Music in the Theater: Essays on Verdi and Other Composers

203 Pages·1995·15.722 MB·English

by  Pierluigi Petrobelli

MUSIC IN THE THEATER
PRINCETON STUDIES IN OPERA
CAROLYN ABBATE AND ROGER PARKER,
SERIES EDITORS
Reading Opera, edited by Arthur Groos and
Roger Parker (1988)
Puccini's "Turandot": The End of the Great Tradition
by William Ashbrook and Harold Powers (1991)
Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Nanative in the
Nineteenth Century by Carolyn Abbate (1991)
Wagner Androgyne: A Study in Interpretation
by Jean-Jacques Nattiez,
translated by Stewart Spencer (1993)
Music in the Theater: Essays on Verdi and
Other Composers by Pierluigi Petrobelli,
with translations by Roger Parker (1994)
MUSIC IN THE
THEATER
*
ESSAYS ON VERDI AND
OTHER COMPOSERS
Pierluigi Petrobelli
WITH
TRANSLATIONS
BY
Roger Parker
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
PRESS
Copyright © 1994 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, NewJersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,
Chichester, West Sussex
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Petrobelli, Pierluigj.
Music in the theater : essays on Verdi and other composers /
Pierluigi Petrobelli; translated by Roger Parker,
p. cm. — (Princeton studies in opera).
Translated from Italian.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-691- 09134-X
ISDN 0-691-02710-2 (pbk.)
]. Verdi, Giuseppe, 1813-1910. 2. Opera. I. Series.
ML410.V4P28 1994
782.1—dc20 93-3440
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Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet
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3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
A Note on Italian Prosody ix
Introduction 3
1. From Rossini's Mose to Verdi's Nabucco 8
2. Verdi and Don Giovanni: On the Opening Scene of Rigoletto 34
3. Remarks on Verdi's Composing Process 48
4. Thoughts for Alzira 75
5. Toward an Explanation of the Dramatic Structure of Il trovatore
(Translated by William Drabkin) 100
6. Music in the Theater (apropos of Aida, Act III) 113
7. More on the Three "Systems": The First Act of
La Jorza del destine 127
8. Verdi's Musical Thought: An Example from Macbeth 141
9. The Musico-Dramatic Conception of Gluck's Alceste (1767) 153
10. Notes on Bellini's Poetics: Apropos of lpuritani 162
11. Bellini and Paisiello: Further Documents on the Birth of
lpuritani 176

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A NUMBER OF these chapters first appeared in Italian and are published here in
English for the first time: chapter ι first appeared as "Nabucco," in Conferenze
ig66-ig6y (Associazione amici della Scala) (Milan, n.d.), 15—47; chapter 2 as
"Verdi e il Don Giovanni. Osservazioni sulla scena iniziale del Rigoletto," in Atti
delprimo congresso internazionale di studi verdiani (Parma, 1969), 232-46; chapter 3
as "Osservazioni sul processo compositivo in Verdi," in Acta musicologica 43
(1971), 125—43; chapter 4 as "Pensieri per Alzira" in Nuove prospettive nella ricerca
verdiana (Atti del convegno internazionale in occasione della prima del "Rigo­
letto" in edizione critica) (Parma, 1987), 110-24; chapter 9 as "La concezione
drammatico-musicale dell'Alceste (Milan, 1767)," in Gluck in Wien, ed. Gerhard
Croll and Monika Woitas (vol. 1 of Gluck-Studien) (Kassel, 1987), 131—38; chap­
ter 10 as "Note sulla poetica di Bellini. A proposito de Ipuritani," in Muzikoloski
Zbornik, vol. 8 (Ljubljana, 1972), 70-84; and chapter 11 as "Bellini e Paisiello.
Altri documenti sulla nascita dei Puritani," in Il melodramma italiano dellOttocento.
Studi e ricercheper Massimo Mila (Turin, 1977), 351-63. Chapter 5 first appeared
as "Per un'esegesi della struttura drammatica del Trovatore," in Atti del III0 con­
gresso internazionale di studi verdiani (Parma, 1974), 387—400; the present English
translation (by William Drabkin), lightly edited here, appeared in Music Analysis
ι (1982): 129—41. Chapter 6 first appeared in English, in James Redmond, ed.,
Drama, Dance, and Music (Themes in Drama, no. 3) (Cambridge, 1981), 129—42.
The introduction and chapters 7 and 8 are new to this volume.
THE REALIZATION of this book would have been impossible without the help
of colleagues, students, and friends who contributed over the years to the clarifi­
cation of the ideas that form its gist. I remember particularly the reports—and
ensuing discussion—of the students of my first Verdi seminar, at the Graduate
Center of the City University of New York during the fall semester 1970; and
those of the participants in the seminar on the same subject in the Faculty of
Music, University of London, King's College, in 1974. Julian Budden and Frits
Noske have been playing—with patience as well as interest—time and again the
role of touchstone for many hypotheses and assertions, placing at my disposal
their deep knowledge of the repertory as well as their own hypotheses and
conclusions—a particularly rewarding and satisfying intellectual exercise. Walter
Lippincott was extremely receptive from the beginning to the proposal of bring­
ing the project under his editorial wing; Elizabeth Powers, also of Princeton
University Press, has constantly offered in a most graceful manner her edito­
rial—as well as diplomatic—talents; and I am very much indebted to Lauren
Oppenheim, who skillfully and patiently edited this volume. Finally, I would
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
like to express my very special debt of gratitude to Roger Parker. It was his idea
in the first place to publish in the form of a book the essays 1 had written about
musical theater; he introduced me to the publisher and included my text in the
series overseen by him and Carolyn Abbate; and he took upon himself the tire­
some and demanding task of translating into readable English my idiomatic and
often idiosyncratic Italian prose and, especially, stimulated a particularly disper­
sive author to bring to an end the task to which he had committed himself—that
of completing the book. It seems particularly appropriate, then, to dedicate this
volume to him, as well as to Lynden, Matthew, Emma, and Tom, with gratitude
and affection.
Pierluigi Petrobelli
Rome, 8 September 1992
A NOTE ON
ITALIAN PROSODY
FREQUENT reference is made in this book to the metrical structure of Italian
poetry. It seems advisable to summarize briefly for the English-speaking reader
some of its basic features, especially those mentioned more often.
An Italian poetic line is measured by, and named after, its number of syllables
and the position of its final accent. The syllable-count designations are as fol­
lows: quinario (five syllables), senario (six syllables), settenario (seven syllables),
ottonario (eight syllables), novenario (nine syllables; very rare in nineteenth-cen­
tury prosody), decasillabo (ten syllables), and endecasillabo (eleven syllables). A line
is called tronco (truncated) when the accent falls on the last syllable of the final
word: andro, pieta, amor. It is piano (plain)—by far the most frequent cate­
gory—when the accent falls on the penultimate syllable of the final word:
pensiero, fiducia, beato. It is sdrucciolo (slippery) when the accent falls on the
antepenultimate syllable of the final word: sorgono, intrepido.
The standard for measuring a line's syllable length is the verso piano. This
means that a line ending with a tronco word must, for the purposes of assessing
line length, have a syllable added to it, while one ending with a sdrucciolo word
must have a syllable subtracted from it. Thus "Le memorie d'un tempo che fu,"
which has nine syllables but ends with a parola tronca, is described as a kind of
ten-syllable line, a decasillabo tronco. Similarly, "Suoni la tromba, e intrepido,"
which has eight syllables but ends with a parola sdrucciola, is described as a kind
of seven-syllable line, a settenario sdrucciolo.
A further feature concerns the position of the main accents in the line. Lines
with an equal number of syllables may differ according to the position of the
main accents. The distinction is important in order to differentiate between versi
semplici (simple lines) and versi doppi (double lines): a verso doppio is built from two
shorter lines with identical accent structure. Thus "O Signore, dal tetto natio"
and "Vieni d'amore—in sen ripara" both contain ten syllables, but the first is a
decasillabo (accents on the third, sixth, and ninth syllables) whereas the second is
a quinario doppio (accents on the fourth and ninth syllables).
More terminology concerns the various rhyme schemes and broad groupings
of types of verse. Rima alternata is abab cdcd; rima baciata is aa bb cc dd. In poetry for
musical drama there is a clear distinction between recitative and set "numbers"
(arias, duets, choruses, ensembles). Whereas for the set numbers the structure of
the poetic text is ruled by a principle of symmetry (they are built on two or more
verses, all on the same type(s) of verse and rhyme scheme), the standard meter
for recitativo is verso sciolto: settenari and endecasillabi, freely alternated without
rhyme scheme except at the end of a section, which is usually marked by a rima
alternata or rima baciata, with the last line usually a verso tronco.