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Not without Madness
Perspectives on Opera
By FABRIZIO DELLA SETA
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2013 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-74914-3
Chapter One
Emotion and Action ON THE THEORY OF ITALIAN OPERA
La sonnambula, final scene: as Amina, having escaped death, advances to sing her Scena ed Aria Finale, the action of the opera is over and innocence has triumphed. Everything that follows is really one great upwelling of pathos, and indeed the whole plot of the opera seems to have been designed merely to create the premises for such an outburst, the raison d'être of Bellini and librettist Felice Romani's edifice. But is this really how things stand? Can the Scena ed Aria not be viewed as the culmination of a dramatic development that runs through the whole opera?
The succession of "reminiscence motifs" in the recitative, the allusions in the verbal text, and the symbols displayed onstage (the ring, the flowers) all refer back to earlier scenes: to Elvino's Cavatina "Prendi, l'anel ti dono" (act 1, scene 5) and the moment when Elvino wrests the ring from Amina (2, 4); and even earlier—with the motive recalling a distant peal of bells that alludes to the canceled wedding—to the sleepwalking Amina's presentiment of the impending ceremony (1, 9). This latter scene in turn refers back, in a delicate dovetailing of melodies, to Amina's Cavatina "Come per me sereno" (1, 3) and the duet "Son geloso del zefiro errante" (1, 7), a connection that points up the theme of Elvino's jealousy (see ex. 1.1). Thus we have a subtle skein of relationships that are not simply musical or sentimental but above all dramatic: taken together these scenes in fact go to make up what constitutes the real action of the opera, namely, the evolution of the relationship between Amina and Elvino (ex. 1.1).
That Elvino is jealous even before he has any real reason to be is an important premise for the story's development. An initial disagreement between the two, which is resolved when he promises not to be jealous anymore, flares up into a definitive conflict when Amina is discovered in the Count's room (2, 11); and although appearances are against her, at this point Elvino breaks not just his promise but also a fundamental tenet of the code of romantic love: the true lover has to abide by the prompting of his own feelings rather than the actual appearance of circumstances ("Ah! se fede in me non hai, / mal rispondi a tanto amor" [If you have no faiThin me, you do not return my love]).
More generally the relationship between Elvino and Amina represents two different conceptions of the dynamic of the couple: in one this is viewed as possession—of the woman by the man, needless to say—and in the other as devotion, as can be seen in the respective answers to the notary's questions in 1, 5:
NOTARO Elvin, che rechi alla tua sposa in dono?
ELVINO I miei poderi, la mia casa, il mio nome, ogni bene di cui son possessore.
NOTARO E Amina? ...
AMINA Il cor soltanto.
ELVINO Ah! tutt o è il core!
[NOTARO: Elvino, what gift s do you bring to your wife? ELVINO: My farms, my house, my name, everything that I possess. NOTARO: And Amina? ... AMINA: Only my heart. ELVINO: Ah! the heart is everything!]
In the first case we have a fundamentally egoistic conception, in the second an altruistic one:
ELVINO ella felice renda il tuo figlio qual rendesti il padre. [May she make your son happy as you did his father].
AMINA Gran Dio, non mirar il mio pianto: io gliel perdono. Quanto infelice io sono felice ei sia.
[Dear God, don't look at my tears: I forgive him. May he be as happy as I am unhappy].
AMINA Ah! vorrei trovar parole a spiegar com'io t'adoro! ...
ELVINO Tutt o, ah! tutt o in questo istante parla a me del foco ond'ardi.
[AMINA: Ah! could I but find words to tell how I adore you! ... ELVINO: Everything at this very instant tells me of the flame you feel].
It is significant that these last two phrases are given a very different emphasis in the musical rendering.
The tension in their relationship, latent at first and then explicit, reaches a resolution in the cantabile of Amina's aria "Ah! non credea mirarti." The expression of her love, far from being a purely lyrical moment, in contemplation of the sentiment itself, is drama, action even, inasmuch as it acts on Elvino: through the experience of his own suffering it makes him aware of the suffering he has unjustly inflicted and brings him to an understanding of the proper order in a loving relationship. The mere recognition of Amina's innocence based on the perceived evidence would have been quite unsatisfactory, because it would simply have reaffirmed the unjust order of things. The crucial moment is marked by a musical gesture that constitutes an innovation on the part of Bellini with respect to Romani's text: the unexpected intrusion of Elvino in Amina's melody, giving greater resonance to words intended for the recitative ("Io più non reggo ... Più non reggo a tanto duolo" [I cannot bear ... I can bear so great a grief no more]), producing a "unison" that embodies at one and the same time his new-found compassion for and sympathy with the woman he has wronged (ex. 1.2).
Although, as both a peasant girl and a sleepwalker, Amina is singularly lacking in true awareness, she here resolves a crux of profound moral and ideal import. Unlike Ibsen's heroine in A Doll's House, but nonetheless at the end of an interior journey that perhaps gives her more in common with Nora Helmer than the cultural divide between their respective creations would suggest, she might claim that her life with Elvino is going to be a genuine marriage. But in having a woman affirm the proper nature of a loving relationship, and thereby recognizing women's implicit moral superiority over men, La sonnambula undoubtedly struck a chord in the common sensibility that ran through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, sanctioning a kinship between Amina and other operatic heroines who perform the same function with greater degrees of consciousness: Norma, Luisa Miller, and Violetta. I offer this essay as a contribution to the discussion of the theory of Italian opera, for the approach I take seems to run contrary to the idea of opera that has been so scrupulously elaborated and constantly reappraised by Carl Dahlhaus.
In his attempt to situate the "ideal type" of Wagnerian Musikdrama between the opposite poles of spoken drama and opera (prevalently Italian and in particular nineteenth-century opera), Dahlhaus characterized the latter in a way that can be summarized thus: in contrast to drama, which is based on a dialogical-rational exchange, interdependence of the parts, and a directional time frame, at the heart of opera lies the expression of emotion (Affekt), which "is realized ... in the present, in the immediate" and is made visible; "the raison d'être of this genre is the theatrical effect bound up with the moment, with this expression having no negative connotation" so that "the law of form governing the genre" envisages the plot "only as a means to provide a summary motivation for the situations of pathos." This definition was designed to uphold the artistic dignity of opera against the criticism of being "nondramatic," in the standard sense of the term. But then came the difficulty of applying it to operas that clearly were dramatic in just this sense. In fact Dahlhaus subsequently produced a positive reformulation of his thesis, at least with regard to Verdi, recognizing that "the dialectic of emotions has no less claim to drama than that of rational argument.... Conflicts represented by emotions against a background of dialogue are ... no less dramatic than those worked out in dialogue against a background of emotions. We might even say that what is involved is the same drama viewed from different angles." Convinced as I am that such an approach is valid, but also to do away with some uncertainties that nonetheless remain in Dahlhaus's most recent—and alas final—formulations, I would ask (1) if the opposition between a "rational" drama and a drama "of emotions" is not a legacy of that emphasis on the verbal text in the classical aesthetic that seems to affect the mainstream German theory of drama, within which Dahlhaus situated himself; (2) whether, given that the idea of what is "dramatic" implies not only the element of conflict but also its working out over time, the identification of discrete or summarily juxtaposed dramatic climaxes does not rule out the possibility of an overall dramatic function for opera, and hence, ultimately, of its being considered as a drama at all.
I have chosen to test this possibility by looking at an opera that more than most others seems to respond to the paradigm under attack. I shall now try to set out the theoretical implications of this attempt with the aid of the formal tools elaborated in the linguistic theory of Louis Hjelmslev, with an accompanying figure (see fig. 1.1).
1. There are two key elements in any definition of the "dramatic": the Hegelian category of conflict and the Aristotelian category of action.
a. Dramatic conflict has an intelligible side, as a conflict of ideas, values, and objectives, which can be immediately realized in a perceptual side constituted by the materialization onstage (even if only ideal) of the characters and their relationships.
b. Dramatic action consists in the alteration of the relationships between the characters through their interaction, which immediately signifies the alteration of the relationships between the ideas, values, and objectives of which they are the perceived image.
2. The relationship between the intelligible and the perceptual sides of the action is to be seen as a functional link between the planes of content and expression of a dramatic text, and hence of the semiotic-dramatic system from which it is generated.
3. The conflict between characters is spelled out in the conflict of ideas, moral attitudes, and emotions attributed to the characters, a conflict that, in turn, constitutes the content plane of a text (system) whose expression plane is made up of three texts generated by the functional coordination of three semiotic systems: scenic (comprising gesture, stage design, and so on), verbal, and musical.
4. Each of these three systems (and accordingly the three texts they generate) possesses its own expression plane but has the content plane in common with the others, made up of the system of cultural codes common to the composer and the audience.
5. The system that generates the dramatic text is a hierarchy of "connotative semiotics," i.e., systems of signs whose level of expression is made up of a system of signs.
On the basis of this attempt at providing a formal description of opera we can make the following observations:
1. The coexistence of the scenic, literary, and musical components and their variable relationship, the prevalence of the rational or the emotional aspect, the type of temporal structure, and the "open" or "closed" form constitute the historically conditioned variables of the various forms of dramaturgy; analysis of these variables is thus indispensable for the definition of the various historical models of the drama, but it must presuppose the fundamental principle, common to all, of action as dynamic interpersonal relations, whatever the nature of these relations.
2. Only in this perspective is it possible to distinguish between a type of drama that is prevalently dialogical-rational and a type that is prevalently emotional. The conflict of emotions is itself "rational" (although I would choose to call it "significative"), in being the contents of a codified system: it is both interpretable and communicable. At the same time, we should not confuse the second-degree rationality attributed to the characters with the rationality of the system of ideas and values that constitutes the contents of the dramatic action: the rationality of the drama consists not in the self-awareness of the characters but in its ability to create an organized image of reality.
3. The cultural system that constitutes the level of contents common to the semiotic systems deployed, being no other than the cultural universe common to composer and audience, is the same in which the conflict takes place that constitutes the contents of the dramatic action. Thus analysis has to bisect the various semiotic levels, so that contents and expression can each throw light on one another and together clarify the relationship between the opera and the cultural universe that has produced it and nurtures it.
Chapter Two
Ernani THE "CAR LO QUINTO" ACT
Ernani shares with Il trovatore the dubious privilege of standing as the classic example of Verdi's brash, impassioned vein, in which he was more concerned with discharging a tumult of surging passions in a burst of splendid melodies than with exploring the depths of the human heart; a work, that is, at the opposite pole from operas such as Macbeth, Luisa Miller, or Rigoletto. However, in recent years the criteria for evaluating Verdi's early output—the so-called galley years—have been subjected to a substantial revision, and such a description undoubtedly fails to do justice to an opera that has been shown to be not only Verdi's first true masterpiece but also the first fully developed example of the composer's original approach to dramatic organization.
Ernani does not of course lack examples of what used to be called "hedonism": popular favorites such as "Come rugiada al cespite," "Ernani! ... Ernani, involami," "Infelice! e tu credevi," with their respective cabalett as. But we would do well to consider the placing of these arias: they are, in the best tradition of the entrance aria, portraits of the three characters, and they are all over halfway through the first act, leaving the way clear for the unfolding of the action. As for the fourth major character, although he is granted the privilege of two arias, neither is an entrance aria: the first of the two ("Lo vedremo, o veglio audace") is, far from being "hedonistic," so dramatically functional that Silva's pertichini have on occasions appropriated it, although clearly under false pretenses, as a duet; while the second, "Ah, de' verd'anni miei," which does not even appear as an aria, since Verdi merely styled it "Scena Carlo," is (as I intend to show in the following pages) an essential part of that larger dramatic and musical organism we can recognize in the third act.
I cannot do better than begin by recalling the words of Gabriele Baldini:
The finest act of Ernani is the third; in my opinion it marks the first occasion on which Verdi enclosed within a fairly extended musical space ... a perfect structural unit. Nothing can be added, nothing cut, no substitutions made ... no Verdi opera up to this point is as rich as Ernani, and the richness of Act III is even greater and more profound than the rest.... The act also benefits from an extremely direct, simple structure: far more so than the first two, in which a kind of additive technique was allowed to take root ... Here in Act III of Ernani we have the first complete, broad-based entity in Verdi's music drama—a structure that includes an exposition, development and conclusion.
There is nothing to add to this: one can only enlarge upon it. I would like, however, to point out how the conclusion of the passage makes it clear that when he talks of "richness," Baldini is referring not to the quality of the musical ideas but rather to the manner in which they are connected into a whole. From this point of view the fourth act, though perhaps musically superior, is clearly a less complex structure. And this is fitting in the sense that the fourth act functions as a kind of epilogue to the action, while the third act is the real keystone of the whole structure, the moment in which the tensions accumulated in acts 1 and 2 collide most violently. Carlo Quinto's act of clemency is the resolving element of the drama, serving both to precipitate Silva's desire for revenge and to nurture an illusion of happiness for Ernani and Elvira that renders its denial in the final act all the more tragic.
What is it, then, that makes this third act a "perfect structural unit" on both the textual and the musical level (although as concerns the text I can do little more than add a few glosses to what has been said by my distinguished predecessors)? This dual enquiry is crucial to the contention that the music is not merely an illustration in sound of emotions and actions already articulated in the libretto but rather the determining factor in the dramatic organization, making the composer, in a very real sense, the "creator" of drama through his music.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Not without Madness by FABRIZIO DELLA SETA Copyright © 2013 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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