https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_opera

Introduction – Opera  of  the 19th and 20th centuries
Opera had become a marriage of the arts, a musical drama, full of glorious song, costume, orchestral music and pageantry; sometimes, even without the aid of a plausible story. From its conception during the baroque period to the maturity of the romantic period, it was the medium through which tales and myths were presented, history was retold and imagination was stimulated. The strength of this genre  fell into a more violent era for opera in the late 19th and 20th  century: Verismo.  Cavalleria rusticana by Pietro Mascagni and Pagliacci by Ruggero Leoncavallo.and the 20th century verismo  operas  of Puccini are examples.

Romantic Opera (19th cnetury)
Romantic opera, which placed emphasis on the imagination and the emotions began to appear in the early 19th century, and because its arias and music, gave more dimension to the extreme emotions which typified the theater of that era. In addition, it is said that fine music often excused glaring faults in character drawing and plot lines. Gioacchino Rossini (1792–1868) initiated the Romantic period. His first success was an “opera buffa” (comic opera), La Cambiale di Matrimonio (1810). His reputation still survives today through his Barber of Seville, and La Cenerentola. But he also wrote serious opera, Otello (1816) and Guillaume Tell (1829).  Rossini’s successors in the Italian bel canto  (beatifuil singing) were Vincenzo Bellini (1801–35), Gaetano Donizetti (1797–1848) and Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901).

It was Verdi,   a supporter of the  struggle for Italian Independence, who transformed the whole nature of operatic writing during the course of his long career. His first great successful opera, Nabucco (1842), caught the public fancy because of the driving vigour of its music and its great choruses. One of the chorus renditions,”Va, pensiero“,   gave advantageous meaning to the struggle for Italian independence and to unify Italy.

Verdi’s does not conform to the  cliche of the tragic life of the Romantic artist yet his life was not free from sorrow.  He  was widely appreciated and enormously successful throughout his long life.   Some of his themes have long since taken root in popular culture, examples being “La donna è mobile” from Rigoletto, “Libiamo ne’ lieti calici” (The Drinking Song) from La traviata, “Va, pensiero” (The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves) from Nabucco, the “Coro di zingari” (Anvil Chorus) from Il trovatoreand the “Grand March” from Aida.

After Nabucco  (see above), Verdi often based his operas on patriotic themes and many  standard romantic literary  sources: Victor Hugo (Ernani, 1844); Byron (Il Duo Foscari, 1844); and Shakespeare (Macbeth, 1847). Verdi was experimenting with musical and dramatic forms, attempting to discover things which only opera could do. In 1877, he created Otello which completely replaced Rossini’s opera, and is described by critics as the finest of Italian romantic operas with the traditional components: the solo arias, the duets and the choruses fully integrated into the melodic and dramatic flow.

Verdi’s last opera, Falstaff (1893), broke free of conventional form altogether and finds music which follows quick flowing simple words and because of its respect for the pattern of ordinary speech, it created a threshold for a new operatic era in which speech patterns are paramount.

A testimony to his capacity outside the field of opera is the Requiem mass: Messa da Requiem   composed in 1874 in Manzoni’s honour.  This  work is regarded as a masterpiece of the oratorio tradition.  Being a visionary and politically engaged, Verdi  remained an emblematic figure of the reunification process (the Risorgimento) of the Italian Peninsula. He was a storng nationalist!

La Donna Mobile

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Here is the larger story of which it is a part. Our aria, “La donna e mobile,”  is a part –  heard in the beginning of act 3.   A voice can be heard singing “La donna è mobile” (“Woman is fickle”), laying out the infidelity and fickle nature of women. Rigoletto makes Gilda realize that it is the Duke who is in the assassin’s house attempting to seduce Sparafucile’s sister, Maddalena: “Bella figlia dell’amore” (“Beautiful daughter of love”).

Rigoletto bargains with the assassin, who is ready to murder his guest for money, and offers him 20 scudi to kill the Duke. He orders his daughter to put on a man’s clothes to prepare to leave for Verona and states that he plans to follow later. With falling darkness, a thunderstorm approaches and the Duke determines to remain in the house. Sparafucile assigns to him the ground floor sleeping quarters.

Gilda, who still loves the Duke despite knowing him to be unfaithful, returns dressed as a man. She overhears Maddalena begging for the Duke’s life, and Sparafucile promises her that if by midnight another can be found in place of the Duke, he will spare the Duke’s life. Gilda resolves to sacrifice herself for the Duke and enters the house. She is immediately mortally wounded and collapses.

At midnight, when Rigoletto arrives with money, he receives a corpse wrapped in a sack, and rejoices in his triumph. Weighting it with stones, he is about to cast the sack into the river when he hears the voice of the Duke singing a reprise of his “La donna è mobile” aria. Bewildered, Rigoletto opens the sack and, to his despair, discovers his mortally wounded daughter. For a moment, she revives and declares she is glad to die for her beloved: “V’ho ingannato” (“Father, I deceived you”). She dies in his arms. Rigoletto’s wildest fear materializes when he cries out in horror: “La maledizione!” (“The curse!”)

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“La donna è mobile” (The woman is fickle) is the Duke of Mantua’s canzone from the beginning of act 3 of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Rigoletto(1851). The inherent irony is that the Duke, a callous playboy, is the one who is mobile (“inconstant”). Its reprise towards the end of the opera is chilling, as Rigoletto realizes from the sound of the Duke’s lively voice coming from within the tavern (offstage), that the body in the sack over which he has grimly triumphed is not that of the Duke after all: Rigoletto had paid Sparafucile, an assassin, to kill the Duke but Sparafucile deceived him by killing Gilda, Rigoletto’s beloved daughter, instead.

The canzone is famous as a showcase for tenors. Raffaele Mirate’s performance of the bravura aria at the opera’s 1851 premiere was hailed as the highlight of the evening. Before its first public performance (in Venice), it was rehearsed under tight secrecy: a necessary precaution, because it proved to be catchy and soon after its first public performance every gondolier in Venice was singing it.

The almost comical-sounding theme of “La donna è mobile”  from Rigoletto  is introduced immediately. The theme is repeated several times in the approximately two to three minutes it takes to perform the aria, but with the important—and obvious—omission of the last bar. This has the effect of driving the music forward as it creates the impression of being incomplete and unresolved, which it is, ending not on the tonic or dominant but on the submediant. Once the Duke has finished singing, however, the theme is once again repeated; but this time it includes the last, and conclusive, bar and finally resolving to the tonic. The song is strophic in form with an orchestral ritornello.

Figure 1. Theme (transposed down by a major third)

Libretto

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Slide show: Romantic Opera

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This slide show will serve as a study guide to your readings on Romantic opera: Verdi (Italian bel canto Opera) Richard Wagner (German Gesamkunstwerk and  Pucini (Realistic (Verismo). Review review it throughout your study of the topic  to stay focused on the most important traits (terms and styles)  of these three national composers…