Il Trovatore

This is written with more music analysis because it’s also for my Music Humanities course!

I saw Il Trovatore at the Metropolitan Opera on February 20, directed by David McVicar and conducted by Gianandrea Noseda. Given that Verdi’s opera demanded talented singers in all of the leading roles moreso than a strong chorus, the vocal skills of Sondra Radvanovsky (Leonora), Dmitri Hvorostovsky (Count di Luna), Marcelo Alvarez (Manrico) and Dolora Zajick (Azucena) were especially notable. Because I did not know Il Trovatore was considered an “extreme case” of the indulgent melodrama of opera, I was able to appreciate this particular interpretation with a blank slate. David McVicar’s take on Il Trovatore keeps the focus on the opera singers, but the sets, orchestra, lighting and costume combine to feature what the opera does best—raw emotion and storytelling through song.

The story of Il Trovatore is long—the opera clocking at nearly three hours with intermission—and the orchestra is instrumental (pun intended) to helping the plot unfold, but always keeps the spotlight on the singers. The orchestra, thus, was situated in the darkness of the pit with only the conductor’s head visible, as if illustrating its accompanying role. Like the sets, lighting and costume, they operate to evoke an atmosphere for the characters on stage. When Manrico, an enemy soldier of the Count’s and also a troubadour, serenades Leonara in “Tacea la notte placida,” we hear a lute played in a medieval mode reminiscent of the Ventadon we listened to in class. The audience can tell that Verdi intended the opera to be set in the early 1400’s, referring the reference to the music of that period, even though McVicar re-envisioned the setting in the early 1800’s, during the Spanish War of Independence. Likewise, when the Count di Luna discovers that his men have captured Azucena, whom he believes is Manrico’s mother and the murderer of his infant brother, the orchestra plays a militant tune in 4/4 time with trumpets blasting the melody. As a result, “Di quella pira” is highly charged and belligerent, with di Luna gathering his men and preparing for the attack.

Though I expected sparse continuo during the recitative scenes, the orchestra also played homophonic accompaniment even in some the arias, and sometimes not at all during a singer’s long melismatic notes. For example, in the opening number “Abbietta zingara,” Ferrando recounts the tale of a gypsy woman burned at the stake years ago for bewitching the Count’s brother. Ferrando’s lines went completely unaccompanied, as if the orchestra were allowing the man to tell the story without interruption, only to chime in homophony with the rest of the men registering reactions of shock, disdain and fury. Between scenes, the orchestra played while the stage revolved into a new set, also indicative of its propulsive movement to keep the opera going.

The singers are the highlight and crucial focus of Il Trovatore. Though the story is clearly being ostended, the characters opt for the “stand and deliver” approach with little nuance, when one merely stands and sings while the rest of the figures on stage are either frozen or turning away. This rightly places the focus on the singer of the aria. Librettist and composer made ample use of word painting, matching the words “higher and higher” to an ascending sequence and “its echo repeated from hill to hill” appropriately manifested in song. What is curious about this approach is that emotions are embodied in the music rather than the acting—lines like “I’m feeling rage and terror” and “I feel faint” are both words in the libretto, with emphasis on the notes rather than the facial expression and gesture. In particular, Sondra Radvanovsky singing “Miserere” of Leonora was an absolutely captivating performance, to the point that it did not matter what the words were—her mastery of both phrase and dynamics left the audience breathless. The aria was in a brooding, minor key, nearly a personification of sorrow itself, modeled after bursts of intense grief and then softer sobs. She sang a few spectacular high notes beginning quietly, which then intensified with a powerful crescendo.

Thus far, I’ve examined the music extensively, but these elements are only part of what made McVicar’s production of Il Trovatore so astounding. The visual aspect of the production were stunning, with his creative team drawing inspiration from Francisco Goya’s series of paintings entitled “Disasters of War”— the scene at the end of the second act was a direct homage to the “Fifth of May.” The stark cement castle looked like a snapshot of El Escorial, and the costumes were appropriate of the early 19th century, with severely cut military jackets and empire waist dresses. The colour palette was mainly stark greys, dark blues, with reds to emphasize blood. Each of the primary characters wore a colour appropriate to their identity and scene (for instance, Count di Luna wore black, Leonora in white in her sacrificial scene). But what made the opera so memorable was how all these elements came together with the music, specifically in the Anvil Chorus. A large group of gypsies filled the stage, with some standing on rocky elevated surfaces and others kneeling, to get a sense of the levels, with the yellow-orange lighting appropriate for a forge. The men swung their anvils in a percussive rhythm that suggested a working song, with children and women interacting with each other much like theatre. Light casted gigantic shadows that decreased in size as the singers filed out, drawing attention to the charred gypsy woman crucified on a stake. The ashen-blue figure loomed in the background to remind the audience of the story being told.

It is all these elements combined—the symbolism in the Goya sets, the lighting, the costumes, the orchestra and the fantastic singers—that made Il Trovatore such a remarkable opera to attend. McVicar took something trite, excessive, and overdone and toned it down to its best parts—the singing—without having it lose its identity. His gentle care in paying respect to Verdi’s opera combined with the modern sensibility of downplaying the melodrama achieved a happy compromise.

On the novel and representations of storytelling

I read the libretto for Verdi’s Il Trovatore yesterday since I am going to see the opera on Friday. I printed it out and I read it on paper, as something I held in my hand and saw with my eyes. They were merely words, a skeleton of which the opera is based on, where the music fleshes it out and the production dresses it in costume. But it is a static document, unchanging, and contained to the page. It does not hold the power to transcend my everyday life because it is not in its finished form. All operas, and to the same extent, plays and musicals, are only half complete even if the composer has finished writing them—they do not take life until they are performed.

This strikes me as remarkable when I think about the novel (and particularly Bakhtin’s thoughts about the novel). In a script or libretto we get its message only—the main theme of the symphony—without the depth and nuance of orchestration. Though I acknowledge the helpfulness of reading a libretto prior to going to a performance (so we know what is happening on stage), the document itself is lifeless. There were quite a few repetitions that I thought they were extraneous, but I know that in a performance, the performers, whether told by the director or of their own volition, will do something different no matter how many times they sing that line. I cannot experience that in a libretto.

A good novel, on the other hand, comes alive on the page. The medium is the same, text on paper—or as the digital age rolls around, text on a screen. Just TEXT still. Huh. But in a good book, characters can be real enough for me to have crushes on them, and certain scenes can make me cry. Most novels I enjoy in solitude, reading silently, a purely internal experience with little performative aspect. Perhaps it is the “act of reading” that takes it to finished form, one degree less than the “act of performing” plus the “act of watching”?

Random musings in the morning. In other news, I start my internship at Curtis Brown today, and after a diligent weekend I find myself all caught up with work. How did this happen?