On Music

...The Princess of Eboli's "O don fa-tale" at the end of the same scene is equally brimming with emotion: An angry line of recitative leads immediately to instrumental and vocal outbursts, as she denounces her "fatal gift of beauty...

...Tacea la notte" begins with a smoky theme that is precisely right for the twilight setting...

...The Queen's "Tu che le vanita" in the last scene, however, returns to the new soliloquy style...

...Next would come the cabaletta, usually a sprightly number that gave the singer a chance to go ornamentally to town, concluded the scene on an emotional high point, and provided the audience with something to whistle on their way out the door...

...In the curious "Pari siamo" Rigoletto likens his tongue to the sword of an assassin in murky, half-melodic phrases instead of the customary mysterious or pleasant tunes...

...After a pause to give the audience plenty of time to applaud, there would be choral interjections and perhaps the entrance of a messenger...

...So accustomed are we to the aria being of a seam with the action, we tend to forget that it once was both superior to and outside the drama...

...then he thunders into one of the liveliest cabalettas of Verdi's early period and challenges the swains to simultaneous duels...

...He took Shakespeare's disjointed phrases and the interspersed comments of the witnesses and actually set them to music...

...Later, in Otel-lo, Desdemona's "Ave Maria" and The Willow Song" succinctly capture her inner turmoil...

...The stage business was sung or spoken in dialogue or in great concerted numbers, and the aria often as not was a pause for comment, background narrative or soliloquy...

...The singers, of course, saw the aria as a chance to demonstrate their prowess—a reason for its presence that frequently usurped all others...

...The effectivenss of the format led Verdi to use it again in Batlo in mas-chera (1859...

...King Philip starts "Ella giammai m'amo" with its somber phrases despairing of his loveless marriage, singing arioso (as melodies not part of an aria are called) rather than stark recitative...

...Verdi's bravura composing in Don Carlos shows how far he advanced from the old foursquare aria of "Ernani, involami...

...She first prays to the dead Emperor Charles V for understanding in heaven, then feels agitated at the forthcoming arrival of Carlos and remembers their initial love duet as the music also harkens back...

...Similarly, Vio-letta, a frivolous demi-mondaine and brilliant coloratura in Act I of La Tra-viata, by Act II is a woman who suffers and a lyric soprano of no little intensity...

...Without a pause she turns remorseful, accompanied by a contrasting melody in the manner of the second section of Rigoletto's "Cortigiani...

...then, as Leonora describes the love song of the trouba-dor, she abandons the melody for a rising chromatic scale that lifts every heart in the house...

...The King's thoughts seem to drift from regret to dejection to furious anguish, and back again, and the melodies keep pace with his contradictory feelings...

...His developing orchestral powers and his skill in varying the use of the chorus make for interesting study, but most fascinating is Verdi's practically single-handed transformation of the simplest solo unit among the operatic building blocks—a metamorphosis by slow stages and without revolutionary intent...

...Verdi became increasingly adroit at raising the impact of the aria with musical boldness...

...Arias tended to be slow, enabling the singer to demonstrate his skill at long-breathed lines...

...On Music VERDI'S PROGRESS by john yohalem Throughout his career Giuseppe Verdi sought to tell a tale with music and, perhaps unconsciously, to get at the psychological truth behind the mad, melodramatic cliches of conventional opera...

...Such a stodgy setup —one thought, pause, another thought, pause—simply had little relationship to the way people really thought, any more than the hackneyed heroic emotions that motivated most operatic characters of Verdi's era were all that people truly felt...

...Later in the scene her basso uncle, Silva, enters with the stately rumbles of "Infelice...

...The guilt-consumed thane and his lady were hardly the usual central characters for an opera, but Verdi's most unprecedented innovation came in the Sleepwalking Scene...

...Macbeth (1847) is a landmark, Verdi's first attempt to set his beloved Shakespeare to music...

...Following a choral instrusion, she ruminates further in a cabaletta apparently written for no other purpose than vocal display...

...E tu credevi" reflecting his sorrow at finding two young men in his niece's boudoir...

...Next, in the old-fashioned way, she discovers something that alters her mood —Carlos' death warrant...

...He had already started to move in this direction in the '40s with a series of pyrotechnically raging heroines—Abigaille in Nabucco, Odabella in Attila, even Lady Macbeth —but in the' 50s he was milder...

...In Act I of his Ernani, for instance, Elvira enters with the gracious waltz, "Ernani, involami," as pretty an air as ever was hummed, in which she longs for her lover to carry her off...

...Exasperated with stock situations and stock characters, he began to seek out unusual ones, and to devise new forms of aria to express their emotions more realistically...

...The development climaxed in Don Carlos (1867), where Verdi put all his innovations to work in three unusual monologues—genuine soliloquies in musical form...

...In Rigoletto, Gilda's "Caronome," with its blooming, high-spirited coloratura, expresses her first love as well as her simplicity, but the trills vanish after her rape and disillusion...

...In // Trovatore, for example, he confronted one of the mold-iest situations in opera—soprano sings narrative aria, is warned by confidante, responds with cabaletta—yet his treatment of the aria is far from routine...

...In both works Verdi allows his characters to wander from idea to idea, bringing an element of psychological realism to opera...

...There had never been anything like it in Italian opera...

...Renato is torn by his lost conjugal happiness and his decision to murder the friend who has stolen his wife's love...

...Verdi easily mastered the manner...

...Nowhere is this more evident than in his handling of aria...

...In Act II, after Azu-cena sings "Stride la vampa," a simple waltz instead of a frilly cabaletta there is a violent narration, "Condotta"—enforced by the orchestration and ending, not in a cadenza, but in a most un-bel canto shriek as she wails over the immolation of her child...

...He solved the problem in Luisa Miller by making the soprano a carefree warbler at the beginning and heightening the stridency of her music as her situation grows more serious...

...It made mincemeat out of the dramaturgy of the plays and novels the operas were based on...

...The throwback to a cliche is necessary to conclude the aria and the scene at the right peak...

...The steps along the way to Verdi's complete mastery of the lyric drama are easy to see...

...The countless versions of his 26 stage works, composed from 1839-93, document Verdi's striving to solve particular problems of dramatic timing and solo expression, his finding the old formal requirements and methods of composition too rigid and his creating, seemingly without effort, something new in operatic history...

...when his fury is spent, he begs for pity in a quietly emotional fashion that, following the outburst, is heartrending...

...Characters in conflict with themselves—who increasingly absorbed Verdi—needed separate arias for each rival feeling...

...Elvira of the early "Ernani, involami" was so one-dimensional that her whole existence could be predicted from that one yearning tune...

...Her turmoil flares up in a desperate theme as she tearfully renounces her dreams and, having run the full register of her mood, resumes her prayer...

...The great scene in the King's study opens with a mournful cello solo that leads to a plangent theme which—recalling the Sleepwalking Scene in Macbeth—permeates the aria yet is never sung...

...Moreover, only a few elemental emotions could be crowded into a single melody...

...The hero oiRigoletto (1851) was violently at odds with tradition—a hunchbacked jester who covertly despises himself—and thus Verdi contrived a new sort of monologue...

...Verdi here achieved his goal—to express emotional complexity in a from true to nature, yet clear to an audience accustomed to the one-tune, one-thought approach...

...In an earlier era she would have sung a single plaintive melody...

...The astute pattern was to be repeated...

...The jump from reflection to action is dramatically effective, as well as thrilling musically...

...By Verdi's day these solos had an all but invariable form: aria paired with a cabaletta...

...With no formal introduction of the melody, Rigoletto launches into a denunciation of the courtiers who have stolen his daughter...

...Although the new-style aria was grand for baritones, in the 1850s sopranos still demanded showpieces, challenging Verdi to use vocal ornament in a manner consistent with the drama...

...For Act II Verdi wrote his first wholly original aria, "Cortigniani...

...It is a measure of his accomplishment that his innovations have passed into the operatic language...

...The situation seems ripe for a melancholy aria followed by a raging cabaletta, but Verdi reverses the order and eliminates the pause, producing a far more effective whole: an impulsive outburst that changes to pensive regret uninterrupted...

...Aida in "Ritorna vincitor" was slightly more complex...

...This flows into a similar, more complete melody as he foresees his lifelong solitude, and finally bursts into a tune, typical of Verdi, entreating God for guidance...

...Yet this stylized convention was in many ways a strait jacket...

...The principal melody merely surrounds the singing, it is itself never vocalized, so there is no place for ornament—only rising tension and barely controlled hysteria...

...Shocking, dazzling, the close of a vocal era...