The story so far: Manrico is in love with Leonora, but the Count of Luna, who is in an enemy to Manrico in the civil war, loves her too. Believing that Manrico is dead, Leonora has decided to become a nun and Manrico is going to rescue her. But he does not know that the Count of Luna has had the same idea and now is in Castellor, where the ceremony during which Leonora will become a nun will take place, and he wants to rescue her too!
As you can see, new fights are going to take place and again the swords will cross. The opera will end as it began, with love, blood and mystery. But let's start from the beginning...
The Count of Luna is now in Castellor, looking for Leonora. He believes Manrico is dead and thinks that now noone could stop him from being engaged with Leonora...
...and he decides to stop and tell us in a wonderful aria that he loves Leonora very much...
...and that noone, "not even a God", can steal Leonora from him:
This seems to me a little bit what you can see in every Disney movie, when the bad guy is sure that he will win and so he says to everyone: "You know, I'm the smartest and most beautiful man on earth, that's why I've won and my rival has lost", but then the hero arrives and he loses everything. Well, this is exactly what happens in this scene, because, after this I-won-and-Manrico-lost aria by the Count of Luna, Manrico arrives and rescues Leonora while she's going to the church where, if he hadn't come, she would have become a nun.
The only thing the Count of Luna can do is what he always do: get angry and shout against Manrico: "Hey, everyone said you were dead, so why are you here?"
Leonora, for her part, didn't like very much the idea of being rescued by the Count of Luna, so she's very happy when Manrico arrives. Thus the second part ends and, when the curtain closes, on scene there is a very angry Count, a very happy Manrico who's going away with Leonora and a very funny fight bethween the supporters of the two men, as we can see in the following video:
Part 3: Il figlio della zingara
But the Count won't have to wait long to have his revenge: in fact, when he returns to his encampment (and he is very angry, as you can imagine), he finds out that his soldiers have arrested a gipsy woman who was wandering near to the camp and who is thought to be a spy. Can you guess who she is? Of course, she's Azucena, and she's immediately recognized by Ferrando, who, as you should remember, said in the first Part that he could recognize the daughter of the woman who was burnt at stake even though many years had passed.
When Azucena understands she has been recognized, she has a wonderful idea: she tells everyone she's Manrico's mother. So, she makes the Count very happy: he condemns her to be burnt at stake, so he can achieve two goals:
1) He can take his revenge on the woman who, he thinks, killed his brother
2) He can take his revenge on Manrico who stole Leonora from him
The news arrives to Manrico, who has just promised eternal love to Leonora, and he has to go and rescue his mother...
...but, before doing that, he sings one of the most famous opera arias of all time: the very well known cabaletta Di quella pira:
Which, you'll agree with me, is a wonderful tune to sing under the shower...
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| To arms! To arms! |
...and which has always been controversial because of its High Cs from the chest. The reason of the controversy is easy to understand if you remember what we said about the Solita forma (if you don't, you can go and see here): in the Solita Forma, the Cabaletta was repeated twice and during the second repetition the singer could change the music by inserting High Cs or grace notes in order to show his vocal ability. And so should singers do in Di quella pira, being Di quella pira a Cabaletta.
But...
But singers made a strange thing, in 1800s: they didn't sing the aria twice, they sang it only once, but they put in it many High Cs and grace notes. And this was the version of this aria which became famous worldwide (for instance, this one-repetition-with-High-Cs version is the version you've heard in the video above, where it is sung by the famous italian singer Mario Del Monaco) and this is a problem, because performing this aria with only one repetition and with High Cs does not mean only doing something which is not what Verdi wanted, but it also implies that the singers and the orchestra don't play all the music there is between the first and the second repetition (because actually there is music between the first and the second repetition, there is a short piece sung by Leonora, as you will hear).
Today, after many critics and conductors, among whom the famous Italian conductor Riccardo Muti, deeply criticized this way of performing Di quella pira, the original version of the aria is performed: the aria is repeated twice and there still are the High Cs from the chest, which are the part of Di quella pira audiences of all the world want to hear in order to judge singer's ability, but singers perform it in the second repetition of the cabaletta.
The "modern" version of Di quella pira sounds like this:
Please appreciate the Eighties Heavy Metal singer dress which Bonisolli wears there. It is quite horrible, isn't it? It makes him look like the singer of Europe, Motley Crue or of any Eighties hair metal group you can think of.
Well, this was the end of Part 3 of Il Trovatore, which was called Il figlio della zingara, the son of the gipsy woman. We're ready now to know how the story ends in Part 4, which is called Il supplizio, "The execution". Any ideas on how the story will end?
Part 4: il supplizio
Manrico fails to rescue his mother and is imprisoned and condemned to death. Leonora tries to save him by promising to marry the Count of Luna...
...but then she kills herself and the Count of Luna gets angry (for the tenth time in the opera) and execute Manrico.
Azucena dies too but, before doing that, she reveals to the Count of Luna that Manrico, who has just died, was his brother and, while she's lead to the place where she will be executed, she cries: "You had your revenge, mother!" That's a good way of taking one's revenge: you make your own son be killed and after he's dead you reveal that he was the brother of the man who killed him. Really well done, Azucena, you're really a genius. Maybe if you had said that a little bit earlier, Manrico could have been saved. But, you know, that's what we said when we talked about Azucena's omission: she has an inner conflict between her love for Manrico and her desire of revenge and at last her desire of revenge wins by making her "forget" to tell everyone in time the truth about Manrico's identity.
I know, the last act of Il Trovatore is a little bit sad: everyone dies, noone is happy (apart from Azucena), everything is destroyed in a second. Well, get used to this, because this is the standard end of Italian non-comic operas: death, sadness, death, sadness and so on. Well, in Il Trovatore we probably have more death and more sadness than in standard operas and that's why many critics said Il Trovatore is the Verdian opera where we can find less hope and more despair. A nihilist opera, if we can say that, and this vision on this opera can be supported by Verdi's own words.
In fact, after the opera was first represented, in 1853, many people said it was too sad and Verdi, in a letter he wrote on the 20th of January (ten days after the first representation of Il Trovatore) to his friend Clara Maffei, tried to explain why he wrote such a sad opera:
Dicono che quest’Opera sia troppo triste e che vi sieno troppe morti ma infine nella vita tutto è morte! Cosa esiste?
They say that this Opera is too sad and that there are too many deaths in it but, at last, in life everything is death! What exists?
(taken from G.Verdi's Lettere, Einaudi, 2012)
So, there is not casual that there are so many deaths in Il Trovatore: they reflect the view of a composer who thought that, at last, everything in life had to come to an end, had to die. Il Trovatore is, at last, an opera about three characters (the Count of Luna, Leonora, Manrico) who deceive themselves, who try to think that the idea that nothing but death exists is not true, who try to believe in love, in politics, but at last are all defeated. Il Trovatore is the story of the end of an illusion and that's why it is a sad story.
One interesting feature in the end of Il Trovatore is the theme of fate: in fact, both Manrico and the Count of Luna are victims of the events which happened when they were very young. Manrico does not die in a duel for Leonora's love, he dies while trying to save his mother that the Count of Luna has condemned to death because of that ancient story and who does not save him by telling everyone the truth because she wants revenge for what happened in that far past. So, the past, as a curse, comes and decides the destiny of the characters. It is something similar to the curse in Rigoletto, if you think about that.
I know, you're all sad right now. Well, luckily, Il Trovatore's Part 4 features one of the most beautiful musical pieces of the opera. And so, we can listen to the music and forget about the sad end of the opera. This is the Miserere:
This Miserere, which you've probably already heard in Marx Brothers' movie A night at the opera and if you haven't you can do this right now by watching the video below (I know, it is in Spanish, I couldn't find on YouTube this scene in English, sorry about that)...
...is very interesting not only because it is wonderful, but also because it tells us something about the way Verdi uses the Solita Forma. In fact, the Miserere is only the Tempo di Mezzo of an Aria whose Cantabile is D'amor sull'ali rosee, which you can hear it in the first half of the first video below, then in the second half you have the Miserere:
This says much about how Verdi used Solita forma: he kept its structure, but he put music where there wasn't and he put theatrical action where it lacked. Recitatives in Donizetti and Bellini operas were musically boring: Verdi filled recitatives with music and often used them to create monologues. We will see it in Rigoletto: during recitatives, the main character thinks, talks and the music follows his thoughts and changes as his thoughts change.
In Tempo di mezzo lacked theatrical action: what happened during it was often very, very simple (a letter arrived, the main character knew that someone wanted to kill him and so on). Verdi used it to make characters interact in ways which were different from traditional duets, quartets and so on (where characters had to sing together at the same time) and from traditional Tempo d'attacco (where characters had to talk between themselves). See for instance the Miserere we've just heard: we have Manrico and Leonora together on stage and they're both singing but
1) They're not singing the same thing at the same moment as in duets
2) They're not talking between themselves as in Tempo d'attacco
Then we have a choir and it sings together with the two characters (it is a choir of people asking God to forgive the souls of the condemned to death), which would have been impossible in a traditional duet or in a Tempo d'attacco.
The effect, both from a musical and a theatrical point of view, is wonderful: the bell tolls and the choir sings its sad prayer, so Leonora expresses the fear which that choir gives to her. Manrico, as Leonora, has heard the choir and he, as Leonora, has a reaction to that: he says that he wants to die and he bids Leonora farewell. The voice of Manrico is heard by Leonora and she says she could faint.
As you can see, there is a very particular interaction among the characters on scene (Manrico, Leonora, the choir) which is very different from the one you can see in a duet and which has a very moving effect on the audience, in particular in the end of the scene, when Manrico says: "Leonora, farewell, don't forget me" and Leonora answers (but Manrico cannot hear her): "I won't".
And on this poetic image of the last farewell of the two lovers our final episode of this series of A night at the opera posts on Il Trovatore ends. But don't be sad: we will talk about other operas and we will talk again soon about Il Trovatore because we'll discover La Vera Storia, an opera which Berio and Calvino wrote trying to make a "modern version" of Il Trovatore.
Stay tuned!
This Miserere, which you've probably already heard in Marx Brothers' movie A night at the opera and if you haven't you can do this right now by watching the video below (I know, it is in Spanish, I couldn't find on YouTube this scene in English, sorry about that)...
...is very interesting not only because it is wonderful, but also because it tells us something about the way Verdi uses the Solita Forma. In fact, the Miserere is only the Tempo di Mezzo of an Aria whose Cantabile is D'amor sull'ali rosee, which you can hear it in the first half of the first video below, then in the second half you have the Miserere:
This says much about how Verdi used Solita forma: he kept its structure, but he put music where there wasn't and he put theatrical action where it lacked. Recitatives in Donizetti and Bellini operas were musically boring: Verdi filled recitatives with music and often used them to create monologues. We will see it in Rigoletto: during recitatives, the main character thinks, talks and the music follows his thoughts and changes as his thoughts change.
In Tempo di mezzo lacked theatrical action: what happened during it was often very, very simple (a letter arrived, the main character knew that someone wanted to kill him and so on). Verdi used it to make characters interact in ways which were different from traditional duets, quartets and so on (where characters had to sing together at the same time) and from traditional Tempo d'attacco (where characters had to talk between themselves). See for instance the Miserere we've just heard: we have Manrico and Leonora together on stage and they're both singing but
1) They're not singing the same thing at the same moment as in duets
2) They're not talking between themselves as in Tempo d'attacco
Then we have a choir and it sings together with the two characters (it is a choir of people asking God to forgive the souls of the condemned to death), which would have been impossible in a traditional duet or in a Tempo d'attacco.
The effect, both from a musical and a theatrical point of view, is wonderful: the bell tolls and the choir sings its sad prayer, so Leonora expresses the fear which that choir gives to her. Manrico, as Leonora, has heard the choir and he, as Leonora, has a reaction to that: he says that he wants to die and he bids Leonora farewell. The voice of Manrico is heard by Leonora and she says she could faint.
As you can see, there is a very particular interaction among the characters on scene (Manrico, Leonora, the choir) which is very different from the one you can see in a duet and which has a very moving effect on the audience, in particular in the end of the scene, when Manrico says: "Leonora, farewell, don't forget me" and Leonora answers (but Manrico cannot hear her): "I won't".
And on this poetic image of the last farewell of the two lovers our final episode of this series of A night at the opera posts on Il Trovatore ends. But don't be sad: we will talk about other operas and we will talk again soon about Il Trovatore because we'll discover La Vera Storia, an opera which Berio and Calvino wrote trying to make a "modern version" of Il Trovatore.
Stay tuned!
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