Tina loves Arts, Cinema and Opera and they have been talking about Il trovatore, the opera composed by Giuseppe Verdi that was premiered in Rome on a day like today in 1853.
Il trovatore or The Troubadour is an opera in four acts by Giuseppe Verdi to an Italian libretto largely written by Salvadore Cammarano, based on the play El trovador (1836) by Antonio García Gutiérrez.
It was Gutiérrez's most successful play, one which Verdi scholar Julian Budden describes as a high flown, sprawling melodrama flamboyantly defiant of the Aristotelian unities, packed with all manner of fantastic and bizarre incident.
The premiere took place at the Teatro Apollo in Rome on 19 January 1853, where it began a victorious march throughout the operatic world, a success due to Verdi's work over the previous three years. It began with his January 1850 approach to Cammarano with the idea of Il trovatore. There followed, slowly and with interruptions, the preparation of the libretto, first by Cammarano until his death in mid-1852 and then with the young librettist Leone Emanuele Bardare, which gave the composer the opportunity to propose significant revisions, which were accomplished under his direction. These revisions are seen largely in the expansion of the role of Leonora.
For Verdi, the three years were filled with musical activity; work on this opera did not proceed while the composer wrote and premiered Rigoletto in Venice in March 1851. His personal affairs also limited his professional work.
In May 1851, an additional commission was offered by the Venice company after Rigoletto's success there. Another commission came from Paris while he was visiting that city from late 1851 to March 1852. Before the libretto for Il trovatore was completed, before it was scored, and before it premiered, Verdi had four operatic projects in various stages of development.
More information: Classic FM
Today, Il Trovatore is performed frequently and is a staple of the standard operatic repertoire.
How and when Verdi acquired a copy of the Gutiérrez play is uncertain, but Budden notes that it appears that Giuseppina Strepponi, with whom Verdi had been living in Busseto since September 1849, had translated the play, as evidenced in a letter from her two weeks before the premiere urging him to hurry up and give OUR Trovatore.
When considering setting Gutiérrez's play, Verdi turned to work with Cammarano, the born operatic poet, according to Budden. Their correspondence began as early as January 1850, well before Verdi had done anything to develop a libretto with Piave for what later became Rigoletto in Venice. At this time, it was also the first since Oberto that the composer was beginning to prepare an opera with a librettist but without a commission of any kind from an opera house. In his first letter to Cammarano, Verdi proposed El Trovador as the subject with two feminine roles. The first, the gypsy, a woman of unusual character after whom I want to name the opera.
With regard to the chosen librettist's strength as a poet in preparing verse for opera, Budden also comments that his approach was very traditional, something which began to become clear during the preparation of the libretto and which appears in the correspondence between the two men.
While the story and most of the characters are fictitious, it is set towards the end of a real civil war in Aragon. Following the death of King Martin of Aragon in 1410, no fewer than six candidates staked a claim for the throne. A political meeting, the Compromise of Caspe, found in favour of Martin's sororal nephew Ferdinand.
Count James II of Urgell, King Martin's brother-in-law and the closest relative through purely patrilineal line of descent, refused to accept the decision of the Compromise, believing with some justification that Martin had intended to adopt him as the heir by appointing him Governor-General after the death of his own son Martin the Younger, and rebelled.
A third candidate was Frederic, Count of Luna, bastard son of Martin the Younger, whose legitimization had been sought from the Pope unsuccessfully. As part of the compromise for withdrawing his own claim in favour of Ferdinand, Frederic was granted the County of Luna, one of the lesser titles that his father had held.
While neither of the two princes who actually took part in the war appears in the opera -neither is even referred to by name, and only Urgell is referred to by his title- the fortunes of their followers mirror those of their princes.
More information: NPR
Thus, with his military success, Ferdinand's side has the upper hand in the war and is effectively the Royalist party, with the backing of much of the nobility and the Dowager Queen, and he also has Di Luna as his chief henchman, Luna's own connection to the royal family is not mentioned, being not necessary to the drama: while Urgell, losing the war and on the back foot, is forced to recruit among outlaws and the dispossessed, effectively taking the part of a rebel despite having some legal right to his case.
Thus the fact that the forces of Urgell, in the opera as in real life, lose every pitched battle: and on the single occasion that they capture a castle (named in the opera as Castellor, a fairly generic name for a castle, there being many Castellars in the region), it proves a handicap to them because their only hope in battle lies in speed, mobility, surprise and ambush, all of which are lost when defending a fortress.
Thus it is that the fictitious troubadour Manrico can gain his rags-to-riches background, having risen from the obscurity of a Biscayan gypsy camp to become Urgell's chief general, a knight and a master swordsman in his own right, good enough to defeat Di Luna himself in a personal duel, or win a knightly tournament: only to lose it again on the military battlefield, where the odds are perpetually against him, and he is damned as an outlaw even before the opera begins, for no deed of his own but because his master is the rebel. And yet he gets to be a heroic, popular outlaw, who might just escape with his life in return for a vow of future loyalty, if put on trial in front of the Prince himself: a chance that Luna does not want to risk, given that his rivalry with Manrico is personal as well as political. Hence the challenge to the duel over the personal rivalry, instead of calling the guards and making the arrest political, in Act 1: and hence also the decision to execute without trial in Act 4 even though Luna knows he is abusing his position. Leonora and Azucena are, of course, as fictitious as Manrico, as is the story's conceit that the former Count of Luna had not one but two sons.
More information: DM's Opera Site
I adore art... when I am alone with my notes,
my heart pounds and the tears stream from my eyes,
and my emotion and my joys are too much to bear.
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