Speranza
"It’s an opera of huge dimensions, and it needs great care" --
Giuseppe Verdi.
During Verdi’s self-imposed retirement, many offers to compose a new work or to produce one of his old operas had come to him, but none had tempted him to go back to the theatre.
Finally in December 1860 a proposal from the Imperial Theatre in St Petersburg awakened some response.
The librettist and composer began work at the end of July, during Piave¹s visit to Busseto, but Verdi was far from satisfied with the results.
"For the love of God, my dear Piave, let’s think this over carefully. We cannot go on like this, and it is impossible to find a way out of this mess with this drama, absolutely impossible."
"The style must be tighter."
"Poetry can and must say everything that prose says, with half the words."
"Up to now, you are not doing it."
Both men threw themselves fully into the opera, which Verdi finally composed in a few weeks between 20 September and the middle of November.
Only the instrumentation remained to be done.
The composer, who had probably not written any music in almost four years, told Fraschini that he was composing with his whole being.
(Mary Jane Phillips-Matz)
"La Forza del Destino" (or "La potenza del fato", as I prefer) is a long, turbulent opera about many matters, foremost among them Verdi’s belief that in this world it is vain to hope for untroubled happiness -- that for a person of sensibility and spirit retreat into a cloister or ivory tower provides no serene refuge.
The opera chimed with the composer’s attempts to renounce the hurly-burly of theatre life and with his experience as a member of the first Italian parliament.
Donna Leonora and Don Alvaro enact his theme against a background of popular, religious, and martial activity.
The consolations no less than the confinements of the Church and the exhilarating splendours no less than the miseries of a war in a just cause are vividly portrayed.
(Andrew Porter)
The War of the Austrian Succession forms the background of two wildly different operas, Richard Strauss’s "Der Rosenkavalier" and Giuseppe Verdi¹s La Forza del Destino.
The first scene of La Forza del Destino’s third act places Don Alvaro and Don Carlo di Vargas, two mortal enemies (both under assumed names), in an army camp near Velletri, south of Rome.
Both wear the uniforms of the Royal Spanish Grenadiers.
The date of the battle near
Velletri was August 11, 1744, involving
an Austrian army led by Prince Lobkowitz
and a Spanish army under
Duke Philip, son of Philip V of Spain
and younger brother of Carlos III, the
Bourbon King of Naples
and the Two Sicilies.
The battle of Velletri was a bloody encounter that ended with the withdrawal of the Spanish forces.
(George Jellinek)
The Imperial Theater of St. Petersburg wanted an opera, and on June 3 [1861] ... the contract was signed.
Somehow, somewhere, Verdi had come across a famous Spanish play called "Don Alvaro, o La Fuerza del Sino", by Don Angel de Saavedra, Duke of Rivas.
It seemed to have appealed to his imagination, for he describes it ... as a “powerful, singular, and vast drama ...”
Rivas, who started his career as
a cavalry officer and ended it
as Ambassador Extraordinary to the court of Naples, was a typical figure of the romantic period.
Il Duca di Rivas fought gallantly against Napoleon in the Peninsular War, in which he nearly lost his life.
After the return to the Spanish throne of Ferdinand VII he had to fly from Spain, owing to his liberal opinions, and lived an exile for many years.
After the death of King Ferdinand, the Duca di Rivas was able to take advantage of the general amnesty to return to Spain, and two years later, in 1836, he became a member of the Spanish government.
Almost immediately, however, owing to fresh political disturbances, the Duca di Rivas had to fly to Portugal, returning after the proclamation of the Constitution in 1837 once more to his own country, where he eventually was made the Vice-President of the Senate and might, had he so wished, have become prime minister.
He died in 1865, in Madrid, at the age of seventy-six, having survived his political activities by fifteen and his radical opinions by some thirty years.
Despite all his political activities, Rivas always remained first and foremost a man of letters.
He was, according to an enthusiastic biographer, the last of the great poets who might be called genuinely Spanish, a man who deserved to rank as one of the greatest exponents of Spanish literary art in his day.
Needless to say, he was a romantic of the romantics.
To dismiss such a play by such a man merely as a “popular Spanish drama produced in Madrid in 1835” betrays a lack of historical and literary perspective.
"Don Alvaro; ossia la potenza del fato" is an important play.
The point is worth making, because it has been
suggested that the choice of such a subject
indicates a certain carelessness or even a definite step backwards on the part of Verdi.
Nothing of the kind.
Verdi thought that he had found a masterpiece full of just those dramatic contrasts which particularly appealed to him.
[Romantic drama] delights in
indissoluble mixtures.
All contrarieties.
nature and art, poetry and prose, seriousness and mirth, recollection and anticipation, spirituality and sensuality, terrestrial and celestial, life and death, are by it blended together in the most intimate combinations"
"Romantic drama embraces at once the whole of the checkered drama of life with all its circumstances."
"And while it seems only to represent subjects brought accidentally together, it satisfies the unconscious requisitions of fancy, buries us in reflections on the inexpressible signification of the objects which we view blended by order, nearness and distance, light and color, into one harmonious whole; and thus lends, as it were, a soul to the prospect before us."
-- A. W. Schlegel.
Verdi wrote:
"Opera nowadays sins in the direction of too great monotony, so much so that I should refuse to write on such subjects as Nabucco, Foscari, etc."
"They offer extremely interesting dramatic situations, but they lack variety."
"They have but one burden to their song; elevated, if you like, but always the same ...
I prefer Shakespeare to all other dramatists, including the Greek."
[In a letter] to Salvatore Cammarano, Verdi stated that he wished to blend the comic and tragic “a uso Shakespeare” (in Shakespeare’s style) because such a mixture of genres, he said “will serve to break up and cut the monotony of so many serious scenes.”
One way to achieve Shakespearean variety in a single opera therefore was to mix the comic and tragic genres.
Verdi did this to some extent, and with great success, in Un ballo in maschera, the opera immediately preceding Forza.
In Forza he would be far more daring, mixing the genres to a greater extent and abandoning the unities altogether.
Further, in this same letter to Cammarano, Verdi gives as an example of a scene containing within itself the kind of variety he sought, a military camp:
“There is a grand scene in this style in Schiller’s Wallenstein: soldiers, camp followers, gypsies, fortune tellers, even a monk, but you can put in all the rest, and you even can make a little dance for the gypsies. In short, make me a characteristic scene that will give a true picture of a military camp.”
And, of course, thirteen years later that scene, including the monk (with Schiller’s verses translated by Maffei) went into Forza.
The fact that "La potenza del fato" is the only one of Verdi’s operas based on a play by a well-known playwright into which he inserted a whole scene by another well-known playwright is evidence that here he was trying to invent a reality – “a uso Shakespeare” -- rather than merely using that of the Duke of Rivas.
Verdi also considerably changed the Rivas play by pushing three of the characters into greater prominence and much further toward comedy.
On the casting of Preziosilla, Melitone, and Trabuco he wrote in a letter to Giulio Ricordi, 15 December 1868:
“Their scenes are comedy, pure comedy. Therefore good diction and an easy stage manner.”
The opera opens on a serious scene, thereafter roughly alternates the comic and the serious, and closes on a serious scene.
The comic, of course, was not to be just a joke thrown in but was to have some steady relation --organic unity -- to the serious.
Schlegel had noted Shakespeare’s use of foils and written:
“Shakespeare makes each of his principal characters the glass in which the others are reflected, and by like means enables us to discover what might not be immediately revealed to us” ...
In "La potenza del fato" Verdi used the comic and serious to contrast rather than to reflect the characters.
He intended, clearly I think, for the comic characters to survive in life through their lack of pretense, sure identity, and sense of community.
By contrast the serious characters ("Don Carlo di Vargas") trapped in their aristocratic codes of honour and racial purity, are doomed first to be separated, then to be isolated from their fellows by false identities, and ultimately, in the opera’s first version, all to die by violence.
Verdi, imitating Shakespeare, mixed the genres for a purpose.
(George Martin)
Verdi makes an epic summary of history, which he sees as a cycle of mischance and malicious coincidence: the force of destiny.
Writing an opera for St. Petersburg in 1862, he fixed on the subtitle of the play he adapted -- the Duke of Rivas’s "Don Alvaro, ossia, la potenza del fato" -- and called his opera La Forza del Destino.
That force is unintelligible and accidental, ruining the lives of the three protagonists -- Don Carlo di Vargas, Leonora, and Alvaro -- because a pistol goes off when Alvaro throws it down, killing Leonora's father and rousing her brother Don Carlo di Vargas to a pitiless vendetta.
The history which persecutes individuals also hounds the mass of men.
The ... mob of pilgrims, carpetbaggers, muleteers and gypsies which quarrels and carouses ... turns up on the Italian battlefield of Velletri.
The warmongering Preziosilla cheers on the recruits with promises of military honor.
Preziosilla leaves behind an abattoir of wounded men in Italy, and a jostling squawling congregation of beggars outside the monastery in Spain.
The busy panorama makes no sense at all,
and in Verdi’s original ending Alvaro,
spurning the religious resignation of the Padre Guardiano, hurled
himself over a cliff to an absurdist death.
Everyone in Verdi’s opera is homeless, friendless -- Alvaro is an exiled Indian prince, Leonora even before her father dies calls herself an orphan -- and instead of sympathy and fellow feeling they must rely on the grudging charity of the church and its regime of penance.
Melitone ladles out soup and sermons, the Padre Guardiano forces the dying to their knees in unavailing prayer.
Here there are only the cries of human misery, like the wail of Leonora when her brother, whom she has rushed to care for, seizes
the final opportunity to stab her.
In both Berlioz and Wagner, history has its own
good reasons ...
Verdi can discern no such logic.
History for him is noises off, an irrelevant victory parade.
The monastery in La Forza del Destino, where Leonora and Alvaro seek refuge, is less a religious establishment than a place of disenchanted seclusion, exempting them from the violent muddle of history outside ...
The world in Forza is given over to war, extolled by Preziosilla as a convenient mass suicide.
Exiled from happiness, Leonora and Alvaro imprison themselves in hermetic solitude ...
(Peter Conrad)
The most panoramic, the most inclusive of all Verdi’s operas is La Forza del Destino.
It was the “truly vast” character of this story that Verdi especially liked.
Usually Verdi was preoccupied with sustaining narrative and dramatic tension by eliminating everything that held up the action or was irrelevant to the opera’s central themes.
But in this case he deliberately enlarged the already generous scope of Saavedra’s play by adding material taken from another play about war, Schiller’s Wallenstein’s Camp.
La Forza del Destino is a sprawling work, especially in its ill-shaped third act.
But Verdi knowingly opted for spread rather than compression.
The sense of a range of social types and situations, and an action spread across the map of Europe, is integral to the opera’s character.
George Martin has dubbed it “Verdi’s imitation of Shakespeare”.
We might also be tempted to call it Verdi’s “War and Peace.”
It includes his most profound and imaginative treatment of war, and his richest portrayal of organized religion.
(Anthony Arblaster)
Every commentator on Verdi’s La Forza del Destino has recourse sooner or later to the same inevitable adjective – “sprawling.”
The adjective is not inappropriate, so long as it is not used pejoratively.
But it is inadequate. Forza sprawls only as a vast naturalistic canvas by a master painter -- by Goya, say, or Velasquez -- may be said to sprawl.
Verdi’s canvas in Forza is crowded with varied figures but, as with the great Spanish painters, it uses more than one angle of vision.
That is how Velasquez invited his beholder to search for his meanings -- through various angles of vision.
In the tumultuous work of art that is Verdi’s Forza there are many conflicting details.
But one single idea -- a searing, terrifying idea -- unifies and gives meaning to all of them.
We do not often think of Verdi as a dramatist of ideas, but as he neared the half-century mark in his life he began to think of himself that way.
In fact he called Forza his “opera made of ideas.”
He took an angry play by a liberal Spanish nobleman and, far from simplifying it as is the usual case with adaptations of stage plays for operatic purposes, he crowded additional details into it.
The melodrama "Don Alvaro, o la Fuerza del Sino" by the Duca di Rivas became in Verdi’s hands a complex, ambivalent, ironic vehicle designed to express a single, central idea.
Above all, coincidence, which before had been used mainly for the purposes of comic intrigue, now became the driving force behind a new kind of drama ... a drama that mixed different genres so as to encompass what A. W. Schlegel called “the whole checkered play of life.”
That is what Verdi was attempting in La Forza del Destino.
(M. Owen Lee)
Why the popularity of the work as a whole?
The story is a jumble and disguise is the order of the day (the baritone even makes his entrance incognito).
Destiny is often indistinguishable from coincidence, motives are seldom clear, and Don Carlo di Vargas invokes honour while
behaving with what seems to us the finesse of the Mafia.
The answer is simple.
Verdi wanted situation and stage conflict, and this the story provided in plenty.
Thus apparent inconsequence inspired a score in which the tunes are splendid and inexhaustible.
The major roles are not only excellent but include in Melitone the composer¹s most ambitious (and successful) comic character to date.
And even the once despised popular music ... provides a contrast which increasingly finds favour today ...
(Lord Harewood)
It must be admitted at once that the psychology and credibility of this story seem fantastic nowadays.
To us it remains the crudest of melodramas only suitable to the very early days of the movies.
We fail to see why Don Alvaro, who never wished to kill either Leonora¹s father or brother, who was animated by the most honorable intentions with regard to Leonora herself, should even in his own view be regarded as accursed.
Why Don Carlo should fanatically insist on killing or being killed by a man who has saved his life and with whom he has sworn friendship.
But if we had lived in Spain a few centuries ago when Spanish families regarded their honour as the most important thing in the world, when the principle of the blood-feud, that is to say that blood can be atoned for only by blood, was commonly accepted, our approach would be quite different.
(Francis Toye)
Powerfully moved though he was by the blows dealt by Fate to the three high-born figures in his source
--
Donna Leonora, Don Alvaro, and Don Carlo di Vargas --
[Verdi] insisted to his faithful librettist Piave that the original play had to be expanded, that the three Spanish commoners -- the gypsy fortune-teller Preziosilla, the Jewish muleteer-trader Trabuco, and the short-tempered lay brother Melitone -- must all appear again when the action moved from Spain to Italy ... so that the gypsy and the the muleteer and the friar could turn up, independently of each other, at a place thousands of miles away from where we first met them.
They too would be swept along by Fate ...
The three commoners, of course, survive. Preziosilla, Trabuco, and Melitone, committed to no allegiances save their own common-sense existential views of life, are all given scenes in which they demonstrate their survival instincts, their savvy and shrewdness.
But the three high-born figures -- Alvaro and Carlo and Leonora -- with their inflexible codes of honour and their adamant religious faith, are destroyed.
********************
They are tragic not
because they die but
because they are, at the end, more
aware than the three commoners of the savage workings of Fate, which in this opera is the only force directing human lives.
Both Trovatore and Forza are derived from angry Spanish plays.
Each develops from an incident which signifies that no one controls his own destiny ...
And Verdi, in the swift and terrible scene at the end of each work, finds no meaning in human existence ...
In the original ending of "La potenza del fato", brother kills sister, and the hero, an Incan prince who became a Byronic soldier and then a humble priest, is so overwhelmed by the force of destiny that he leaps off a cliff into what he sees as the jaws of hell, despairing and calling on heaven to annihilate the whole human race.
Verdi changed that ending six years
after the Russian premiere to the ending
that most opera houses use today.
In the second and now
standard ending, Verdi’s
Alvaro does NOT leap to his death
but is persuaded by an old man of vibrant faith to find meaning in Christian forgiveness.
The music in this second ending grows thematically out of what has preceded it.
But the drama does not, and Verdi knew it. Religion as Verdi saw it was utterly helpless in the face of life’s cruelties.
La Forza del Destino, with its two opposed and irreconcilable endings, remains a stark reminder that we have two choices in the matter of how we can view our lives.
We can see life as inexorably fated, utterly beyond our control.
Or we can see our lives as directed, however violent and senseless they seem, by a provident God.
What, finally, is the central idea that unifies all the details in Verdi’s canvas?
The idea that the question of human existence is whether there is any meaning to human existence.
It was a question to which Verdi, who took nothing on faith but thought seriously about life, found no answer.
He was the kind of man for whom asking the question was more important than finding the answer.
(M. Owen Lee)
It is possible that the Duca di Rivas, who started life with radical opinions, intended in his play to do something more than tell what to his audience, at any rate, seemed a most thrilling and effective story, wishing perhaps to suggest that there were things in the world even more important than the honour of noble Spanish families.
Christian charity, for instance, and forgiveness of sins.
Such speculation, however, is profitless.
Not only La Forza del Destino but Don Alvaro must always remain for us typical examples of "blood-and-thunder" romantic drama, though that is no reason for refusing to take them seriously.
(Francis Toye)
Don Alvaro incarnates with a special intensity the condition of the exile, which is a recurring preoccupation in Verdi’s operas.
The idea of fate or doom – “destino avverso,” as Alvaro calls it -- is characteristic of Spanish romantic pessimism.
But it can be, and has been, argued that this idea, in the context of La Forza del Destino, is a mystification.
There is no impersonal overarching force driving the characters to disaster.
****************
Everything is perfectly explicable in terms of human choices and actions and the social pressures and conventions which determine them.
It is with Alvaro above all that we can see clearly that impersonal fate is not the driving force of the opera.
Don Alvaro’s unhappiness is not endemic or metaphysical.
Rather, Alvaro's unhappiness is due essentially to a single fact: the prejudice evoked by his racial background, and his consequent sense of being isolated in a hostile society.
If the Marquis of Calatrava is insulting, his son Carlo is a vicious racist.
Religion receives unusual treatment in this opera.
It is certainly the only one of Verdi’s operas in which the spiritual beauty and comforts of religion are dwelt on more than its fierce and vengeful aspects.
Verdi looks at war from a new angle.
War is presented from the point of view of its victims, the peasants whose land is plundered and laid waste, and the young men who are forcibly conscripted into the armies.
But it is also examined, more conspicuously and more originally, from the point of view of hangers-on, the commercial baggage-train that simultaneously services the army and seeks to profit from it.
(Anthony Arblaster)
So what is this opera about, anyway?
Religion?
War?
Racism?
Honor?
Fate?
The above commentators offer many possibilities, and they don¹t all agree with each other.
Is this story convincing on any level, or is at hopeless mess, as some critics (such as Lord Harewood) contend?
Does the “Shakespearean” mixture of tragic and comic, elevated and popular, work?
Or does one element interfere with the other?
Which of the two endings discussed above, the original or the revised, seems better?
What shall we make of Arblaster’s claim that the events in the story have nothing to do with Fate, but are “perfectly explicable in terms of human choices and actions and the social pressures and conventions which determine them?”
If that is true, does it undermine the whole premise of the opera?
Does the treatment of such themes as war, religion, and racism have any relevance for us, or is it all too rooted in nineteenth century romanticism to make any difference nowadays?
Owen Lee (who is a Catholic priest) says that we have two choices in how we view our lives: guided either by inexorable Fate or a provident God. Which view do you hold? Is Lee overlooking other possibilities?
The “code of honor” under which that vicious racist, Don Carlo di Vargas acts was not limited to Spanish society in the romantic era.
Several commentators identify it with “Mafia” values, but it can also be seen in street gangs of many times and places, and in ancient cultures celebrated in some of the great classics of Western literature.
What do you think of this code of honour?
Should revenge, or “getting even,” be a higher value than forgiveness?
Should justice be meted out by individuals, instead of by the state or some other duly constituted body?
Does the biblical “eye for an eye” remain valid today?
If somebody beats up your friend or brother, should you go beat up that somebody?
Are we making too much of this opera, as some of the commentators would claim?
Isn’t just an exciting melodrama with lots of good music, and let’s leave it at that?
One should read the play Don Alvaro by Rivas for the sake of comparison with the libretto of Forza.
While you’re at it, read Wallenstein’s Camp by Schiller to see how thoroughly the creators of Forza assimilated it into their opera.
Investigate the “code of honor” as it operates in various groups, historical and contemporary.
Verdi’s operas -- more than two dozen -- are central to the repertory.
Don Carlo bears the closest resemblance to Forza as a large historical canvas against which the principal characters enact their personal tragedies, and for good measure it is based on a play by Schiller. (So are several other Verdi operas, notably Luisa Miller.)
Owen Lee cites Il Trovatore as the Verdi opera closest philosophically to Forza.
Other commentators invoke Aida (especially for its treatment of religion and priesthood), Rigoletto (in which, as in many other Verdi operas, the heroine is torn between father and lover), and even Falstaff (a comedy prefigured by the comic moments in Forza).
Operas by other composers bearing comparison with Forza -- again as large historical canvases -- are Les Troyens (Berlioz), Tannhaeuser and Lohengrin (Wagner), Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina (Mussorgsky), and the French “grand operas” of Meyerbeer.
Shakespeare’s history plays are the ones that seem to have influenced Forza the most.
Commentators often cite Henry V as an analogue to Forza in its treatment of war. Read some Shakespeare. (There are two excellent film versions of Henry V, one directed by Lawrence Olivier in the 1940’s and a more recent one by Kenneth Branagh.)
Another “dark” Verdi opera is Macbeth, which moreover incorporates scenes of exile and the victims of war.
Forza is one of the few mature Verdi operas that has a fully developed free-standing overture.
It is based on themes from the opera (a “potpourri” overture), a common practice.
Other potpourri overtures of note are Wagner’s to The Flying Dutchman and Die Meistersinger.
Until the past couple of decades, most Broadway shows had potpourri overtures, of which two of the most admired are Candide (Leonard Bernstein) and Gypsy (Jule Stein).
These lists could be multiplied. Listen to the Forza overture, considering its choice of themes, structure, and relationship to the following story.
Do the same with other potpourri overtures. You may wish to develop some theories about this genre.
Philosophers, theologians, and writers from time immemorial have pondered the question of Fate and its role in human life. Join their ranks.
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