Speranza
Words or music?
Which is more important to melo-dramma?
This is a question which
intrigues opera lovers, as it is endlessly arguable without being
finally answerable.
Richard Strauss devoted an entire opera, Capriccio, to the
debate.
The opera culminates in a lengthy scene of ecstatic, mesmerizing musical
intensity which might seem to give the nod to music, if not for what the
soprano is actually singing: that words and music are both indispensible.
Take
one away and whatever is left will not be opera.
But, music and words
aside, the library is a good source for tracing the seed from which most operas
are grown-- their original literary sources.
Shakespeare had Holinshed, but the
operas we now love typically sprang from works of popular fiction or drama, most
of which have fallen out of fashion and are now known only through their later,
musical incarnations.
Of these works, libraries have multiple editions.
But it's best to choose volumes which contain compelling illustrations.
Among people who have a favorite opera, that opera is often
La Boemia, which is based on The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter(Scene dalla vita dalla Boemia), by Enrico Murger.
This chronicle of poor Parisian artists was
first published as a series of magazine sketches between 1845 and 1848 and then
as a novel in 1849.
It was later STAGED, and this possibly gave the idea to the Italians!
It contains many more characters than the compact Puccini
opera, or the Leoncavallo version, for that matter -- and it's a surprise the French had to waited for Italians to set the thing to music.
The lives of the Bohemians are interwoven through a jumble of events that would not
seem to yield the slightest thread of theatrical cohesion.
Still, despite a
great deal of friction between Puccini and his librettists, Giacosa and Illica,
they managed to carve out a straightforward narrative of the passing of love.
You
have to go along for the complete ride.
So one is curious to see how the "novel" treated these torturous, wonderful final moments.
Instead of ending up in the garret, surrounded by her friends and mourned by her lover,
Mimi is stuck with the
Sisters of Charity in a tuberculosis ward.
Rodolfo arrives too late and finds
her already loaded into the vehicle in which the corpses that are unclaimed are
taken to their pauper’s grave.
There is also a surprising final
chapter in which all the bohemians are
shown, some time later, as
comfortably
settled members of the bourgeoisie.
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