Verdi's First Rifacimento:'I Lombardi'and 'Jérusalem'
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Music and Letters JANUARY, 1979 VOLUME LX NO. 1 Music AND LETTERS was founded in 1920 by the late A. H. Fox Strangways. It was continued by the late Richard Capell and is now the property of Music and Letters Limited, a Company Limited by guarantee and comprising Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ml/article/60/1/1/1050316 by guest on 30 September 2021 representatives from the Royal Musical Association and Oxford University Press and others. BUSINESS & ADVERTISING ADDRESS : Ely House, 37 Dover Street, London, W1X 4AH. EDITORIAL ADDRESS : Faculty of Music, 32 Holywell, Oxford, OX1 3SL. ISSN 0027-4224 © Music & Letters Ltd. and Contributors 1979 VERDrS FIRST RIFACIMENTO: «I LOMBARDF AND 'JERUSALEM' BY DAVID R. B. KIMBELL E A c H o F Verdi's half-dozen rifacimenti offers points of special interest to the student. As a matter of fact it is unlikely that Jerusalem is the first: that distinction probably belongs to Oberto. But with the loss of Rocester we lack the material that would enable us to study the process of recasting and rewriting from which Oberto eventually emerged. With / Lombardi and Jerusalem such a study is for the first time pos- sible. Jerusalem shows the way in which Verdi went about the task of adapting an Italian melodrama to form a Parisian grand opera. It is a process we can study again in Macbeth; but there is a crucial dif- ference between the two works. Macbeth originated in Florence in 1847 and was revised for the Paris Ope"ra only in 1865; Jerusalem, the Paris adaptation of / Lombardi, followed the original at a distance of a mere four and a half years in 1847. The rifacimento of Macbeth reflects not only the composer's view of what was necessary to make an Italian opera conformable to the operatic traditions of Paris; it reflects besides Verdi's enormous growth in maturity and sophistication over a period of nearly twenty years. With Jerusalem, on the other hand, it is the desire to give the opera a Parisian form and style that is the dominant consideration. Clearly JSrusalem is the work of a more mature com- poser than / Lombardi—that kind of development cannot be ignored 1 altogether; but the real interest of the opera is in illustrating the way Verdi responded to the idiom of 'grand opera' at the period of its greatest prestige. Generally Italian composers had uneasy relations with grand opera. It is alleged that the ascendancy of the genre he had helped create was one of the factors that contributed to Rossini's early silence. Verdi obviously never admired the Paris OpeVa quite as much as he felt he ought. Nevertheless it was, paradoxically, the Italians who wrote the only examples of the genre that can really be said to have survived : Rossini's William Tell, Verdi's Don Carlos and a number of works Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ml/article/60/1/1/1050316 by guest on 30 September 2021 such as Nabucco and Aida which can best be described as Italian grand operas. The Italians rarely lost their sense of fitness when con- fronted with the staggering resources of the Ope"ra, with the masterful complication of its musical idiom and the cleverness of its practitioners; they contrived to put these assets to some worth-while dramatic pur- pose. And they were able to do this because their musical and theatrical instincts had been formed in a tradition which, for all its modesty, its convention-proneness and its crudities, had a stylishness and a wisdom beyond the imaginings of the rouS artists of the Ope"ra. The best short definition of what was involved in converting an Italian opera into a Parisian grand opera is probably Donizetti's. He defined the work he had to do on Poliuto in transforming it into Les Martyrs in the following terms : ... I have had to rewrite all the recitatives, compose a new finale for Act I, add arias, trios, and such related ballets as they use here, so that the public may not complain that the facture is Italian . French music and dramatic verse have a cachet all their own, with which every composer must conform; whether in the recitatives or in the lyrical pieces. For example, a ban on crescendos, etc., a ban on the usual cadences,1 joy, joy, joy; then between one statement of the cabaletta and the other there is always poetry that intensifies the action without the usual repetition of lines which our poets use.2 Verdi, too, through Muzio, described the process as being that of 'adapting the music of / Lombardi to a new libretto, and composing additional music'.* So our study of Jerusalem must begin with an examination of what the librettists Royer and Vaez did to Solera's libretto. This can best be demonstrated by means of an annotated synopsis of the plot of / Lombardi. 1'Solite cadenze': this could of course mean 'the usual cadenzas'; but there are just as many cadenzas in Let Martyrs as in Donizetti's Italian operas. On the other hand reiterated tutti cadence patterns are far less conspicuous, and I suggest that this is what Donizetti is referring to. "Letter of 8 April 1839: G. Zavadini, Donizetti: vita-miuiche-epistolario, Bergamo, 1948, pp. 494-5. 1 L. A. Garibaldi, Verdi nelle lettre di Emanuele Muzio ad Antonio Barezzi, Milan, 1931, p. 350. i LOMBARDI, ACT i: Vengeance Scene 1. The piazza in front of the Basilica of Saint Ambrose in Milan. Joyful music is heard from the church. A group of citizens discuss the return to Milan of Pagano, one of the sons of Folco, Lord of R6. He had been exiled and gone on a pilgrimage of contrition because of his jealous attempt on the life of his brother Arvino. The brothers emerge from the church in pro- cession and publicly give one another die kiss of reconciliation. Nevertheless, Arvino and the bystanders are still troubled by die expression in Pagano's eye, and it does soon transpire that at the very ceremony of atonement he is plotting revenge with Pirro, one of Arvino's servants, whom he has suborned. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ml/article/60/1/1/1050316 by guest on 30 September 2021 The Prior of Milan announces that the Pope has appointed Arvino to lead the Lombard forces on the Crusade. He urges Pagano to join him in an oath of allegiance. The brothers look forward to destroy- ing die infidels in the Holy War. The stage empties, leaving Pagano and Pirro alone. Pagano admits that long years of exile have served only to make more fierce his passion for Viclinda, his brother's wife. Pirro introduces his gang of thugs, who are ready to fire Arvino's house and commit any murder that may be needful. Pagano exults in his hour of vengeance. Scene 2. A gallery in the Folco palace. Night. Arvino tells his wife and their daughter Giselda to retire to their rooms. He is leaving his elderly father with them while he goes to investigate some suspicious noises. The women pray and then retire. Pirro conducts Pagano into the gallery and points out to him Arvino's chamber. Pagano goes off to kill his brother, and after a while re- emerges from the room with blood-stained sword, dragging with him the screaming Viclinda. But Pagano's exultation is turned to dismay when Arvino returns, and to horror when it is realised that he has killed his own father. All the assembling household express their loathing for Pagano's crime. Arvino would kill him but is pre- vented by Giselda; Pagano's despairing attempt to kill himself is also frustrated. He is condemned to a life of penitence and remorse. Characteristic of Solera's style in this opera is his straining for exaltation of mood by heaping up romantic and vicious and religious passions in their most extreme forms. The first act especially is distin- guished by a sustained hyperbole of language—of which the final tutti furnishes a good example : Va! fra i fiori di lieto cammino, Nelle grotte, fra i boschi, sul monte, Sangue ognor verserai dalla fronte, Sempre al dosso un demon to stara! (Go! among the flowers of the pleasant pathways, in the grottos, in the forests, on the mountain, your face will always pour blood, always a demon shall stand behind you !) —and extravagant and often incongruous imagery : Qual dall'acque l'alimento Tragge l'italo vulcano, Io cosl da te lontano Crebbi agli impeti d'amor. (As the Italic volcano draws its nourishment from the waters, so I, dilUnt from you, swelled up with the transports of love.) The general turbulence of the effect is exacerbated by Solera's refusal to distinguish between primary and secondary issues or primary Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ml/article/60/1/1/1050316 by guest on 30 September 2021 and secondary characters. Whether Pagano's guilty passion for Vic- linda, the consequences of his parricide, or the Crusade is going to be the central dramatic issue we have no means of knowing, for all characters, major, minor and collective, express themselves with the same violence. Nervous of Arvino's safety—whedier because of Pagano's 'rolling eyes' or because of the perils of the Crusade is not made clear—Viclinda urges her daughter : Giuriam, s'ei copre di suo manto pio Tuo padre, il mio consorte, Giuriam, che, nudo il pie', verremo al santo Sepolcro orando. (Let us vow—if with his compassionate mantle he covers your father, my consort—let us vow that, bare-footed, we shall come to the Holy Sepulchre in prayer.) The activities of a gang of thugs are described in a grotesque and brutal hymn, as lyrically exalted as everything else in the libretto.