"Ma in fine nella vita tutto è morte!"» What does "Il trovatore" tell us?

STUDI VERDIANI

24

istituto nazionale di studi verdianiparma 2014

STUDI VERDIANI 24 (2014)

Direttore responsabile Emilio Sala

Comitato scientifi co Fabrizio Della Seta, Anselm Gerhard, Roger Parker,Alessandro Roccatagliati, Emanuele Senici, Mary Ann Smart

Tutti i saggi pubblicati in questo volume sono stati sottoposti a processo didouble blind peer-review

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© 2014istituto nazionale di studi verdianiStrada M. Melloni, 1/bi–43121 Parmatel e fax 0521/285273http://www.studiverdiani.ite-mail: [email protected]

issn 0393-2532Printed in ItalyAutorizzazione del Tribunale di Parma n. 3 del 17.01.1986

«Ma infi ne nella vita tutto è morte!»What does Il trovatore tell us? *

Fabrizio Della Seta

To Franco Piperno for his 60 years, and 40 years of friendship

«Th e music that makes one want to cry», he called it, and he always wanted it played at a volume that jarred my eardrums and severely taxed the capacity of the tape recorder.1

Not long ago I had occasion to say that Il trovatore «is the most dif-fi cult opera to analyze in the whole canon».2 I certainly did not have in mind any diffi culty in grasping the musical ideas and following the way they are interlinked. Th is is aft er all one of the best-loved operas of all: it contains some of the most irresistible, most oft en heard melodies in the whole operatic repertoire. Rather, I was referring to the diffi culty of identifying a message or a meaning. What does Il trovatore “speak to us about”? To some this may seem a non-problem, but not to anyone who believes that every great work of art interrogates us about the funda-mental truths of human existence. However, while nobody, for example,

* Th is article was presented at the conference Un duplice anniversario: Giuseppe Verdi e Richard Wagner (1813-2013), Milan, Teatro alla Scala, Ridotto dei palchi “Arturo Toscanini”, January 25, 2013, and is forthcoming in the proceedings of the conference. I am grateful to the Istituto Lombardo Accademia di Scienze e Lettere for the permission to publish this English version of the article.

1 Th us the Utku leader Inuttiaq, speaking of Il trovatore, as reported by Jean L. Briggs, Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family, Cambridge (ma), Harvard Uni-versity Press, 1970, p. 154.

2 Fabrizio Della Seta, Not without Madness: Perspectives on Opera, trans. Mark Weir, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2013, p. 7.

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has any doubts that Rigoletto and La traviata speak to us about injustice and justice, oppression and redemption, egoism and sacrifi ce, when one tries to answer this question about Il trovatore, it is like trying to grapple with on an octopus: its tentacles slip out of your grasp in every direction. Th is emerges quite clearly if you go back over the critical literature on this opera; there is plenty of it, and even in recent years there have been signifi cant contributions from some of the leading opera scholars.3 Each has had important and well grounded things to say about Il trovatore, and yet I am left with the impression that something remains unsaid, that the vision is only partial. I really do not feel that this is the case for any other opera by Verdi, or indeed by any other composer.

It will be helpful to recapitulate briefl y the principal critical perspec-tives that have succeeded one another in the history of the reception of Il trovatore. Originally, let us say at the beginning of the 20th century, the problem of interpreting the opera “as a drama” was not even con-sidered. In a cultural climate still under the infl uence of Wagnerism, it was taken to be emblematic of a form of popular entertainment that was did not deserve to be considered as “great art”, a marionette theatre whose appeal lay in its catchy melodies. Th is negative evaluation, which became increasingly untenable in the light not only of the opera’s endur-ing popularity with vast audiences but also of the irresistible attraction it

3 See in particular: Pierluigi Petrobelli, Toward an Explanation of the Dramatic Structure of “Il trovatore” (1974), now in his Music in the Th eater: Essays on Verdi and Other Composers, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1994, pp. 100-112; Julian Bud-den, Th e Operas of Verdi, 3 vols., London, Cassell, 1978, ii (From “Il trovatore” to “La forza del Destino”), pp. 57-112; William Drabkin, Characters, Key Relations and Tonal Structure in “Il trovatore”, in «Music Analysis», 1 (1982), pp. 143-153; Roger Parker, Th e Dramatic Structure of “Il trovatore”, ibid., pp. 155-167; Anselm Gerhard, Dalla fatalità all’ossessione: “Il trovatore” fra mélodrame parigino e opera moderna, in «Studi verdiani», 10 (1994-1995), pp. 61-66; James Hepokoski, “Ottocento” Opera as Cultural Drama: Ge-neric Mixtures in “Il trovatore”, in Verdi’s Middle Period (1849–1859), ed. Martin Chusid, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1997, pp. 147-196; Martin Chusid, A New Source for “El trovador” and Its Implications for the Tonal Organization of “Il trovatore”, ibid., pp. 207-225; Paolo Gallarati, Lettura del “Trovatore”, Torino, Libreria Stampatori, 2002; Pau Monterde, Sulle canzoni di Azucena e Manrico nel “Trovatore”, in «Studi verdiani», 18 (2004), pp. 11-26; Wolfgang Osthoff, “Il trovatore”. Seine dramatisch-musikalische Einheit und seine tragische Hauptgestalt: Azucena, in «Studi verdiani», 19 (2005), pp. 58-106; Anselm Gerhard, Giuseppe Verdi, München, Beck, 2012, pp. 70-73; M. Chusid, Verdi’s “Il trovatore”: Th e Quintessential Italian Melodrama, Rochester (ny), University of Rochester Press, 2012; Guido Paduano, TuttoVerdi. Programma di sala, Torino, edt, 2013, pp. 89-95.

«ma infine nella vita tutto è morte!» 13

always exerted on sophisticated intellectuals,4 was famously overturned – without however actually contradicting the premises – by the German Verdi-Renaissance in the 1920s 5 and, in Italy, by Bruno Barilli, who as-serted that Verdi «raggiunse con una immediatezza tutta meridionale il culmine più eccelso della bellezza proprio nel Trovatore».6 Th is concep-tion (which today grates on account of its nationalistic and irrationalistic implications, but which at the time had its raison d’être) was immediately countered by a viewpoint which we can call “idealistic”, best represented, as early as 1933, by Mila:

Proprio il Trovatore […] non richiede neppure un particolareggiato esa-me di ogni scena: una sommaria divisione del buono e del cattivo si ha quando si pensi che la vera vita di quest’opera non sta nell’intreccio amoroso di Manrico, Leonora e il Conte di Luna, ma nel tocco di colore zingaresco che aureola foscamente le fi gure di Manrico e Azucena. Se si aggiunge a questo elemento la gran scena del Miserere […] avremo po-sto da un lato tutto ciò che veramente vive nell’opera: naturalmente non si esclude che anche nel resto non si trovino felici intuizioni musicali, e che questo stesso settore felice languisca a volte in banalità, ma si tratta di particolari che non intaccano l’unità della concezione drammatica, tesa sulla fi gura di Azucena.7

4 Martha Nussbaum, commenting on Utku’s opinion cited at the beginning of this article, observes: «it is obvious, too, that certain sophisticated works are easier to enjoy than others […]. But the fact that certain works are relatively easily decoded does not imply that there is no learning required, or that the code is universal» (Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Th ought: Th e Intelligence of Emotions, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 263). On the use Nussbaum makes of Briggs’ account, see Lorenzo Bianconi, La forma musicale come scuola dei sentimenti, in Educazione mu-sicale e formazione, a cura di Giuseppina La Face Bianconi e Franco Frabboni, Milano, Angeli, 2008, pp. 85-120, in particular pp. 114-116 (also on line: <http://www.saggiatore-musicale.it/saggem/ricerca/bibliografi a/Bianconi 2008.pdf>).

5 See for example Herbert Gerigk, Giuseppe Verdi, Potsdam, Athenaion, 1935, pp. 85-87.

6 Bruno Barilli, Il paese del melodramma [1930], Milano, Adelphi («Piccola Bi-blioteca», 444), 20002, p. 20. [attained with an immediacy that is wholly characteristic of the South the most sublime heights of beauty precisely in Il trovatore.]

7 Massimo Mila, Il melodramma di Verdi, Bari, Laterza, 1933; then in his L’arte di Verdi, Torino, Einaudi («Saggi», 627), 1980, pp. 3-82: 38. [Precisely Il trovatore […] does not even require a detailed examination of each scene; one gets a summary division into the good and the bad when you think that the beating heart of the opera lies not in the love story involving Manrico, Leonora and the Conte di Luna, but in the rather somber gypsy aura that envelops the fi gures of Manrico and Azucena. If one adds to this the great scene of the Miserere […] we shall have put on one side everything that really lives in the opera: of course this is not to say that there are no felicitous musical

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It is clear how this opinion presupposes an ideal type of Verdian opera, represented primarily by Rigoletto, Traviata and above all Otello. In practice this derives from a Romantic-Naturalist idea of theatre whereby only what is based on the alleged psychological truth of the character is to be considered true drama. But, apart from the fact that we no longer subscribe to such a conception of theatre, can a reading which, in the wake of Croce, assigns a quarter of the opera to the realm of poetry, relegating the remaining three quarters to the domain of a conventional and, apparently, tedious structure, really be satisfactory?

In any case the centrality of Azucena remained a touchstone in the subsequent critical history.8 It is also borne out by a much-quoted obser-vation by Verdi himself:

Parmi […] che sopratutto Azucena non conservi il suo carattere strano e nuovo: parmi che le due grandi passioni di questa donna Amor fi gliale, e amor materno non vi siano più in tutta la loro potenza.9

Verdi does not claim that Azucena is the keystone of the whole drama: he limits himself to describing the interior confl ict which defi nes the character. Th ere is however another claim, this time by Cammarano, which has not been given its due recognition: «Principalissimo interes-se di questo Dramma si è che un fratello uccide l’altro».10 Th is should surely have been enough to arouse suspicions that the opera’s dramatic system is more complex than people thought, and that the love story is not merely a conventional relic framing a modern psychological drama.

Th e problem was radically readdressed by Gabriele Baldini.11 In the wake of his interpretation Il trovatore came to be seen as, certainly, a dra-matic masterpiece, but one which exemplifi es a type of drama in which

intuitions also in the rest of it, nor that this successful aspect does not occasionally descend into banality, but these are details which do not impinge on the unity of the dramatic conception, based on the fi gure of Azucena.]

8 See in particular W. Osthoff, “Il trovatore”.9 Carteggio Verdi-Cammarano (1843-1852), a cura di Carlo Matteo Mossa, Parma,

Istituto nazionale di studi verdiani, 2001 (henceforth: CVC), pp. 189-192 (letter of April 9, 1851): 190. [It seems to me […] that above all Azucena does not maintain her strange new character: I would say that the two great passions of this woman, fi lial love and maternal love, are no longer there in all their potency.]

10 CVC, pp. 195-199 (letter of April 26, 1851): 197. [Th e pre-eminent interest of this drama lies in the fact that one of the brothers kills the other]. An exception is W. Osthoff, “Il trovatore”, p. 104.

11 Gabriele Baldini, Th e Story of Giuseppe Verdi, trans. Roger Parker, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1980 (original ed.: Abitare la battaglia. La storia di Giu-seppe Verdi, a cura di Fedele d’Amico, Milano, Garzanti, 1970), pp. 209-230.


the constellation of characters has to be seen as a system of “purely musi-cal” signs and relations, and thus to be investigated with the tools per-taining to musical analysis, relegating the data provided by the libretto to a secondary status. I believe I have already convincingly demonstrated elsewhere that this approach was based on an erroneous interpretation of Baldini’s position.12 Th is is not to deny that the studies I am referring to 13 have produced substantial results; but the fact remains that, in them, it is still unclear what is really meant by “drama”. Besides, there is one singular fact which suggests that the libretto of Il trovatore cannot readily be set aside: the extraordinarily lengthy period of its gestation, two and a half years, for which there is no parallel in any opera of the time. Th us it is only right that I should start from this, I hope without falling into methods of interpretation now regarded as superseded. Th e libretto has to be considered not as a merely literary object or as a complete drama for which the music stands as the illustration, but as a partial text which is in itself musical, in the sense that Verdi succeeded in having it put together in the form we know it starting from a musical idea of the opera which would grow out of it.

An old cliché concerning the libretto of Il trovatore concerns its obscurity, in particular the fact that most of the story refers to prior events which are not seen on stage but merely evoked, thus remaining incomprehensible.14 Th is accusation was rejected by Baldini:

Verdi fi nally encountered the perfect musical libretto, a text which fully allowed for the musical life of his characters and for that alone; essen-tially a phantom libretto, which became completely engulfed by the music and, once the opera was fi nished, disappeared as an individual

12 See F. Della Seta, Not without Madness, pp. 213-223 (Chap. 12, Gabriele Baldini on Verdi).

13 Among the writings cited in footnote 3, see in particular those of Petrobelli, Drabkin, Parker, and Chusid, to which should be added a number of important essays by Harold S. Powers not directly related to Il trovatore.

14 Th e cliché is summarized by G. Paduano, TuttoVerdi, pp. 90-91: «La mitologia del Trovatore parla di un libretto astruso e sconclusionato, utile a screditare per anto-nomasia il teatro musicale. In parte questo giudizio è frutto di pigrizie e supponenze; in parte però rifl ette un’autenticità specifi ca di quest’opera, esprimibile nella bizzarra formula per cui ciò che accade in essa non è rilevante per i suoi signifi cati: la rappresen-tazione cioè degli aff etti essenziali, l’eros e l’amore materno […]. […] neanche le anti-nomie più nette che ne derivano scalfi scono la loro aff ermazione estrema e categorica. […] la situazione del Trovatore non nasce dal loro confl itto, ma dalla contemporanea presunzione di totalità che ognuno di essi avanza in riferimento alla medesima fun-zione tenorile, mai apparsa così fragile» [In Il trovatore mythology this is viewed as an

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entity. Th e libretto of Il trovatore did in fact disappear, and nobody has ever succeeded in tracing it. One can say of no other Verdi opera that the libretto fails to narrate […]. It is a very special quality of this distin-guished text, and derives not so much from individual complications as from the extremely elusive nature of the characters and events outside their musical setting […]. Th e libretto mechanism which allows us to understand the type of relationship between the mezzo and the tenor and baritone is brilliant, even though the events of the plot are never fully grasped. But the nature of a relationship can be expressed in mu-sic, while events cannot. Here we have a tangled confusion of love and hate in which, as always in Verdi, eroticism is mixed with family ties.15

So rather than contesting the cliché, Baldini gives it a completely diff erent meaning. Th is said, it has to be added that in a literal sense this is not actually strictly true. In reality the progression of the events in the story is perfectly clear from a certain point, precisely from act ii scene 2, when the messenger arrives to announce Leonora’s imminent taking of the veil. From this moment onwards the action proceeds apace, almost as comprehensibly as in any other of Verdi’s operas. Th e obscurity lies in the fi rst part, and depends not on the fact that the prior events are nar-rated – this is certainly not the sole such case – but on the very nature of these events. In practice there are two aspects to this question.

First: who is Manrico? According to Azucena’s fi nal words he is the son of the old Count of Luna and brother of the young Count, abducted from the cradle. In this way his death, albeit involuntarily,16 fulfi ls the

abstruse and rambling libretto, just what is needed to discredit opera as a whole. In part this merely betrays haughtiness and laziness; but it does also refl ect one specifi c feature of this opera, which we may express by saying, rather bizarrely: what happens in it has no importance for its meaning, i.e. the representation of the essential sentiments, eros and motherly love […]. […] Not even the most strident contrasts that ensue supersede their extreme, categorical affi rmation. […] Th e situation in Il trovatore does not derive from their confl ict but from the presumption of totality claimed by each one with re-spect to the very function of the tenor, which has never appeared more fragile].

15 G. Baldini, Th e Story of Giuseppe Verdi, pp. 210-212. Even in recent times, and still misunderstanding Baldini’s thought, this reading was vigorously opposed by W. Osthoff, “Il trovatore”, p. 59.

16 Involuntary only in the libretto. In the Spanish drama (here cited from Anto-nio García Gutiérrez, Il trovatore, introduzione e traduzione [with parallel original text] di Marina Partesotti, presentazione di Piero Menarini, Firenze, Aletheia, 2001), Azucena tries in extremis, begging forgiveness from the spirit of her mother, to prevent the execution of Manrique; when this has taken place, she apostrophizes Don Nuño in this way: «¡Sì, sì… luces… él es: tu hermano, imbécil! … ¡Ya estás vengada!» (ibid., p. 206). In a note to Cammarano, Verdi translated these words almost verbatim: «Morto


gypsy’s vendetta. On the other hand, the gypsy actually regards Manrico as her son: she adopted him aft er inadvertently burning her own child, and she even “regenerated” him by saving his life on the battlefi eld.17

But is this really the way things stand? I am not suggesting that Azu-cena is deliberately lying, but it is appropriate to recall that, within the text, everything we know about Manrico comes exclusively from her, the protagonist and sole witness of the atrocious event.18 According to a hypothesis which, I admit, is not confi rmed but nor yet contradicted by any element in the text, she could have killed the noble infant herself. Aft er which, by means of a mechanism of emotional transfer nurtured by remorse («Ei distruggeasi in pianto… / io mi sentiva il cor dilanïato,

Manrico il sentimento della vendetta diviene gigante, e dice con esaltazione… Sì Luci luci egli è tuo fratello… Stolto!… Sei vendicata o madre!!» (letter of April 9, 1851, in CVC, pp. 189-192: 191) [Manrico dead, the urge for vendetta becomes overwhelming, and cries… Yes, lights, lights he is your brother… Stupid!… Mother, you are avenged!!]. In his “programma”, written at the beginning of April, Cammarano had eliminated the dilemma of Azucena, saving only a part of the last line: «Ah! Che facesti?… Egli era… tuo fratello!» (CVC, pp. 183-188: 187) [Oh! What have you done?… He was… your brother!]. On April 4, Verdi observed: «La Gitana non salva sé e Manrique perché sua madre sul rogo le aveva indicato “Vendicami”» (CVC, pp. 188-189: 188) [Th e Gypsy does not save herself and Manrico because her mother, from the stake, had ordered to her: “Avenge me”]; to which the poet replied on 26: «La mia Azucena […] ha il ticchio della vendetta, e non potendo meglio, vuol godere del martirio di De Luna, rammentandogli l’orrenda morte del fratello. […] Un altro tratto mi parve che mancasse nell’originale e ve lo aggiunsi; quello col quale Azucena, anche in mezzo allo scompiglio delle sue idee, rammenta che può salvare Manrique: il pensiero di perderlo col suo silenzio (pensiero d’altronde troppo orribile) abbiam già veduto non esistere nello spagnuolo, e però cre-do aver riempiuta una lacuna» (CVC, pp. 195-199: 197-198) [My Azucena […] has a thing about revenge, and being unable to do any better, wants to savour De Luna’s martyr-dom, recalling the horrendous death of her brother. […] It seemed to me that one other touch was missing in the original, and I added it for you; the way Azucena, even amidst her derangement, remembers she can save Manrique: we have already seen that the thought of losing him by remaining silent (truly too terrible a thought) does not exist in the Spanish, and I feel I have fi lled a gap]. Th is statement is not, as mentioned above, quite true, but here Cammarano is referring to the fi rst scene of the third act, rather than to the end of the opera. To sum up, the whole issue was the subject of careful consi-deration; this makes the vagueness of the libretto on this point all the more interesting.

17 See G. Paduano, TuttoVerdi, p. 94.18 Th is specifi cation is fundamental for the following reasoning: when I speak of

“truth”, I always mean the one that exists “within the text”, the only one that matters in a fi ctional speech; with respect to the imaginary world in which the characters live, what the authors possibly thought about their “reality” has no relevance (see below, fn. 20). Only in some cases may this be fortuitously documented, and in any case the audience will not necessarily know it.

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infranto!…»),19 she could have shift ed onto her natural son the identity of the other, so successfully that the young gypsy grew up with an irre-sistible vocation to become knight, military commander and the para-mour of highborn women. Such a process of involuntary identifi cation could also be invoked for the fact that Manrico saved the Count’s life, held back both by an arcane impulse («un moto arcano») and by an in-junction shouted from the heavens: «non ferir!». Th us from her point of view Azucena is telling the truth when she reassures Manrico that he is her son and when she shouts at the Count: «Egli era tuo fratello!». Rather, it is Manrico’s question which is strange: «Non son tuo fi glio?… E chi son io? chi dunque?…». If he refuses to take into consideration the possibility of being the rescued boy, his question should have been: “Well in that case, what became of the Count’s son?”. In fact one cannot understand why Azucena should not have had another, “real” child.20

Secondly: during the opera Manrico and the Count clash three times, at the end of each of the fi rst three acts. But when and how have they

19 Th e libretto of Il trovatore is cited from Libretti d’opera italiani dal Seicento al Novecento, a cura di Giovanna Gronda e Paolo Fabbri, Milano, Mondadori («I Meri-diani»), 1997, pp. 1365-1404. For English translation see Seven Verdi Librettos. With the Original Italian, ed. William Weaver, New York-London, Norton, 1975, pp. 69-179. For the musical text, see Giuseppe Verdi, “Il trovatore”. Dramma in quattro parti, libret-to di Salvatore Cammarano, 2 vols. (Score + Critical Commentary), ed. David Lawton, Chicago, University of Chicago Press (Th e Works of / Le opere di Giuseppe Verdi, s. 1, vol. 18a), 1992. Th is critical edition documents the many changes introduced by the composer in the poetic text; I will mention these variants when important in the con-text of this essay.

20 «It is important that Manrico is unsure whether he is really her son; it is impor-tant that Azucena continually contradicts herself on this matter; it is important that she feels like a projection of another mother, of another gypsy who found herself in a similar situation on which must now be placed the seal of revenge; but it is above all important that whoever hears this dazzlingly clear music continually superimposes one character on another, and never separates their individual moulds» (G. Baldini, Th e Story of Giuseppe Verdi, pp. 221-222). In fact, there is a clue that Azucena is aware of ly-ing: the stage direction according to which she responds to Manrico: «Tu sei mio fi glio! (con la sollecitudine di chi cerca emendare involontario fallo)» [You are my son! (with the circumspection of someone trying to remedy an involuntary slip)]. But, apart from the fact that even this textual clue can be placed in the interplay between truth and fi ction that distinguishes the character (see below), it seems to me quite revealing of a concern of the librettist. On April 4, 1851, Verdi observed: «È vero che la Gitana fa intendere che Man-rique non è suo fi glio, ma è una parola che le sfugge nel racconto e che la ritira sì presto che il Trovatore, lontano dal pensare cosa simile, non può credere sia quella una verità» (CVC, pp 188-189: 188) [It’s true that the Gypsy gives Manrique to understand that he is not her son, but only in a word that slips out during her narrative, and she corrects


clashed in the past? In the Spanish play the succession is clear. Th ere were two single duels, the fi rst of which, recalled by members of the family (i, 1), took place some time before the beginning of the action: «poco duró el combate: la espada del conde cayó a los pies de su rival, y, un momento después, ya non había un alma en todo el jardín».21 (Th ere is no sign of strange pities, arcane impulses and voices from on high.) We witness the second (i, 5) up until the moment when the two make off brandishing their swords, as in the fi rst act of the opera; subse-quently (ii, 1) we learn, again from family members, that Don Nuño was wounded. In the meantime a year has gone by, during which the battle of Velilla has taken place (referred to in ii, 1, 4 and 7), where Don Manrique was believed to have died; but in reality he was not on the battle fi eld, being at the time in Castile, and thus he was never wounded or saved by Azucena.

Th e wounding of Manrico – like his «strana pietà» [strange pity] – was introduced by Cammarano and Verdi. It led to a discussion as to whether it happened during the duel (for them only one, not two) or in battle.22 Verdi got his way but, as the poet rightly foresaw,23 the result is

herself so quickly that the Troubadour, far from thinking any such thing, cannot believe that this is the truth]; the fact remains that in the score he substituted the stage direc-tion with an elusive «interrompendo» [interrupting]. Similarly he corrected Azucena’s revealing slip, «col fi glio… teco in braccio» [with the son… with you in my arms], with the more neutral «col fi glio… sulle braccia» [with the son… in my arms]. See also Cam-marano’s punctilious discussion of the matter in his letter of April 26, 1851 (CVC, pp. 195-199: 197), in particular: «Quando Azucena non ragiona, ragiona meglio il Dramma» [When Azucena does not reason the Drama reasons better]. On the contrary, the Span-ish text lacks any ambiguity, and the dialogue is carried out in a completely logical way: «Manrique: ¡Vuestro hijo! Pues ¿quién soy yo, quién?… Todo lo veo. Azucena: ¿Te he dicho que había quemado á mi hijo?… No…; he querido burlarme de tu ambición… Tú eres mi hijo» (A. García Gutiérrez, Il trovatore, pp. 122 and 124) [Manrique: Your son! Well then, who am I, who?… I see everything. Azucena: Did I tell you that I burnt my son?… No…. I wanted to make fun of your ambition… You are my son].

21 Ibid., p. 74. [Th e combat did not last long: the Count’s sword fell at the feet of his rival and, a moment later, there was no one in the garden.]

22 See CVC, pp. 183-188 (Cammarano’s “programma”): 185 (account of the wound-ing in the duel) and 190 (Verdi: «non amerei che il Trovatore restasse ferito nel Duello» [I wouldn’t want the Troubadour to be wounded in the Duel]; «Trovatore ferito in bat-taglia» [Troubadour wounded in battle]).

23 Ibid., p. 195: «Manrique ferito in duello annoda meglio la seconda Parte alla pri-ma, e non astringe a cercare altre cagioni ed altri schiarimenti per motivare la supposta morte di lui» [Manrique wounded in a duel links the second Part better to the fi rst, and does not require coming up with other reasons and circumstances to motivate his supposed death].

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not easily grasped either in the text or, above all, in the staging. As the curtain falls on act i we see Manrico and the Count about to fi ght; at the beginning of the second act we fi nd a wounded Manrico being treated by his mother. Given the immediate concatenation of events it is only logical to suppose that the wounding occurred during the duel. Later on we learn that Leonora was «tratta in inganno di tua morte al grido» [deceived by the cry of your dead]. Since she was physically close to the venue of the duel, we are led to think that she did in fact hear Manrico’s shout as he fell to the ground. But a careful reading of one of the most hyper-literary passages in the libretto, declaimed in a recitative to be delivered “molto presto”, tells us that Manrico was actually wounded «nei pugnati campi / di Pelilla, ove spento fama / ti disse» [over the bat-tlefi elds / of Pelilla, were the story was / that you were dead], and where Azucena set out «notturna» [at night] to give him burial. Th us we realise that the «grido» [literally: shout] which Leonora heard was actually, in the fi gurative sense, the news or rumour. Whereas «nel singolar cer-tame» [in the single combat], which took place some time before the pitched battle, Manrico had triumphed, while nonetheless sparing the Count’s life. On the page everything tallies, but there is still something that remains unclear. Again we can ask why at the end of act ii, when Manrico has his rival in his power, not only does he again spare his life – contravening the oath he had lately sworn to his mother – but does not even take him prisoner, as his duty as military commander required? 24 (Once again the problem only concerns the opera, since in the Spanish play the abduction of Leonor goes very diff erently.)

All this may seem of little practical help in understanding the story, but we know that the temporal structure is an important aspect in de-termining the sense of a dramatic work and, rather than dismissing the plot of Il trovatore as absurd, it is appropriate to take its “absurdity” as an element to be interpreted. Not that the authors themselves deliberately set out to make it “absurd”: rather, it is the outcome of a mediation between diff erent visions, to which was added, as usual, the diffi culty of condensing the complex original story and the need to circumvent the predictable objections of the censors. But all this belongs to the genetic

24 Th ere is an answer in a fi rst draft of the libretto, in which the Finale of the second act envisaged a stretta with the following lines for Manrico: «Sia respinto quest’uomo insensato… / Morte invano egli spera da me… / Vivi, e renda il sapermi beato / Un supplizio la vita per te» (letter of August 23, 1851, ibid., pp. 212-220: 219) [Away with this madman… / He hopes in vain for death at my hand… / Live, so that knowing I am happy / Becomes a lifelong punishment for you].


history of the text; once this text was completed, the obscurity became a structural feature of the opera, and we have to approach it as such.

It is once again Baldini who comes to our aid, not in his analysis of Il trovatore but in something he wrote about his own posthumous “drama” Selva e torrente, which he claimed was the fulfi llment of his own youthful dream «to write operas in the style of Bellini Verdi Wagner and Strauss»:

Th e time sequence, as has been noted several times in the course of the drama, does not correspond to a conventional chronological succession. Th e scenes that are conjured up follow one another according to rules quite diff erent from those of chronology. Everything that cannot be un-derstood, all the accounts that do not add up are there by the author’s express wish; not for the sake of the outlandish, but because it really see-med that such matters had no importance in this type of composition.25

Read in this perspective, the obscure plot of Il trovatore, far from being the result of a compromise, seems deliberately to avoid the narrative linearity of the “classic” drama, whereby events follow one another irre-versibly according to a causal linkage, in favour of a sort of space-time in which each event is collocated prior to or following every other event and which can therefore be retraced to infi nity.26 Instead of attempting to establish the exact succession of the clashes between Manrico and the Count, we could say that they clashed – and are destined to clash again – any number of times. Th is type of cyclical temporal structure is characteristic of the tale belonging to oral tradition in its various mani-festations as myth, legend or fable.27 Th us we can identify the peculiarity

25 G. Baldini, Selva e torrente, Torino, Einaudi («I coralli», 262), 1970, p. 138, as translated and commented in F. Della Seta, Not without Madness, p. 223.

26 See for example P. Gallarati, Il melodramma ri-creato. Verdi e la “trilogia po-polare”, in Finché non splende in ciel notturna face. Studi in memoria di Francesco De-grada, a cura di Cesare Fertonani, Emilio Sala e Claudio Toscani, Milano, led, 2009, pp. 171-185, and in particular 174: «il tempo nel Trovatore […] non è quello empirico dei fenomeni, ma quello metafi sico dell’immaginazione. Qui non contano tanto i fatti ma le visioni che, sorprendentemente, si avverano, cancellando la diff erenza tra passato, presente e futuro» [Time in Il trovatore […] is not the empirical time of phenomena, but the metaphysical one of the imagination. Here it’s not the facts that count but the visions which, surprisingly, come true, cancelling the diff erence between past, present and future].

27 Th e relationship of identity or diversity between these diff erent forms of narrative has been and is the subject of lively debate. See the discussion between Lévi-Strauss and Propp in Vladimir Propp, Th eory and History of Folklore, Minnesota, University of Minnesota Press, 1984, pp. 183-184.

22 della seta

of Il trovatore in the fact that it is a reproposal in operatic form of a tra-ditional theme, as has sometimes been expressed by singling out aspects of legend or tragic fable.28

Th ere is no lack of themes associated with fable in Il trovatore: for example that of the son removed from the cradle and believed dead. In the twentieth century Pirandello wrote a novella based on it (Le nonne, 1902, reworked as Il fi glio cambiato, 1925) and subsequently a libretto for an ope-ra by Gian Francesco Malipiero, La favola del fi glio cambiato (1932-1933). In the intervening years he also incorporated the fable into his “myth” I giganti della montagna.29 And as a matter of fact, also the ogre in Little Poucet kills his daughters by mistake, instead of the hero and his brothers.

One theme which recurs again and again in the myths, legends and literatures of all eras and peoples is that of the “rival brothers”.30 Among

28 Th e widespread notion of Il trovatore as epic-legendary narrative underlies Lu-ciano Berio’s reinterpretation of it in La vera storia (1982). In a letter to Vittorio Ser-monti of January 10, 1975, Berio describes what happens in the fi rst part of his coming opera as «la rappresentazione di una lunga e complessa ballata sulla vicenda del “Tro-vatore”» [the representation of a long and complex ballade on the story of Il trovatore]; the second part, instead, will be a «ballata scenica di una ballata di una ballata…» [a scenic ballade of a ballade of a ballade…]» (published in Michele Girardi, “Il tro-vatore” nel 1982 secondo Berio, Calvino e Sermonti in “La vera storia”, in Verdi 2001. Atti del Convegno internazionale / Procedings of the International Conference (Parma - New York - New Haven, 24 gennaio - 1° febbraio 2001), 2 voll., a cura di Fabrizio Della Seta, Roberta Montemorra Marvin e Marco Marica, Firenze, Olschki [«Historiae mu-sicae cultores», xciv], 2003, ii, pp. 443-460: 458). See also Luca Zoppelli, Dramaturgie structurale? Nouvelles observations sur le rapport entre “La vera storia” et “Il trovatore”, paper read at the third session of the conference cycle Dramaturgie musicale contem-poraine en Europe – Le théâtre musical de Luciano Berio”, Paris, Université de Paris 8, November 18, 2011 (can be read on line at: <http://www2.univ-paris8.fr/DMCE/page.php?page=9#LVS>).

29 See Luigi Pirandello, Maschere nude, 4 voll., a cura di Alessandro d’Amico, con la collaborazione di Alessandro Tinterri, Milano, Mondadori, 2007 («I Meridia-ni»), iv, p. 721.

30 Th e notion that «brothers have the same logic as enemies» belonged to the po-pular wisdom of the ancient world: «For they do not assist but rather harm, just as enemies do, too, since that which one would have had to oneself one will not have to oneself but rather possess in a half or third measure with his brothers» (Artemido-rus’ Oneirocritica: Text, Translation, and Commentary, ed. Daniel E. Harris-McCoy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 361). A large number of variations on this theme in Western literature, from Hesiod to Steinbeck (East of Eden), are presented in Elisabeth Frenzel, Motive der Weltliteratur. Ein Lexikon dichtungsgeschichtlicher Längsschnitte, Stuttgart, Kröner, 1976, pp. 80-94. In the fi eld of psychoanalysis there are two recent studies: Luis Kancyper, El complejo fraterno. Estudio psychoanalitico, Buenos Aires, Lumen, 2004; René Kaës, Le complexe fraternel, Paris, Dunod, 2008.


the innumerable variants one is of particular interest to us: when the brothers clash and kill each other – or one kills the other – for love of the same woman 31 (in the world of opera one immediately thinks of Pelléas et Mélisande, a timeless dramatic legend). Th ere is a very ancient ver-sion in the Mahābhārata: the brothers Sunda and Upasunda kill one another for love of the beautiful Tilottamā, sent by the gods to punish their arrogance.32 It is unlikely that Verdi and Cammarano (or indeed García Gutiérrez) would have been familiar with this story, but they would certainly have known Die Braut von Messina (1803) by Schiller, of which Andrea Maff ei published a translation.33 And it is not impossible, although perhaps improbable, that one or the other knew Heinrich Hei-ne’s ballade Zwei Brüder (1820),34 set to music by Schumann in 1840 with

31 W. Osthoff, “Il trovatore”, p. 104, refers to the subject, with references to Ae-schylus, Schiller and Byron, but does not give importance to its erotic variant. However, the confl ict between brothers (or between sisters) had already been treated by Verdi in Nabucco, I lombardi/Jérusalem, I masnadieri, and by Cammarano for Donizetti in Maria de Rudenz (1838). Furthermore, it is central to Shakespeare (see Joseph T. McCullen, Brother Hate and Fratricide in Shakespeare, in «Shakespeare Quarterly», 3 [1952], pp. 335-340). It is noteworthy that in the project for Re Lear, sketched by Verdi and Cammarano in 1850 (CVC, pp. 166-169, and 366-378), this theme was of a certain signifi cance, while it was gradually toned down in the various draft s of the libretto elaborated with Antonio Somma between 1853 and 1856, as if Verdi felt he had exhausted its dramatic potential in his earlier operas (see Carteggio Verdi-Somma, a cura di Simo-netta Ricciardi, Parma, Istituto nazionale di studi verdiani, 2003, pp. 41-182).

32 My attention was drawn to this story by a wonderful Cambodian tenth century bas-relief displayed at the Musée Guimet in Paris (from the pediment of the temple of Banteay Srei; visible at <http://www.fl ickr.com/photos/dalbera/6364409273>). Th e episode is narrated in the fi rst book of the poem (Th e Book of Beginning), which can be read in English in Th e Mahābhārata, translated and edited by Johannes Adrianus Bernardus van Buitenen (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1983). I reproduce here its conclusion (ibid., pp. 397-398): «Maddened by the boon they had received, by the strength of their chests, by their riches and gems, by the liquor they had drunk, mad-dened by all these madnesses, they knitted their brows at each other and, possessed by crazed lust, began to speak to each other. “She is my wife”, said Sunda, “and your guru!” “She is mine”, quoth Upasunda, “and your sister in law!” Rage seized them: “She is not your, she is mine!” And for her they grasped their horrible clubs. When they had grasped their horrible clubs, they hit each other, shouting “Me fi rst, me fi rst!” – blinded by their love for her. Clobbered by the clubs, the terrible pair fell to the ground, their bodies smeared with blood, like two suns falling from heaven».

33 La sposa di Messina, tragedia di F. Schiller. Traduzione del cavaliere Andrea Maff ei, Milano, Fontana, 1827. Another translation of Antonio Caimi was published, also in Milan by Sonzogno, in 1828.

34 From the Romanzen (1821), published in the Buch der Lieder (1827). Th e poem is not included among those translated by Gérard de Nerval in the «Revue des Deux

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the title Die feindlichen Brüder. 35 Based on an old Rhenish legend,36 it tells of two brothers who, for love of the Countess Laura, get to «fencing / a grim duel there, enraged with anger» until «both fi ghters fall / each upon the other’s steel». Th is is how the story ends:

Viel Jahrhunderte verwehen,Viel Geschlechter deckt das Grab;Traurig von des Berges HöhenSchaut das öde Schloß herab.Aber nachts, im Talesgrunde,Wandelt’s heimlich, wunderbar;Wenn da kommt die zwölft e Stunde,Kämpfet dort das Brüderpaar.

Many centuries drift past,graves cover many generations;mournfully from the heights of the mountainthe deserted castle looks down.But at night, in the depths of the valley,something is moving secretly, wondrously:when the twelft h hour arrives,the pair of brothers are fi ghting there.37

Here we fi nd the cyclic scheme, which lends itself to being told and re-told. It has been observed 38 that the opening scene of Il trovatore, in which the family members ask Ferrando to tell «la vera / storia […] di Garzia, germano / al nostro Conte», anticipates that of Parsifal (1882). Th ere too the esquires ask the elderly Gurnemanz to tell «the true story» of the King’s wound: «Doch, Väterchen, sag’ und lehr’ uns fein: / du kanntest Klingsor, – wie mag das sein?». And at the beginning of Götterdämmerung the Norns recount, as they have done an infi nite number of times, the story we too have witnessed: «singe, Schwester, / – dir schwing’ ich’s zu – weisst du, wie das ward?».39

It is not by chance that I have brought Wagner into the picture. It is surely signifi cant that in exactly the same years, without knowing anything of their respective activities, the two leading musical drama-tists of the nineteenth century chose to have recourse to the myth, one in the guise of a tragic fable, the other in its purest form: the conception of Der Ring des Nibelungen coincides with that of Il trovatore, and both composers had the idea of taking fi re as a “musical” motif.40

Mondes», July 15, 1848, pp. 224-243, and September 15, 1848, pp. 914-930 (nor in the next series, appeared ibid., July 1, 1854, pp. 354-376); and, to my knowledge, does not appear to have been translated into Italian.

35 It is the no. 2 of the Romanzen und Balladen, op. 49, published in 1844.36 Cfr. Hedwig Jacke, Die rheinische Sage von den feindlichen Brüdern in ihrer von

der Romantik beeinfl ußten Wirkung, Wuppertal-Elberfeld, Martini & Grüttefi en, 1932 («Beiträge zur rheinischen und westfälischen Volkskunde in Einzeldarstellungen», 7).

37 Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche Gedichte in zeitlicher Folge, Frankfurt a. M., Insel, 2007, pp. 79-80; trans. Emily Ezust ©, from Th e Lied, Art Song, and Choral Texts Archive: <http://www.recmusic.org/lieder/get_text.html?TextId=7692>.

38 See M. Mila, La giovinezza di Verdi, Torino, eri, 1974, p. 451.39 Respectively: Parsifal, act i, lines 159-160; Götterdämmerung, Vorspiel, lines 41-43.40 See G. Baldini, Th e Story of Giuseppe Verdi, pp. 228-230.


As is well known, for Wagner the recourse to myth has an ideological value: only thus is it possible to get back to the “purely human” founda-tions of the sentiments, which have been degraded by the conventionalism of the historical subjects of Italian and French opera. Verdi thought dif-ferently: his whole opus was designed to explore the complexity of the human soul, the passions and interpersonal relations, always collocated in a precise, albeit idealised, historical and cultural context.41 But is it too far-fetched to suppose that, at least for once, he was tempted by the idea of representing the great passions in their own right, in their brutal and irrational force, and thus remained fascinated by a subject that was so far from the main thread of his dramaturgy, above all in the form in which he forged it starting from his literary model? Th is also explains the apparent illogicality of the libretto: it is illogical with respect to the laws of Aristotelian logic, but, as a century of psychoanalysis has taught us, the life of the emotions follows a logic of its own which is diff erent and impinges on our conscious actions with unforeseeable results.42

In completing my line of reasoning I admit to some qualms about having recourse to terms and concepts we owe to Sigmund Freud. I have resolved to do so on the basis of two premises. In the fi rst place, whatever one thinks of the scientifi c solidity of psychoanalysis, its theoretical framework or its therapeutic validity,43 I do not think anyone can call

41 Th is was also the story of El trovador of García Gutiérrez, which even has an exact time frame: from 1390 to 1412. Contrary to his habits, Verdi eliminated – or let Cammarano eliminate – the essential historical references, even if in the libretto, for no apparent reason, one exact date, 1409, did actually remain. Th e Aljafería Palace in Zaragoza, whose main tourist attraction is the so called Troubadour Tower, took on a legendary aura thanks to the popularity of this drama in Spain.

42 Th e idea that in its manifestations the unconscious follows a rationale that is diff erent from that of conscious thought is present in Freud’s thought from Th e Inter-pretation of the Dreams (1899). See its concise formulation in Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis, in Th e Standard Edition of the Complete Psy-chological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. (1953-1974), London, Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1964, xxii, pp. 57-80 (Lecture xxxi, Th e Dissection of the Psychical Personality): 73-74. Th is idea found its systematic development in the work of Ignacio Matte Blanco who, in order to explain the functioning of the emotional life, postulated a “bilogic” and then a “bimodality”, where two ways of thinking coexist, the symmetric and the asymmetric. See Ignacio Matte Blanco, Th e Unconscious as Infi nite Sets: An Essay in Bilogic, London, Duckworth, 1981, and Id., Th inking, Feeling, and Being: Clinical Refl ections on the Fundamental Antinomy of Human Beings and World, London, Routledge, 1988.

43 An unbiased critical evaluation can be found in Il secolo della psicoanalisi, a cura di Giovanni Jervis, Torino, Bollati Boringhieri, 1999, in particular the editor’s introduc-tion of the same title, pp. 13-90.

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into question the importance of Freud as the expression and self-aware-ness of some fundamental aspects of Western civilization, in particular of nineteenth century culture. It is not necessary to share his theory of the Oedipus complex or of narcissism to recognise the extraordinary importance that the myths from which they take their names have had in the formation and performance of the European consciousness,44 and thus to use Freudian interpretations as reagents which can help to iden-tify the traces in the texts we analyse.

In the second place, I use Freud’s thought in the only way possible nowadays in the domain of art criticism, according to the masterly les-son of Francesco Orlando in his literary analyses and his writings on the theory of literature.45 Far from any banal psychologism concerning the author or the character, Orlando off ers a conception of the literary – in our case dramatic-musical – text as a symbolic system structured according to formal principles akin to those which govern the manifestations of the un-conscious. Th is perspective makes it possible to view from a standpoint which is only apparently diff erent two nodes which I have explained drawing on the structure of the mythical narrative.46 Whether Manrico

44 See G. Paduano, Lunga storia di “Edipo Re”. Freud, Sofocle e il teatro occidenta-le, Torino, Einaudi («Paperbacks», 245), 1994 (new ed.: Edipo, storia di un mito, Roma, Carocci, 2009); Maurizio Bettini and Ezio Pelizer, Il mito di Narciso. Immagini e racconti dalla Grecia a oggi, Torino, Einaudi («Saggi», 853), 2003.

45 For a complete bibliography of Orlando’s work’s, see Luciano Pellegrini, Bibliografi a degli scritti di Francesco Orlando, in Sei lezioni per Francesco Orlando. Teoria ed ermeneutica della letteratura, a cura di Paolo Amalfi tano e Antonio Gargano, Pisa, Pacini («I libri dell’Associazione Sigismondo Malatesta»), 2014, pp. 291-325. Orlando’s thought, elaborated at the beginning of the 1970s, was infl uenced at fi rst by the reading of Lacan, then decisively by that of Matte Blanco; see in this regard F. Orlando and Sebastiano Timpanaro, Carteggio su Freud (1971-1977), Pisa, Scuola normale superiore, 2001. For an updated examination of this issue see G. Paduano, Il testo e il mondo. Ele-menti di teoria della letteratura, Torino, Bollati Boringhieri, 2013, pp. 110-123.

46 In the words of a major scholar of the Ancient Greek world, who also criticized Freud’s interpretation of Oedipus: «Myth is not only characterised by its polysemy and by the interlocking of its many diff erent codes. In the unfolding of its narrative and the selection of the semantic fi elds it uses, it brings into play shift s, slides, tensions and oscillations between the very terms that are distinguished or opposed in its categorical framework; it is as if, while being mutually exclusive these terms at the same time in some way imply one another. Th us myth brings into operation a form of logic which we may describe, in contrast to the logic of non-contradiction of the philosophers, as a logic of the ambiguous, the equivocal, a logic of polarity. How is one to formulate, even formalise, the balancing operations which can turn one term into its contrary while yet, from other points of view, keeping the two far apart? Ultimately, the mythologist has to admit to a certain inadequacy as he is forced to turn to the linguists, logicians


is really the son of the gypsy or of the old Count is a problem for day-light logic, not for that of the unconscious, which ignores the principle of non contradiction, just as the fable can ignore it: in the fable – let us say, in the perspective of Azucena – Manrico really is both one and the other.47 Nor is it a problem how many times, and in what succession, the rival brothers have fought, since, like the fable, the unconscious can do without a linear temporal succession, a before and aft er, or irreversible relations of cause and eff ect.

I am certainly not the fi rst to turn, or at least to allude, to Freudian concepts in connection with Il trovatore.48 Many years ago Pierluigi Pe-trobelli – noting the similarity between two melodic phrases sung by Le-onora and Azucena, both expressing their love for Manrico – observed that «Such an extraordinary parallelism can be explained only by theories of deeply unconscious motivation».49 I myself alluded to the Freudian theory of faulty actions when, comparing the fi nal scene of Il trovatore with that of La Juive by Scribe and Halévy, I remarked that «la situazione è molto simile […] salvo che qui la scelta che risolve il confl itto non è frut-to di deliberato fanatismo ma, con maggiore sottigliezza psicologica, di un’omissione: in Azucena il desiderio di vendetta ha la meglio facendole “dimenticare” di rivelare in tempo la vera identità di Manrico».50 Anselm

and mathematicians in the hope that they may provide him with the tool that he lacks, namely the structural model of another kind of logic: not the binary logic of yes or no but a logic diff erent from that of the logos» (Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Society in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd, Brighton, Harvester Press, 1980, pp. 239-240). Th e model invoked by Vernant is in fact found in Matte Blanco’s fi rst book, Th e Uncon-scious as Infi nite Set, which appeared in the same year the former wrote, 1975.

47 According to Matte Blanco (see above, fn. 42) the symmetrical thinking of emo-tions identifi es each part of a set with the whole of it: a child is all children, a mother is all mothers. In this perspetive the principle of non-contradiction is not valid: A is also non-A; therefore, the two assumptions about Manrico’s personal identity (see above, fn. 20) are not mutually exclusive. Azucena’s cry «Mio fi glio avea bruciato!» and her statement «Tu sei mio fi glio!» are both “real” in the light of a dual and complementary inference: a) “I burned my son, then you, the son of the Count, are he”; b) “I burned the son of the Count, then you, my son, are he”. Everyone, and certainly every parent, can verify how “true” this is if they simply imagine killing a child in this way.

48 Compared with Rigoletto and La traviata, «il Trovatore è, come tutti sanno, una faccenda più oscura e freudiana» (Luciano Berio, Verdi?, in «Studi verdiani», 1 (1982), pp. 99-105: 102) [as everyone knows, Il trovatore is a more obscure and Freudian matter].

49 P. Petrobelli, Music in the Th eater, p. 107. Th is observation seems to confi rm in advance, on the basis of the musical text, the interpretation of G. Paduano, TuttoVerdi.

50 F. Della Seta, Italia e Francia nell’Ottocento, Torino, edt, 19952 (Storia della musica, a cura della Società italiana di musicologia, vol. 9), p. 232. [the situation is very

28 della seta

Gerhard has also compared Il trovatore and La Juive, showing how the former supersedes the concept of “fatality” typical of the French roman-tic drama of the 1830s:

Azucena […] spinta dalla sua ossessione, è un personaggio attivissimo, il suo destino non le dà tregua prima del compimento di un atto distrut-tivo che riproduce l’evento traumatico dell’antefatto. […] E anche chi trovi anacronistica la conclusione che la favola del Trovatore anticipa la teoria freudiana del Wiederholungszwang, della “coazione a ripete-re”, potrà essere d’accordo almeno sul fatto che Verdi ha saputo darci un’immagine delle passioni che spiega l’odio cieco meglio del ricorso ai poteri sovrumani del fato.51

Th e compulsion to repeat – to relive and reproduce traumatic situa-tions – is at the basis of one of the most fascinating and controversial of Freud’s ideas: that the psychic life is an inextricable tangle of Leben-striebe (life instincts), serving the reproduction of the individual and the conservation of the species, and Todestriebe (death instincts) which operate to return the organism to the inertia of inorganic matter.52 Once again, whatever point scientifi c debate has reached concerning this the-ory, it is avowedly inspired by primordial conceptions – represented in mythological terms by the opposition between Eros and Th anatos – which in the nineteenth century found expression in the philosophy of

similar […] except that here the choice which resolves the confl ict does not stem from a conscious fanaticism but instead, showing greater psychological subtlety, from an omission: Azucena’s desire for revenge prevails because it causes her to “forget” to re-veal Manrico’s true identity in time.]

51 A. Gerhard, Dalla fatalità all’ossessione, p. 66. [Azucena […] driven by her obsession, is a highly active character; her destiny gives her no respite up until the accomplishment of a destructive act which reproduces the traumatic prior event. […] And even whoever fi nds the conclusion that the fable of Il trovatore anticipates the Freudian theory of Wiederholungszwang, “compulsion to repeat”, anachronistic, should at least agree that Verdi has succeeded in giving us an image of the passions that explains blind hatred better than having recourse to the superhuman powers of destiny.] In a similar interpretative direction see now also Emanuele d’Angelo, Il trovatore, in Id., Leggendo libretti. Da “Lucia di Lammermoor” a “Turandot”, Roma, Aracne, 2013, pp. 77-101.

52 Th e fi rst and fundamental exposition of this idea is found in the essay of 1920 Jenseits des Lustprinzips (Beyond the Pleasure Principle), which marked a real turning point in Freud’s thought. It circulates in the later writings of the author, who however never again reverted to it in an organic fashion. A summary account is found in S. Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psyco-analysis, pp. 81-111 (Lecture xxxii, Anxiety and In-stinctual Life): 102-111.


Arthur Schopenhauer 53 and, by adhesion and then by reaction, in that of Friedrich Nietzsche: two fundamental names 54 in the intellectual con-stellation commonly evoked to interpret Wagner’s thought and work, whose mature production, from the Ring to Parsifal, is entirely domina-ted by this clash. Is it too far-fetched to invoke the same constellation to help us better understand an opera by his great contemporary? An opera which, as we have seen, is closer than was once thought to the profound springs of Wagner’s art? 55

Th us my thesis is that in Il trovatore Verdi gave expression to the fundamental confl ict between the life instincts and the death instin-cts,56 which are embodied in varying proportions in each of the four protagonists; that rather than manifesting itself in the usual forms of exchange of dialogue and the parola scenica, this confl ict is expressed

53 Freud himself recalls the philosopher, albeit to distance himself from him: «You may perhaps shrug your shoulders and say: “Th at isn’t natural science, it’s Schopenhauer’s philosophy!” But, Ladies and Gentlemen, why should not a bold thinker have guessed something that is aft erwards confi rmed by sober and painstaking detailed research? Moreover, there is nothing that has not been said already, and simi-lar things had been said by many people before Schopenhauer. Furthermore, what we are saying is not even genuine Schopenhauer. We are not asserting that death is the only aim of life; we are not overlooking the fact that there is life as well as death. We recognize two basic instincts and give each of them its own aim» (ibid., p. 107). Th e issue is also crucial in the broader philosophical debate on evil and destructiveness, on which see now Simona Forti, I nuovi demoni. Ripensare oggi male e potere, Mila-no, Feltrinelli, 2012, which is worth reading from cover to cover, but in particular, on Nietzsche and Freud, pp. 52-89. I thank Michela Garda for bringing to my attention this interesting study and for our many stimulating conversations on these topics.

54 To these names can be added that of Th omas Mann, who is also the connection with Freud.

55 At the time of Il trovatore, Verdi could have no notion of Schopenhauer, and nor indeed could Wagner, who only read Th e World as Will and Representation in 1854. However, an edition of the book was, and should still be, present in his library, along with texts by Plato, Pascal, and Darwin (see Luigi Magnani, L’“ignoranza musicale”di Verdi e la biblioteca di Sant’Agata, in Atti del iii Congresso internazionale di studi verdiani (Milano, Piccola Scala, 12-17 giugno 1972), Parma, Istituto nazionale di studi ver-diani, 1974, pp. 250-257: 256). At the minimum, this suggests a later intellectual curiosity.

56 Amore e morte is the title of one of Giacomo Leopardi’s last Canti, an author dear to both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Arguably it was known to the Neapolitan Cammarano and to Verdi (an autograph of the poet is preserved in the collection of Sant’Agata); but it was also the title chosen at fi rst for what would later become La traviata. Besides being in any case the symptom of an interest in this topic, that title would actually have been much more trivial and less meaningful than if it stands as the implicit subtitle of Il trovatore.

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in the very presence – stage, verbal and musical – of the characters; 57 and lastly, that this represents the opera’s “latent content”, conveyed by the “manifest content” of the events represented. Th is thesis seems to me to conform to the conception of the work of art as the «formation of a compromise» which enables a «return of the repressed» – repres-sed by social or ideological-political censorship – «made accessible to a community of men but rendered harmless by sublimation and fi ction».58And what idea is more scandalous, and hence deserving of being censored, negated, masked, than that of a man at the mercy of impersonal forces which impel him, in the illusion of satisfying his own desires but in reality acting at the service of the cycle of reproduc-tion, to destroy and self-destroy? 59 Among other things this reading recognises the emotional impact of the extraordinary episode of the Miserere, whose centrality has found a general critical consensus even though almost no one has posed the problem of how it relates to the textual system of the opera as a whole.60

Let us briefl y examine the four characters from this standpoint. (From what I have said above it should be clear that, even if for conve-nience I use expressions like “Azucena’s sentiments”, “Manrico is aware”, I refer not to a non-existent psychical reality of the character but to her or his function in the system of the text, as it is manifested in the words to be uttered, the notes to be sung and the gestures to be performed).

Azucena is the simplest case, and also the only one to have been pre-viously investigated by critics. Th e two fundamental sentiments that de-termine her actions, fi lial love and maternal love, produce an irreparable confl ict from which can only free herself by means of a reiterated de-structive act: the dual murder of her “real” son, which is bound also

57 For a more detailed illustration of this conception of theater, musical and other-wise, I refer to what I wrote in Not without Madness, pp. 4-6.

58 F. Orlando, Toward a Freudian Th eory of Literature, with an Analysis of Raci-ne’s “Phèdre”, trans. Charmaine Lee, Baltimora, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978, pp. 19 and 137-138.

59 «For “little children do not like it” when there is talk of the inborn human in-clination to “badness”, to aggressiveness and destructiveness, and so to cruelty as well. God has made them in the image of His own perfection; nobody wants to be reminded how hard it is to reconcile the undeniable existence of evil – despite the protestations of Christian Science – with His all-powerfulness or His all-goodness»: S. Freud, Civiliza-tion and its Discontents, in Th e Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, xxi, pp. 57-146: 130. Freud mentions a line from a ballad by Goethe.

60 Th e issue is addressed more directly by P. Gallarati, Lettura del “Trovatore”, pp. 130-131.


to have a self-destructive outcome.61 Moreover this obsession, although mostly manifested in spine-chilling forms, also has its consolatory aspect, since it is really not diffi cult to understand the nature of the «an-tica pace», the «sonno placido» to which she longs to abandon herself amidst her mountains. But, as many have observed (Baldini with all the more acumen), Azucena is also a universal symbol, a sort of Mother Na-ture who distributes life and death impartially.62

On the contrary, the Count of Luna appears to be the manifestation of sheer libido, an erotic drive which gives rise to a sort of delirium of omnipotence with aspects which are infantile («Leonora è mia!») or even blasphemous:

Invano un dio rivaleopponi all’amor mio:non può nemmeno un dio,donna, rapirti a me! [ii, 3] 63

Not only is he the only person not to foresee his own end, but he be-lieves that his amorous fulfi lment will bestow a sort of immortality on him: «la gioia che m’aspetta, / gioia mortal non è!…» (thus the libretto; but whoever does not feel the libidinous charge of such musical phrases as this one or «Ah! l’amor, l’amore ond’ardo» would do well to choose another fi eld of interest). However, his eroticism is frustrated. Th e

61 In her fi nal line of El trovador Azucena bursts out: «¡Ya estás vengada! (con un gesto de amargura, y expira)» (A. García Gutiérrez, Il trovatore, p. 206) [Now you are avenged! (with a gesture of bitterness, and dies)]. Nothing is said of her end in the libretto – not even in the various preliminary draft s published in CVC – whereas in the score Verdi wrote simply: «cade a piè della fi nestra» [she falls beneath the window]. It is hard to believe, as some maintain, that the Count, who is in turn devastated by the event, sends Azucena to the stake; yet, once that revenge is taken, there is no longer any reason why she should continue to exist.

62 «[Azucena’s] greatness derives from her feeling of being torn between emotion and destiny, birth and death (or rather fl owering and decay), by a blind, irrational game in an indissoluble circle of madness». She embodies «the delirium of the fi re», «which in a natural, unforeseen manner, gushes out of the earth without reason. It is the fi re of nature, and must burn sinews, nerves, fi bres and feelings, exulting and mortifying, de-stroying and recreating»; and the «maternal tenderness – a feeling not so much of one individual mother for her son as of nature’s heartrending embrace, which induces both mistrust and abandonment (G. Baldini, Th e Story of Giuseppe Verdi, pp. 222-223, 229).

63 It is precisely the Christian God, not the usual poetic «nume»; small wonder that at the première the Roman censorship was merciless on lines like these. See also G. Paduano, I due registri dell’amore. L’opposizione tra tenore e baritono nel melodram-ma romantico, in Il giro di vite. Percorsi dell’opera lirica, Scandicci, La Nuova Italia («Discanto/Contrappunti», 30), 1992, pp. 47-68: 58.

32 della seta

pleasure principle is continually at odds with the principle of reality («a danno mio rinunzia / le prede sue l’inferno!…»; «In braccio al mio rival!»), and this is bound to produce destructive drives («Ho le furie nel cor!») which are regularly – and, in Freud’s terms, typically – vented in sadistic phantasies:

Ah!… dell’indegno renderevorrei peggior la sorte,fra mille atroci spasimi…centuplicar sua morte… [iv, 2]

But this is the voice of impotence: reality will confront the Count with the most atrocious disillusion, all the more atrocious because he comes up against it without having had the least intimation, and it is indeed diffi cult to imagine that he could survive the fi nal catastrophe. His last words are a declaration of surrender to death, even though it is still exor-cised by naming it with antiphrasis: «E vivo ancor!».

In Manrico too the erotic tension predominates, albeit in an idealized form as befi ts a nineteenth century tenor, and it undoubtedly prevails over ambition: fulfi lment in love – «s’ei quel cor possiede» – is suffi cient to make him «d’ogni re maggior»; 64 and he too is convinced that the love of Leonora makes him, «mortale» as he is, «invitto» (undefeated), if not actually immortal. However, he also knows that love is dangerously close to death and that he will pay for it «col sangue mio». Th e fi rst verse of the “romanza” that he sings in the context of the Miserere contains a universal consideration on life and death:

Ah che la morte ognoraè tarda nel venira chi desia morir!… [iv, 1]

Implicit here is the antithetical idea that instead death arrives too soon for those who wish to live and love. But «who» is he talking about? Th e song that García Gutiérrez has Manrique sing leaves no doubt:

Despacio viene la muerte,que está sorda a mi clamor;para quien morir desea,despacio viene, por Dios. [v, 3] 65

64 Th is is the reading of Cammarrano’s manuscript (cfr. CVC, p. 205), set to music by Verdi. Th e printed libretto has: «egli è d’ogni uom maggior» [he’s greater than any man].

65 A. García Gutiérrez, Il trovatore, pp. 174 and 176. [Death comes slowly, deaf to my lament; by God it comes slowly to whoever wishes to die.]


And Leonor’s comment confi rms this: «Él es; ¡y desea morir / cuando su vida es mi vida!».66 Th us, at least from Leonor’s point of view, Manrique desires to die (a desire that she explicitly contrasts with the desire to live). Cammarano, instead, chose an impersonal form, which does not allow us to decide who is the logical subject of the utterance. In fact he introduced an ambiguity into his text which does not exist in the model, leaving it open to two diff erent interpretations: 1) death arrives too late for someone, like Manrico, who desires to die; 2) death arrives too soon for someone, like Manrico, who wishes to live and love.67 An orthodox Freudian could derive many associations from this. I shall limit myself to observing that the ambi-guity is confi rmed by the music, since Verdi set the two verses to a melody which is at the same time heart-wringing in its expression and, on account of the major key and the accompanying texture, a ray of light in the gloom of the Miserere. Th e fact that it is a classic of the so-called barrel-organ repertoire does not make this observation any less true. Indeed it reinforces it: Schubert and Mahler are past masters in this matter.

Th e ambiguity of Manrico’s attitude is at the bottom of the Adagio of his grand aria, «Ah sì, ben mio, coll’essere». Th e cantabile polarises the tension between joy at the prospect of his imminent marriage and the presage, al-most certainty, of death, in one of the most original harmonic progressions Verdi ever produced: F minor, A fl at major, A fl at minor, F fl at major, D fl at major.68 It is striking that the minor tonality of the beginning is linked to the image of the wedding, while although the thoughts of death are introduced and tinged by infl ections in the minor, they always usher in major keys, from the radiant F fl at of «ch’io resti fra le vittime / dal ferro ostil trafi tto» to the fulfi lled D fl at of «e solo in ciel precederti / la morte a me parrà!».69

66 Ibid., p. 176. [It’s him, and he wishes to die / when his life is my own!]67 A manuscript variant by Cammarano does not resolve the ambiguity: «Tarda è

la morte ognora / A chi desia morir!… / O solo mio desir, / Addio Leonora!» (CVC, pp. 209-212: 211) [Death comes late in any case / To whoever wishes to die!… / O my only desire, / Farewell Leonora!].

68 In Not without Madness, pp. 6-7, I observed that «Th e analysis of the melody of “D’amor sull’ali rosee” […] does not aspire to proposing an overall interpretation of Verdi’s Il trovatore, but it could surely be one element, if not indeed the keystone, of such an interpretation». Th is essay seeks to meet that aspiration; in fact, Manrico’s cantabile, tonally “open” like that of Leonora, «depicts the tension between the two extremes of anxiety and hope», whereas «the emotional pendulum swings continually between one and the other» (p. 111).

69 For sound remarks in this regard see P. Gallarati, Lettura del “Trovatore”, pp. 110-112. Th is cantabile can be compared with the harmonically no less rich counterpart of Riccardo in Un ballo in maschera, «Ma se m’è forza perderti». Here too the premoni-

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Th e most enigmatic character remains Leonora. She is the one who gives voice, in the form of a cliché in an libretto, to a genuine defi nition of the death instinct as Freud was to formulate it:

Non reggo a colpi tanto funesti…Oh, quanto meglio saria morir! [iii, 6]

Th e investment of the psychic energy required to fulfi l the love passion is the cause of such an unbearable state of anxiety that the annulment of the self is the only way to elude it. A libretto cliché, I said; 70 one should add that the phrase is absolutely marginal in the context of «Di quella pira», and that, even if the listener should register it, it is in fact rarely heard – only if the cabaletta is repeated. However, in fact this enunciation does not occur in isolation. From the beginning to the end Leonora seems to be gripped by a sort of mania for disappearing, she can speak of nothing but her own death:

Il mio destin compirsinon può che a lui dappresso…S’io non vivrò per esso,per esso io morirò! [i, 2]

O dolci amiche,un riso, una speranza, un fi or la terranon ha per me! Degg’iovolgermi a Quei che degli affl itti è soloconforto, e dopo i penitenti giorni,può fra gli eletti al mio perduto benericongiungermi un dì. [ii, 4]

Tu vedrai che amore in terramai non fu del mio più forte;vinse il fato in aspra guerra,vincerà la stessa morte.O col prezzo di mia vitala tua vita salverò,

tion of death is ubiquitous, but is never detached from a deep sense of despair, even in the conclusion in C major.

70 A few examples by Camarrano himself can suffi ce, from Lucia di Lammermoor: «Io son tanto sventurata / che la morte è un ben per me»; «Io sperai che a me la vita / tronca avesse il mio spavento»; and from Luisa Miller: «La tomba è un letto sparso di fi ori, / in cui del giusto la spoglia dorme: / sol pei colpevoli, tremanti cori / veste la morte orride forme; / ma per due candide alme fedeli / la sua presenza non ha terror…». Th is last example contains a clear reference to Leopardi’s Amore e morte.


o con te per sempre unitanella tomba io scenderò. [iv, 1] 71

Ora il mio fi ne impavida,piena di gioia, attendo…dirgli potrò, morendo:“salvo sei tu per me!” [iv, 2] 72

Prima che d’altri vivere…io volli tua morir!… [iv, 4]

If for the Count I have spoken of manifestations of sadism (aggressiveness which is vented on an external object), in Leonora one can readily recognise features of masochism, fi rst of all, here too, in the attenuated form of a cliché:

Piombi, ah piombi il tuo furoresulla rea che t’oltraggiò…Vibra il ferro in questo core,che te amar non vuol, non può. [iv, 5]

then made explicit in ways for which I fi nd no equivalents in the reper-tory of opera librettos:

Mira, di acerbe lagrimespargo al tuo piede un rio:non basta il pianto? svenami,ti bevi il sangue mio…calpesta il mio cadavere,ma salva il trovator! [iv, 2]

71 Leonora’s intention recalls that of Manrico with regard to Azucena: «Madre in-felice, corro a salvarti / o teco almeno corro a morir»; but there the death of the subject is not foreseen. Whichever of the two alternatives will occur, mother and son will both be either dead or alive.

72 Note, in the last two extracts, the sharpness of the antithesis love/death, but also the paradox it generates: love gives life, but only at the cost of suppressing another life. As was pointed out to me by Guido Paduano, to whom I am indebted for this and other insightful comments on this essay, Leonora – as well as, in a diff erent way, Gilda, referred to below – is a variation on the classic model of Alcestis; see in this regard his introduction to Euripide, Alcesti, Milano, Rizzoli («bur. Classici greci e latini»), 201112, pp. 5-40, and, on the musical settings of the theme, G. Paduano, Il giro di vite, pp. 1-28 (Le due “Alceste” di Gluck e la drammaturgia classica). Let me quote a remark he made (personal communication of February 5, 2013): «Th e comparison between Leonora and Alcestis can be somewhat more concrete. Th e relationship between the erotic and the funerary language is dynamic in both directions: there is a humane and optimistic side, according to which love “vincerà la stessa morte”; and, so to speak, a decadent side, in which, on the contrary, the death intrudes on love, so making the life of the

36 della seta

Th is is indeed a strange way to attempt to save the troubadour: fi rst she tries to placate the rejected lover telling him that she will never love him, then she off ers the destruction of her own body to the man who desires that body spasmodically – motivating the off er, what’s more, with love for the other. Th is can only exasperate the frustration of the hapless ri-val, who instead falls all too easily into the trap when Leonora, changing tack, tricks him by off ering him her living body in exchange for the life of Manrico. Th e words employed at this junction are particularly harsh: «conte: Spiegati, qual prezzo? di’. leonora (stendendo la destra con do-lore): Me stessa!… che la vittima / fugga, e son tua. […] (M’avrai, ma fredda, esanime / spoglia)».73

Th us it can be argued that the sum of the textual utterances I have cited, some of them perhaps banal but others which are certainly not, con-stitutes a system in outlining Leonora’s dramatic depiction. Something strange happens in the musical realization: in many cases Verdi employs a vocal style which is virtuoso, brilliant and quite diffi cult, precisely the type of writing which has led to the character, and indeed the whole opera, being viewed as a throwback to a stylistic world which by this stage he had abandoned. Th is style of singing has it fi nal triumphant swansong in Violetta’s cabaletta «Sempre libera degg’io», a piece which was conceived at the same time as the composition of Il trovatore.74 In La traviata, however, the use – solely at this moment – of vocal virtuosity lends itself to only one interpretation: it gives expression to Violetta’s desire to enjoy to the utmost the brief life she still has in front of her. She goes to the verge of «di voluttà ne’ vortici perir!…» only to exorcise the tragic certainty of being condemned to die of consumption. Is it unrea-sonable to advance the hypothesis that in Il trovatore Verdi made exten-

survivor unlivable. In short, there is darkness within us, but we are there too, with our paradoxical claim to illuminate darkness».

73 Emphasis added. In El trovador Leonor seduces Don Nuño by pretending to love him and wanting to forget Manrique (A. García Gutiérrez, Il trovatore, pp. 184-188). Francesco Izzo reminds me of a precedent in the Duetto Andromaca-Pirro in Rossini’s Ermione (ii, 1), in a situation not unlike that of Il trovatore: «Andromaca: (Mi avrai, ma fredda spoglia, / E lieta a Dite in seno / Fida al consorte almeno / Quest’alma scenderà.)» (Tutti i libretti di Rossini, a cura di Marco Beghelli e Nicola Gallino, Milano, Garzanti, 1991, p. 587). Th e opera had had no further revivals since 1819, but Cammarano could perfectly well have known Tottola’s libretto.

74 I do not consider here Verdi’s use of coloratura singing in the parts of Hélène in Les Vêpres siciliennes, Eboli in Don Carlos, or Oscar in Un ballo in maschera, which is related to genre issues in a non-Italian tradition.


75 Another of Cammarano’s libretti, the aforementioned Maria de Rudenz, presents a whole repertoire of destructive passions even more harshly than Il trovatore. Perhaps precisely on account of this explicit harshness, the artistic result is less convincing.

76 See the many interventions documented by the critical edition (cit. at fn. 19).77 But actually, this is true of any literary genre: «even when there is no Freudian

negation of the return of the repressed to divide the individual or the consciousness, it is in eff ect neutralized by the fi ctitious importance of the literary institution, which already acts as a Freudian negation as such» (F. Orlando, Toward a Freudian Th eory of Literature, p. 187).

78 See F. Della Seta, Not without Madness, pp. 190-212 (Chap. 11, “Parola scenica” in Verdi and His Critics).

sive use of the same stylistic expedient to represent Leonora’s desire to ensure her vertiginous descent into the abyss? Within the theoreti-cal framework in which I have set this interpretation of the opera, the hypothesis is acceptable, although there is in fact another one which seems to me to be compatible.

If it is true that the work of art feeds back contents that are repressed because they are socially disapproved, it must be said that, in the classic examples subjected to theoretical scrutiny, such contents were «rendered harmless by sublimation and fi ction» thanks to a sophisticated system of metaphors, reticence and allusions. But in the libretto of Il trovatore, at least as far as Leonora is concerned, the disturbing contents are, as we have seen, all too explicit.75 In fact in 1853 they were systematically obscured by the Roman censors.76 But how do things stand for the innu-merable spectators who since then have seen and heard Il trovatore and have read the libretto in its entirety? I would say that there is a fi rst level of attenuation in the literary status of the libretto.77 Not only is there the obscurity, whether intended or not, of the events, and the fi lter of the high-sounding and hyper-literary idiom; there is also the fact that most spectators read the libretto to understand, more or less, what happens on stage, not to grasp, word for word, the meaning of what is said. Th is is why, for the really important utterances, Verdi developed the concept of parola scenica,78 of which precisely in Il trovatore there is very little sign. Th e same goes for those more discerning readers who should be found in the category of critics: all too few of them take the libretto text seriously as a vehicle for contents that go deeper than the immediate circumstances (rather as happens with the jokes analysed by Freud). As a result there is the tendency not to see them, and this is the case for Le-onora, even when they are as it were displayed in front of our very eyes; in fact up until now, nobody has spoken of them.

38 della seta

79 Not always, however. In some cases, the musical setting allows a distinct percep-tion of the words and expresses adequately their meaning: «svenami, / ti bevi il sangue mio… / calpesta il mio cadavere».

80 F. Orlando, Toward a Freudian Th eory of Literature, pp. 164-165.81 Since the thirteenth century the adjective fi guratus, or fi guralis, was applied to

the measured (polyphonic) cantus, because the values of the sounds were represented by geometric fi gurae (square, lozenge). In the same period the term color, borrowed from the rhetoric, designated all manner of compositional artifi ces fi t to embellish the musical discourse. Later, fi guratus and its equivalents in the main European langua-ges came to mean «Florid, i.e. elaborated with various kinds of musical artifi ce. At its broadest “fi gural music” simply means polyphonic or concerted music, as opposed to

Th e second fi lter is, obviously, the one interposed by the music. If as a rule only part of the words that are sung are clearly perceived by the spectator (even in Monteverdi, Lully or Janáček), the degree of com-prehensibility will be all the smaller, to the extent in which the composer uses a fl orid vocal style. And this is in fact what with Leonora: her pre-dominant style is the negation (in the Freudian sense) of the censurable content of what she is saying.79

However, it is not just a question of grasping the sense of the single words and phrases. I shall try to be more precise by citing Orlando once again:

To claim with Lacan that the unconscious is the realm of the signifi er is really to say that in the languages of the unconscious there are never transparent signifi ers because no signifi ed is ever disclosed; thus the signifi ed is always invisible and only the signifi er is visible. To claim with modern rhetoric that a verbal language is opaque when it attracts attention to itself by clothing itself in fi gures, instead of remaining im-perceptible and allowing its meaning to be immediately apparent, is to point out a similarity to the languages of the unconscious, whose opacity is so extreme as to be literally obscurity.80

As I said above, the language of opera librettos is in itself characterized by an extensive use of verbal fi gures, which produces the eff ect, whether desired or not, of making it «opaque», or obscure as the critical com-monplace has it. One should not forget, however, that right from the fi ft eenth century the term musica fi gurata or fi guralis was used to designate an embellished and ornate type of melody, and still today the components of such a melodic line are called “fi gures”; with respect to the literary use of the term, the semantic evolution starting from the Latin fi gura is diff erent, but there is a common rhetorical matrix for its use in the two contexts.81 To say that the melodic fi gures have something in common with the fi gures in the text is not mere wordplay; rather, it


plainchant. All the terms could be applied to a single part, e.g. to distinguish a decorated line or cantus fi guratus from the plainchant or cantus planus to which it might be added as a descant; it could also be applied to music in several parts, as for instance the musica fi gurata of the 15th and 16th centuries in which polyphony was created by combining a number of equally fl orid lines (as opposed to note-against-note counterpoint»: Michael Tilmouth, «Figural, fi gurate, fi gured» (ad vocem), in Grove Music Online (<http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/09620>).

82 F. Orlando, Toward a Freudian Th eory of Literature, p. 168.83 Luigi Baldacci, I libretti di Verdi, in Il melodramma italiano dell’Ottocento.

Studi e ricerche per Massimo Mila, a cura di Giorgio Pestelli, Torino, Einaudi («Saggi», 575), 1977, pp. 113-123: 119. [needs at times to be integrated in order to restore musical life to characters, such as Leonora in Il trovatore, who have been improperly confi ned to the domain of bel canto, whereas her singing, no less than that of Azucena, represents the dark drama of the id.]

highlights the fact that the function that the two procedures have in common is the one whereby the language «attracts attention to itself»:

the fi gure as an alteration of the relationship of transparency between the signifi er and signifi ed has its origin in the asocial and functionally noncommunicating languages of the unconscious. Th ere it is free to become denser, and it dominates to the point of concealing itself as it conceals the meaning that it nevertheless expresses by a compromise. In a communicating language, under the surveillance of the conscious ego, the fi gure could only occur as a disturbance or error, if, speaking absurdly, man were an animal totally lacking an unconscious and having as an inborn prerogative an absolutely transparent use of words and a strictly logical use of thoughts. Th e former and the latter are, on the contrary, a conquest and a restriction for man; to take pleasure in fi gures against this restriction acquires the value of a «formal return of the repressed». In other words, the fi gure assumes a new, socially insti-tutionalized function, which is a compromise turned in the opposite direction and a pleasure that may be transmitted to others.82

With this function “fi gured” singing was used extensively in the allusive and reticent type of artistic product par excellence: eighteenth century opera seria. And with no less confi dence Verdi seems to have revived it for this purpose one last time in Il trovatore. Th is gives a precise meaning to the intuition of that acute critic, Luigi Baldacci, when he observed that the interpretative approach of Mila (to which I referred above) «ab-bisogna a volte di integrazioni che recuperino alla vita musicale perso-naggi, come la Leonora del Trovatore, indebitamente relegati nel domi-nio del bel canto, laddove quel canto è dramma oscuro dell’Es non meno di quello di Azucena».83

40 della seta

84 See also Radamès in Aida (iv, 1): «d’ogni gaudio / la fonte inaridita, / sol bramo di morir».

85 In fact Otello said it explicitly at the end of the fi rst act: «Venga la morte e mi colga nell’estasi / di questo amplesso / il momento supremo!». See G. Paduano, Il giro di vite, pp. 151-154, and also, in summary, TuttoVerdi, p. 153.

86 Th e reference to Il trovatore (1917) of Giorgio De Chirico, «uno dei più cele-bri tra i suoi manichini metafi sici» [one of the most celebrated of his metaphysical mannequins], is found in M. Mila, La giovinezza di Verdi, p. 448.

If what I have said so far is acceptable, we have to fundamentally reap-praise the position usually attributed to Il trovatore in Verdi’s creative development. It does not represent his farewell to the tradition of Ros-sini: precisely on account of the systematic use of old-fashioned forms and vocal styles, this opera inaugurates a new phase in this development in which the ideological perspective of his youth is overturned. Up un-til now Verdi’s heroines and heroes have been positive expressions of the eros: they struggle strenuously to affi rm it, and succumb manifesting a desperate attachment to life, which they leave with regret, like Gilda («Ah! presso alla morte, / sì giovine, sono») and Violetta («Gran Dio! morir sì giovane, / io che penato ho tanto»). Still in Un ballo in maschera, if Amelia feels the temptation of oblivion she knows nonetheless that nothing would remain for her «povero cor» once «perduto l’amor» (and Riccardo is ready to remind her of it: «non sai tu che di te resteria / se cessasse di battere il cor!»). But already Simone Boccanegra regretted not having found his tomb in the maternal womb of the sea while he was still young, just as Aida will foresee for herself «pace forse, e oblio» in the «cupi vortici» of the Nile.84 «Pace, mio Dio», is Leonora’s invocation in La forza del destino, and it is immediately clear what peace she is speaking of: «Dio!, fa’ ch’io muo-ia». For four of the seven protagonists of Don Carlos – including the friar/Charles Quint – the only hope of sleep and peace lies in the tomb. And lastly, in the closing bars of Otello we witness the disturbing identifi cation between erotic fulfi lment and the dissolution of the self. Here indeed what goes unsaid amounts to more than what is said,85 but we are in another era, with another poet and perhaps also another musician. However this may be, it seems to me that the obscure dimension which the mature and late Verdi explored with his unrivalled capacity to penetrate man’s inner world, in Il trovatore he was able to present it almost in the raw, devoid of any psychologism, in such essential forms as to generate the image of an opera that is indeed particularly abstract and “metaphysical”.86

One fi nal consideration. As I have pointed out several times, my reading is entirely based on the dramatic-musical text of the opera, at


87 Giuseppe Verdi, Lettere, a cura di Eduardo Rescigno, Torino, Einaudi («I mil-lenni»), 2012, p. 282. «Th ey say that this opera is too sad and that there are too many deaths. But, aft er all, in life everything is death. What lasts?»: trans. M. Chusid, Verdi’s “Il trovatore”, p. 1.

most with some cross-reference in contiguous texts such as the traces of the creative process and the literary model of the libretto. We are too worldly wise to appeal to the author and his intentions; less still to require “facts” which can make become proof the clues on which our interpretations were built. And yet, if we are in possession of some data that can be linked to the empirical experience of the author, must we really be forbidden, I don’t say from considering them as evidence, but at least from acquiring them as a further fragment of text that can help to orient the interpretation in one sense rather than another? Ten days aft er the fi rst performance of Il trovatore, on 29 January 1853, Verdi wrote to his friend Clara Maff ei:

Dicono che quest’Opera sia troppo triste e che vi sieno troppe morti ma infi ne nella vita tutto è morte! Cosa esiste?…87

(Translated by Mark Weir)

"Ma in fine nella vita tutto è morte!"» What does "Il trovatore" tell us?

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