Life, Love, and Mayhem
Fact and Fantasy
By Romana Annette 03/02/2008
For two centuries, opera served as the motion pictures and television of the age. This is why motion pictures have background music, and why many of us walk around hearing it in our daily lives.
I will deal with a specific type of opera: Italian Opera. Italian opera can be characterized by three elements: amore, morte, and vendetta, or love, death, and revenge. Italians are especially famous for amore, which is why friends always warned husbands to never leave their wives alone with the likes of the famous conductor, Arturo Toscanini.
One of the first types of actual Italian Opera was called Bel Canto, or beautiful singing. People would do the most awful stuff to each other while uttering the most lyrically imaginable tunes.
The three masters of this form were Gioachino Rossini (1792 - 1868), Vincenzo Bellini (1801 - 1835), and Gaetano Donizetti (1797 - 1848.) Bellini and Donizetti were proper composers, who chose to die fairly young, but Rossini would have nothing to do with this idea. Still, if Rossini had not lived to complete William Tell, where would we have gotten the theme music for the Lone Ranger?
While Bellini and Donizetti did write comic operas, Rossini composed mostly comic operas; in which case, the vendetta was more absurd than bloody and often caused members of the audience to double over in laughter.
Donizetti properly combined the three elements into his masterpiece, Lucia di Lammermoor. The usual suspects in all Italian Operas are the tenors, so be warned! Once upon a time, all identified tenors had to register with their local police departments.
It was at the pre-performance lecture that I learned the origin of the best man at a wedding. This was originally the best-man-at-arms, whose job was to keep the groom alive long enough to consummate his marriage.
Lucia, a soprano, was in love with the tenor Edgardo, but she was forced to marry another tenor, Arturo, for political reasons. She did not love that jerk. Lucia had secretly worked out in her gym, learning how to use a dagger. Instead of a peaceful romantic encounter, her bedroom became a bloodbath, with each jab of her hideous blade. She had contracted tenor-itis.
Upon emerging from her chambers, her night gown was covered with blood. But the dagger would not stop; she used it on herself. When Edgardo learned of Lucia’s death, he decided to kill himself. This is a strange reaction for a tenor, considering all the contributors to this disaster, who were still alive and very much in need of retribution.
There could have been a reprise of the famous sextet, where Edgardo walked around the circle dispatching the guilty ones. It does not matter that some characters might officially be dead already, since characters in opera take to long to die anyway.
Giuseppe Verdi (1813 - 1901,) far overshadowed his predecessors, considering that so many of his operas are standards of the modern repertory. Verdi declined to do just beautiful music, in favor of solidly dramatic and melodramatic forms.
Many of Verdi’s famous choruses can be whistled,
and many took on significance far beyond mere choral works. Verdi’s works became rallying points for the reunification
of
Two of Verdi’s operas are mainstays at Seattle Opera. The first is Rigoletto, a story about a pathetic hunchback, that contains the famous La donna è mobile. The second is Il trovatore (The Troubadour,) which contains the equally famous anvil chorus.
When Verdi died suddenly (from a stroke) in 1901, his funeral was supposed to be simple, with his famous Requiem played in the background. However, a crowd of common folk, who lined the route for the hearse, surged to as many as 600,000, far more than any monarch, or ruler in history.
Verdi excelled at merging the three elements: amore, morte, and vendetta. How fortunate it is for us, that our modern civilization has risen above such petty concerns and excesses.
Giacomo Puccini (1858 - 1924) is considered to be the only great successor to Verdi. Puccini strived to compose more realistic operas, in contrast to Verdi, who concentrated on dramatic values.
Puccini also did not carry on the tradition of amore, morte, and vendetta; rather, he seemed more inclined toward amore, morte, and tragedia (tragedy.) Many of Puccini’s characters were heroines who suffered great loss, as well as a failure to prevail.
Three of Puccini’s most
successful operas, especially most performed at Seattle Opera, are La bohème, Tosca, and Madama
Butterfly. These are all about heroines who do not triumph. In La bohème, we have Mimi, the
personable young woman who dies of tuberculosis.
In Tosca, we have a young opera singer who will do anything to save her artist
boyfriend from a tyrant (Scarpia.) She proclaims to undying love for Scarpia,
who agrees to spare her boyfriend. However, after stabbing Scarpia in the back, a firing squad
kills her boyfriend anyway.
In Madama Butterfly, even way back in
1904, we have the ugly American (Pinkerton,) who has no remorse whatsoever over
the clash of culture he has caused. Not
only must Butterfly kill herself because of her (sexual) shame, she must
also give up her infant son.
Few Puccini operas have happy endings. The most notable exception was La fanciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West.)
Such unhappy endings were recently the topic of the Metropolitan Opera Quiz. What if the doctor, for whom they had sent,
had arrived with a miraculous experimental cure for Mimi? What if Tosca had survived her jump off the wall
of the parapet, to lead a revolution against the corrupt regime? And what if Butterfly had been forgiven by her emperor, who transferred the
shame to Pinkerton?
All these endings begged for better closure. Alas, after Wagner’s Ring, the
concept of the sequel was not reinvented until the 1920’s.