Good evening ladies and gentlement and let me invite you at the theatre tonight in order to see one of the most beautiful Verdi's operas: Il Trovatore. Here's your favourite bass player speaking and we're ready for the first episode of...
Il Trovatore was first represented in 1853 and, together with Rigoletto and La Traviata, is part of Verdi's Trilogia popolare (Popular trilogy), which is called in this way because the three operas were and still are today loved very much by the audience. It was first represented in Rome and had immediately a huge success. We can understand why: the opera features some of the most beautiful arias and melodies in Verdi's career and it probably is one of the peaks of Verdi's production as a composer.
But Il Trovatore, though very successful among the audiences of all the world, has always been infamous among lots of people above all for its plot, which is really complex, and because it is an opera which is different from its fellows in the Popular Trilogy, being La Traviata and Rigoletto two operas in which we can find a deep look on social issues and a deep psychological analysis on characters, while in Il Trovatore characters have no psychological development during the opera and can appear sometimes a bit stereotyped.
So, is Il Trovatore really "a stupid opera with wonderful music"? I think it isn't and I'll try to show you why.
1. Let's know more about "Il Trovatore"
Il Trovatore was first represented in 1853 and, together with Rigoletto and La Traviata, is part of Verdi's Trilogia popolare (Popular trilogy), which is called in this way because the three operas were and still are today loved very much by the audience. It was first represented in Rome and had immediately a huge success. We can understand why: the opera features some of the most beautiful arias and melodies in Verdi's career and it probably is one of the peaks of Verdi's production as a composer.
But Il Trovatore, though very successful among the audiences of all the world, has always been infamous among lots of people above all for its plot, which is really complex, and because it is an opera which is different from its fellows in the Popular Trilogy, being La Traviata and Rigoletto two operas in which we can find a deep look on social issues and a deep psychological analysis on characters, while in Il Trovatore characters have no psychological development during the opera and can appear sometimes a bit stereotyped.
So, is Il Trovatore really "a stupid opera with wonderful music"? I think it isn't and I'll try to show you why.
2. Historical setting
Il Trovatore, whose libretto was written by Salvatore Cammarano (who died before the end of the composition of the opera) from a play by Spanish writer Antonio Garcia Gutierrez, is set in Spain during the XV Century. In particular, the opera shows a specific moment in the history of Spain which is known as the revolt of the Count of Urgell.
In 1412, after the death of king of Aragon Martin I, many noblemen asked to get the crown. The reason was easy: as it often happened in Middle Ages, the king had died without leaving any heir. So, no royal babies in this story, I'm sorry. Well, between all the noblemen who wanted to be king there was the Count of Urgell, who really wanted the crown, but unfortunately didn't manage to get it.
In fact, in the same year, some representatives of kingdoms of Aragon and Valencia and of the Principality of Catalonia met and decided to give the crown to Fernando I of Aragon. This was called the Compromise of Caspe, from the name of the city in which the meeting took place, and, as you can imagine, the Count of Urgell didn't like this result. So, in 1413 he made a revolt against Fernando. He lost and went to prison, but this is not so important, because our story is set exactly during the few months of Urgell's revolt.
What you need to remember out of all those historical stuffs is that the two main male characters of the opera, Manrico and the Count of Luna, are on the opposite sides in this war: Manrico is part of Urgell's army, while the Count of Luna is allied with Fernando.
3. The characters
The main characters, in this opera, are four, two male characters and two female characters. Let's see who they are:
1) Manrico: he is an officer in the army of the Prince of Urgell. This work gives him a lot of free time, so he spends it in singing under the windows of Leonora, the woman he loves. That's why he's called "il Trovatore", "the Trobadour": the trobadour was a musician who, in Middle Ages, sung and entertained the nobles of the court; trobadours often pretended to be in love with the Lady of the Castle and composed songs and poems in her honour. As we can see, Manrico does not exactly do all this: he simply goes under Leonora's window and play for her, but he composes love songs for her, so probably this is the reason why Verdi and Cammarano call him a trobadour while he clearly isn't.
Manrico has humble origins: he believes to be the son of a gipsy woman, Azucena (even though in the end of the opera we'll know he isn't), and is not a nobleman, while his rival, the Count of Luna, is part of the traditional nobility of Spain. So, Manrico is an outsider, as Rigoletto is in Rigoletto and Violetta in La traviata.
2) The Count of Luna: he's a nobleman, he is a rival to Manrico for the love of Leonora and he is allied with Fernando of Aragon, so he and Manrico are enemies also on the battlefield.
You can see him in the picture, he does not seem a nice guy, does he?
3) Leonora: she is a companion to the Queen of Aragon and so she lives in Saragozza together with the Court of Aragon and the Count of Luna in the Aljaferia Palace. Manrico and the Count love her, she loves only Manrico and we can imagine that this will create some small problems during the opera.
4) Azucena: she is a gipsy woman and she's Manrico's mother or at least that's what we all believe...
4. What happened before: the prequel
There are some operas whose stories need some explanation to be understood. Il Trovatore is not one of them: some explanations wouldn't be enough to understand Il Trovatore's story, what would be really useful would be a prequel, better if it was a Star-Wars-like three-movies prequel. If Mr.George Lucas ever reads this blog, well, I'll ask him to think about it.
So, what's the problem with Il Trovatore's plot? The problem is that a part of the story is not shown on scene and what we know about it is what the characters on scene say about this old story. And this part of the story is not something really unimportant that you can ignore without problems, no, it is something which is very important to know in order to understand what happens on scene. So, you have no excuse: you have to know all about the dark past of Azucena, otherwise many parts of the plot will be quite incomprehensible.
Let's take a look at what happened before. It is nothing difficult, don't worry, just imagine this as one of those Star Wars opening crawls which explain you the story so far and everything will be OK...
A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far faraway called Spain, lived a Count which was called the Count of Luna. Wow, you'll say, we already know him! He is the angry guy with big moustache we've seen some minutes ago!
No, I'm sorry, this Count of Luna is not him. It's his father: in the times we're talking about the angry moustache guy is a young happy non-moustache boy and we won't care very much about him.
Well, the Count of Luna (the father to the moustache guy) has two sons: one is the moustache-man-to-be, the other is a little baby who sleeps all day in his cradle. Everyone is happy but one day the nurse of the little baby finds a gipsy woman sitting next to the cradle of the Count of Luna's son. This gipsy woman is Azucena's mother and, since the baby falls ill after her visit to his cradle, she is accused to be a witch and burnt at stake.
Azucena wants revenge for her mother's death: so, she abducts the Count of Luna's little baby and she wants to burn him but she makes a little mistake and burns her own son instead of the Count of Luna's one. Ooops... this is embarassing, isn't it? And you surely want to know why she does such a terrible mistake: well, the real answer is that there is no answer, which means that nowhere in the libretto Azucena explains how she could confuse two babies and kill the wrong one.
You can choose the explanation you like most...
1) Azucena was short sighted
2) The babies were identical
3) Add here your own explanation
...but the fact is that Azucena's son is dead and the Count's son isn't and he grows up among the gypsies thinking that Azucena is his mother. After some years, that son of the Count of Luna Azucena did not kill has become an officier in the army of the Count of Urgell and he's in love with a woman called Leonora.
Can you guess who he is? Of course, he is Manrico and he's completely unaware of the fact that the Count of Luna he hates (the man with big moustache, son to the Count of Luna who killed Azucena's mother) is actually his brother. The Count of Luna ignores it too and wants to kill Manrico.
This is what happened before the curtain opens to show us the story we'll talk about in our next post about Il Trovatore, in the second episode of A night at the opera.
See you soon!
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