Divas and Scholars Read online

  Divas

  AND

  Scholars

  PERFORMING

  ITALIAN

  OPERA

  PHILIP GOSSETT

  THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

  CHICAGO AND LONDON

  Philip Gossett is the Robert W. Reneker Distinguished Service Professor in Music and the College at the University of Chicago.

  The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

  The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

  © 2006 by The University of Chicago

  All rights reserved. Published 2006

  Printed in the United States of America

  15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 1 2 3 4 5

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-30482-3 (cloth)

  ISBN-10: 0-226-30482-5 (cloth)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-30488-5 (electronic)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gossett, Philip.

  Divas and scholars : performing Italian opera / Philip Gossett.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and indexes.

  ISBN 0-226-30482-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

  1. Opera. 2. Opera—Production and direction.

  3. Opera—Performance. I. Title.

  ML1700.G7397 2006

  782.10945—dc22

  2005032151

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

  TO HAROLD GOSSETT,

  My father and most enthusiastic supporter

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  PROLOGUE

  1. Mare o monti: Two Summer Festivals

  PART I KNOWING THE SCORE

  2. Setting the Stage

  3. Transmission versus Tradition

  4. Scandal and Scholarship

  5. The Romance of the Critical Edition

  INTERMEZZO

  6. Scholars and Performers: The Case of Semiramide

  PART II PERFORMING THE OPERA

  7. Choosing a Version

  8. Serafin’s Scissors

  9. Ornamenting Rossini

  10. Higher and Lower: Transposing Bellini and Donizetti

  11. Words and Music: Texts and Translations

  12. Instruments Old and New

  13. From the Score to the Stage

  CODA

  14. Two Kings Head North: Transforming Italian Opera in Scandinavia

  Notes

  Glossary

  Bibliography

  Index of Principal Operas Discussed: Bellini, Donizetti, Rossini, and Verdi

  General Index

  PREFACE

  This book, written by a fan, a musician, and a scholar, is about performing nineteenth-century Italian opera. It is addressed to all those who share my passion for the music of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi. I trust that fans will be intrigued by an occasional technical explanation, musicians will find something of value in the social and textual history of their art, and scholars will indulge me the backstage gossip indigenous to the opera house.

  While these three elements of my operatic being are now hopelessly merged, they developed consecutively. My earliest exposure to opera was the Metropolitan Opera’s weekly broadcasts, and my father assures me that as a child I sang along with gusto. Unfortunately, my vocal skills have not improved with age. The first opera I actually saw was Carmen with Rise Stevens at the old Met, during the mid-1950s, but memories of this event have long been inseparable from family anecdote. An opera-loving uncle, Jules Schwartz, collected early LPs, which we devoured together. Having studied piano since the age of five, I frequented Juilliard Preparatory Division in uptown Manhattan during my high school years (from 1955 to 1958) for piano lessons and theory classes. By noon on most Saturdays I caught the subway downtown to join the standing-room queue at the Met. I must have heard all the great singers of the period, and there were many, but at that age I was not very discriminating about voices: it was the extraordinary music and drama that captured my imagination.

  Heading off to Amherst College in the fall of 1958, I brought along my trusty reel-to-reel tape recorder. Tapes of Uncle Julie’s LPs and others borrowed from the New York Public Library were my constant companions, and they ranged from Mozart through Verdi and Wagner to Berg and even Britten: indeed, it was a recording of Peter Grimes that convinced me that opera remained a living art. On our first New York date, I brought my Smith College girlfriend to stand at the Met through a Birgit Nilsson Tristan und Isolde. Despite three-inch spike heels (I hadn’t warned her about the opera’s length), she survived.

  Every opera fan has a favorite story, and here is mine. During a summer of French study at the Cannes campus of the University of Aix-en-Provence in 1960 (I say that with a straight face), my Wagnerian fascination drove me, ticketless, to Bayreuth. After expressing astonishment at my presumption, a sympathetic box-office agent directed me to an annual youth music festival, the Rencontres Internationales de Jeunesse Musicale, meeting that summer in Bayreuth, for whose participants some tickets had been reserved. That very morning their rehearsal pianist for a production of Così fan tutte had jumped ship, and suddenly my skill at keyboard sight-reading was rewarded. Along with my assignment came tickets for Das Rheingold, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung in the legendary Wieland Wagner productions, with Nilsson as Brünnhilde. After Rheingold I knew I had to see Die Walküre. In my desperate search for a ticket, I made my way to the office of the English widow of Richard Wagner’s son Siegfried, Winifred Wagner, who had run Bayreuth during the Nazi years and was known for her close association with Hitler. Although control of the festival had passed to her sons, Wieland and Wolfgang, she remained a presence at postwar Bayreuth. While she must have been amused by my cock-and-bull stories, she was surprisingly kind. Still, there simply were no tickets. Instead of admitting defeat, I followed several violinists into the orchestra green room, where, fortunately, there were two bathroom stalls, into one of which I promptly locked myself. When I heard the storm music and knew that Siegmund was dragging himself to Hunding’s hearth, I emerged and opened the first door marked “Verboten” (that much German I knew). There I was, atop a lighting tower high over the stage, and it was from there—not quite twenty—that I saw my first, unforgettable Walküre.

  Making a career in opera was the furthest thing from my mind. While I took an occasional music course, continued to study piano, and accompanied the Smith-Amherst Glee Club, I was a declared physics and math major, and even won a prestigious fellowship from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute after my junior year. However, an intense summer of applying the Navier-Stokes equations to rotating bodies convinced me that scientific research was not for me. My teacher and mentor, the physicist Arnold Arons, who understood me better than I understood myself, suggested I explore music history. After a year of courses at Columbia University and a final year of undergraduate study at Amherst (under the tutelage of the kind and brilliant Henry Mishkin), I knew that this direction was right.

  I undertook graduate work in music at Princeton University. And what did we study? Certainly not Italian opera and even more certainly not Italian bel canto opera. The very idea seemed risible. No, we did serious musicology: medieval notation, Byzantine chant, tempo and meter in the music of the Renaissance, the history of music theory, analysis of twelve-tone music, the operas of Wagner, Bach cantatas, Beethoven piano sonatas. Yet when it became time to choose a topic for my doctoral dissertation, I announced my intention to write about Italian opera. My professors believed (or so I imagined) that this bright young scholar was about to ruin his career.

  As I embarked on the
SS France to undertake dissertation research in Paris in the fall of 1965, preparing new scholarly and performing editions of this repertory was far from my mind. Not that graduate school had left me untouched by the rigors of textual scholarship. From my wife, Suzanne (my Tristan und Isolde date), who was pursuing her own studies of the Jacobean dramatists Beaumont and Fletcher, I first heard the dread name of the dean of American bibliographers and textual scholars, Fredson Bowers, and learned of early seventeenth-century compositors and their unfortunate penchant for turning little pieces of type upside down. But it was one of my own teachers, Arthur Mendel, who demonstrated the significance of pinholes, stitchholes, and stabholes. Painstakingly he analyzed the history of the pages that made up the tormented autograph manuscript of Bach’s St. John Passion, revised and rebound again and again and again as the composer performed it with his Leipzig choir over a period of twenty-five years. After sitting through ten weeks of seminars that would ultimately result in the longest scholarly report ever included in the Neue Bach-Ausgabe, I vowed that textual scholarship was not going to dominate my scholarly career. No, for me the pleasures of criticism and musical analysis.

  I had chosen my project with the help of another Princeton professor, Oliver Strunk, whose elegant prose style reflected his upbringing as the son of William Strunk Jr., one-half the team of Strunk and E. B. White, authors of The Elements of Style. Though a scholar of Byzantine chant, the younger Strunk loved Italian opera with the passion of a patrician slumming at a blues joint. He pointed out to me that Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi, at crucial moments during their careers, all composed works for Parisian theaters. But what happened to the style of an Italian composer when he sought to adapt his art to the needs of a foreign society in a city that considered itself “la capital del mondo,” as the Parisian Contessa di Folleville asserts in Rossini’s Il viaggio a Reims? That was a subject worth pursuing.

  There were abundant grounds for investigating the question. Three of the composers (Rossini, Donizetti, and Verdi) had written operas for Italian theaters, which they subsequently adapted to French texts for performance at the Paris Opéra; three (Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti) had prepared operas expressly for the Théâtre Italien, a theater frequented by cultural luminaries such as Balzac, Stendhal, and Delacroix; three (Rossini, Donizetti, and Verdi) had composed new operas in French for the Opéra. Strunk used to describe scholarship not as searching for needles in haystacks, but rather as getting inside a haystack and kicking the straw around. Well, here was plenty of straw waiting to be kicked.

  I set to work examining the French career of the earliest of these composers, Gioachino Rossini. Rossini presented his first opera in 1810, when he was eighteen, at the Teatro di San Moisè in Venice.1 Between 1810 and 1823, he wrote thirty-four operas for Italian theaters, ranging from early one-act farse, through the comic operas of the mid-1810s, to the great serious operas, largely associated with the Teatro San Carlo of Naples. His success was overwhelming: by the 1820s as much as half the repertory in the operatic season of any Italian theater consisted of works by Rossini.2 Furthermore, the new approaches he developed to musical dramaturgy and form were models that dominated the thinking of Italian composers for the next half century. As Rossini’s slightly younger contemporary, Giovanni Pacini, wrote in his memoirs: “Let me be permitted to observe that at the time all my contemporaries followed the same school, the same mannerisms, and thus were imitators, like me, of the Great Star. But good heavens! what was one to do if there was no other means to make your way? If I was a follower of the great man of Pesaro, then, so were all the others.”3 Then, in 1823, Rossini moved to Paris, where he lived until 1829. He served as director of the Théâtre Italien, mounting several earlier Italian operas and writing Il viaggio a Reims for the coronation of Charles X in 1825. For the Opéra, Rossini first adapted two Neapolitan serious operas, Maometto II and Mosè in Egitto, into works performed in French, as Le Siège de Corinthe (1826) and Moïse (1827); he subsequently used part of the music of Il viaggio a Reims for a French comic opera, Le Comte Ory (1828); finally, in 1829, he mounted an entirely new work, one of the most successful and complex compositions ever given at the Opéra, Guillaume Tell. After Tell, Rossini abandoned the operatic stage and lived another thirty-eight years in semiretirement, first in Paris, then in Italy, and eventually (after 1855) back in Paris.

  When I arrived in Paris, then, the steps I needed to pursue seemed clear: chart the changes Rossini made when he transformed his Italian operas for the French stage; investigate the performances he directed of his own operas at the Théâtre Italien; and analyze Guillaume Tell. By adding similar studies for other Italian composers, one could be assured of ample material to construct a thesis. There was no collected edition of Rossini’s music, of course, nor had most of the operas been printed in full orchestral score, but the Bibliothèque nationale, the Bibliothèque du Conservatoire, and the Bibliothèque de l’Opéra were rich in musical sources. And so, in my first weeks, I began to study printed reductions for piano and voice, orchestral manuscripts of the operas, and even Rossini’s own autograph scores, several of which are in Parisian collections. It did not take me long to realize the morass into which I had fallen.

  In my dazed state it seemed as if every source of an opera I examined was different from every other one. I compared printed editions, librettos (which in the early nineteenth century were published for individual performances and were intended to reproduce the words the audience would actually hear in the theater), manuscripts of the operas (copied all over Europe), and complete autograph scores, as well as fragments. How could I talk rationally about changes the composer made in his operas for Paris if I had no way of defining the “original” to which the “changes” were made? I needed to understand which versions stemmed from performances with which he was associated, and which reflected other contemporary practices. I needed to comprehend the theatrical system in which textual decisions were made, not to mention the performers for whom they were made. Furthermore, if sources in Paris were so problematic, how could I avoid examining other collections? Little by little, I was sucked into the quicksand of textual scholarship. The result has been my thirty-year involvement with the Edizione critica delle opere di Gioachino Rossini, and then The Works of Giuseppe Verdi. There will be more to say about these projects and their history during the course of this book.

  While I had studied music from childhood, I never sought a career as a pianist, even though I frequently performed chamber music in public or accompanied singers and choruses in concert. My involvement in critical editions of Italian opera, however, led directly to close collaboration with singers, conductors, and stage directors, and since the mid-1970s I have been actively involved in performances, many of which will find a place in the following pages. Having worked hard to get accurate scores into the hands of performers, I was hardly ready to abandon the works I had come to love at the moment they emerged from the printed page into the public domain of performance in the opera house. At first I simply observed and tried to learn; later, as I grew more confident, I worked directly with productions on matters involving style, vocal ornamentation, and decisions about cuts and versions.

  You cannot publish critical editions of nineteenth-century Italian operas without studying the performing traditions of that period and their subsequent transformations. And in studying the traditions you begin to understand the relationship between history and practice. Without knowing something about the instruments for which Rossini and Verdi were writing, you cannot understand why their scores look the way they do. Without instruction in the art of vocal ornamentation from Rossini and his own singers (Giuditta Pasta, Manuel García, and Laure Cinti-Damoreau), you are forced to trust the practices of late nineteenth-century divas like Estelle Liebling, who tended to confuse the music of Rossini with the Bell Song from Délibe’s Lakmé. Without grasping nineteenth-century stagecraft, you will inevitably be puzzled by the structure of a nineteenth-century libret
to. And without comprehending the social milieu for which these operas were written, you cannot draw lessons from the history of their transmission.

  History and practice, in short, go hand in hand: they did so in the nineteenth century and they do so today. I have had the privilege of working directly with some of today’s finest artists (the equal of artists of any generation): singers such as Marilyn Horne (who for me will always take pride of place), Cecilia Bartoli, Rockwell Blake, Renée Fleming, Juan Diego Flórez, Cecilia Gasdia, Bruno Praticò, and Samuel Ramey; conductors such as Claudio Abbado, Bruno Bartoletti, Riccardo Chailly, Valéry Gergiev, James Levine, Riccardo Muti, Roger Norrington, and Evelino Pidò; and stage directors such as Jonathan Miller, Pier Luigi Pizzi, Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, Luca Ronconi, and Francesca Zambello. I have learned an enormous amount from them, and I hope that I have made some small contribution in return. Opera production at its best, after all, depends not on the presence of superstars, but on the assembling of a team that operates well together (a concept many superstars fully understand, but others do not).

  As fan, musician, and scholar, then, I aim in this book to address the many problems that theaters and performers face when they produce a nineteenth-century Italian opera, concentrating on the period from the advent of Rossini in 1810 through Verdi’s revision of Macbeth for Paris in 1865.4 Even in today’s intellectual climate, where all artistic production is ever more understood to result from collaborative processes, nineteenth-century Italian operas seem particularly embedded in the social history of their composition and performance, in the hurly-burly of impresarios’ demands, singers’ egos, and audiences’ expectations. Manuel García, the first Almaviva in Il barbiere di Siviglia, was paid three times as much for singing the work as Rossini got for composing it, and the latter’s contract obliged him “to make where needed all those alterations necessary either to ensure the good reception of the music or to meet the circumstances and convenience of those same singers, at the simple request of the Impresario, because so it must be and no other way.”5 The artistic world has changed less than one might imagine.