but their suffering.

Notice particularly
his use of a ½gure “come un lamento” [“like
a lamentation”], a descending minor second
that constantly produces dissonances with
the melody.

This ½guration dominates a great
deal of the opera, from Macbeth’s fateful
pronouncement after murdering Duncan,
“Tutto è ½nito”, to Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking
scene, where–played by the English horn– it
is like the insistent voice of her conscience, an
interval she duplicates in her ½rst words “Una
macchia” [ “Yet, here’s a spot”].

Freed from the underlying political agenda
of the 1847 version, Verdi concentrates on
the dramatic and musical situation, producing
a setting that may have carried a less potent

----
Verdi was neither a conscientious
objector to war . . .
nor a propagandist for
his government’s bellicose
policies.
---

political message, but brought out instead
the horrors of war and its innocent victims.

We are far from Preziosilla’s “war is lovely,
long live war.”

* * *

Verdi was neither a conscientious objector
to war, such as Benjamin Britten, nor a propagandist
for his government’s bellicose policies,
as some would charge Dmitri Shostakovich
with having been for at least part of
his life (although the matter is contested).

On one level, of course, it could be argued
that a successful opera composer does not
need to believe in what he sets to music.

He
only needs to produce a musical setting that
is in and of itself convincing.

As literary
theorists have long understood, the narrator
of a novel is not its author.

Yet when one examines carefully the operas
of Verdi, patterns do emerge in the choices
he makes, the modi½cations he and his librettists
impose upon their sources, the musical
styles he adopts and rejects.

The resulting
picture of the composer, faced with our
theme of war and peace, is not unequivocal.

Verdi knew the dangers of accepting the idea of
a “just” war, but he was also willing to risk
much to change the political system under
which Italy suffered before 1860.

That very
ambivalence is one of the things that has
given his operas meaning for generation
after generation of opera-goers, and that will
continue to do so as long as the human issues
the operas explore remain with us.