By the end of the 1970s, the spectral composers were being invited to speak at the Darmstadt Summer Courses and were enjoying favourable press coverage in France. Recognising the need for a common epithet for their musical movement, they discussed a few possibilities: ’spectral’, ’liminal’, and ’vectorial’. This chapter explores, in turn, Dufourt’s concept of spectral music, which signified a compositional approach recognising and drawing on the microscopic scale of sound as the composer’s true material; Murail’s more technical vision of spectral music, and how, at IRCAM from the beginning of the 1980s, beginning with the electroacoustic work Désintégrations, Murail developed a sophisticated music drawing on computational resources; and Grisey’s notion of écriture liminale, a psychoacoustics-informed approach to compositional writing based on blurred statistical parameters and musical mutation. The chapter ends by detailing how the Darmstadt Summer Courses in 1982, at which the composers of l’Itinéraire gave a joint seminar, were the end of their common movement and the beginning of spectral music as an internationally known compositional attitude.

In 1972, Grisey and Murail were resident together at the Villa Medici in Rome as Prix de Rome winners. It was during this period that they first discussed together ideas regarding compositional techniques related to psychoacoustics and computer sound synthesis. This chapter explores each composer’s work during the period, which laid the foundation for the subsequent collective French spectral movement. Murail’s music, from Couleur de mer through Altitude 8000 onwards, sought to move away from the austerity of pointillist serialism towards sonorous beauty and poetic colour, aligning him to some degree with symbolist aesthetics. Grisey engaged in in-depth psychoacoustics self-study through reading books by Leipp and Winckel, books which outline what became known as the spectral attitude, and in Dérives he finally established his mature musical style. The chapter shows how, for each composer, meeting Scelsi was significant.

Sibelius and the Kalevala

The vital importance of the epos Kalevala for the building of a Finnish language and the emerging nation has been stressed repeatedly in the preceding chapters. The pioneering Elias Lönnrot visited the remote areas of White Sea Karelia over fifteen years, collecting, editing and expanding different singers’ runo verses. His first fragmentary attempt, the Proto-Kalevala, appeared in 1834, the first “complete” version in 1835, and the “final,” the New Kalevala, in 1849. There are significant differences between these editions. The primary plot of the epos is the theft of the Sampo, the undefined symbol of prosperity – the Finnish version of the Norse “Ring” – which the heroes Väinämöinen and Ilmarinen sailed to fetch from the Pohjola region. The adventures of the third hero, the warrior Lemminkäinen (a Don Juan and a shaman), were added and expanded by Lönnrot. The only female among the main figures, Aino, was a creation of Lönnrot’s, too, compiled from several sources (see also chapter 8).

With the threat of Russia to Finland’s new and fragile autonomy, the second half of the nineteenth century was a propitious time to develop contemporary cultural expressions, inspired by the ancient runos, that is, the traditional Finnish poetic form. As William Wilson puts it:

Lönnrot’s compilation and Sibelius’s patriotic music served the same purpose: the creation of a national tradition.

The German Expressionists

The cultural ties between Germany and Finland had been strong ever since the time of the Reformation. Mikael Agricola studied theology in Wittenberg in the sixteenth century, and Leipzig and Berlin had been natural educational destinations for Finnish musicians throughout the nineteenth century. Sibelius’s years abroad in Berlin (1889–90) and Vienna (1890–91) laid the foundation for his lifelong interest in German culture. German was Sibelius’s first “foreign” language and Germany was the country he visited most frequently during his life. His early friends Ferruccio Busoni and Adolf Paul resided in Berlin, and he used every opportunity to visit them and follow the concert life of the big city. Between 1889 and 1931 Sibelius visited Berlin thirty-six times.

In his ambitions to promote his international career and with the help of his friends Busoni and Paul, Sibelius established relationships with the leading German publishing houses, Lienau and, above all, Breitkopf & Härtel, in Leipzig. The monstruous inflation that followed the war years of 1914–18, and fraught attitudes toward the defeated nation, created disturbance in his connections to Germany. A portion of Sibelius’s slowly accumulating royalties was almost nullified, and Sibelius turned to other publishers.

Recent scholars have scrutinized Sibelius’s relationship to Nazi Germany, mainly because of his nomination to the Reichsmusikkammer and his decoration with the Goethe Medal. Without any taint of entartete Kunst (degenerate art), Sibelius’s persona (at least the official side) perfectly fit the ideal of the healthy, strong and nature-loving musician from the North, an early image created by Walter Niemann. In relation to the Third Reich, Sibelius acted with a similar balance as he had done in Finland’s domestic language and political issues. He behaved discreetly and diplomatically: he neither resisted nominations nor returned medals, but he never became an active participant in the Third Reich’s organizations.

Sibelius set nine texts in German. His setting of Ohqvist’s Segelfahrt was discussed in the previous chapter. Sibelius’s most ambitious endeavor in setting German lyrics was op. 50; this had been the initiative of the publisher Robert Lienau, who asked the composer to write songs in German for the European market, and sent him an anthology, Deutsche Lyrik seit Liliencron (German Poetry since Liliencron), from which to choose texts.

Methodology

Verdi's lyrical writing and that of his predecessors and contemporaries—aria style in the broad sense discussed by Basevi—can often be understood as a hierarchical construct in which four-measure phrases group together at a higher level of syntax. Melody is the focus of the listener's attention, but cadences play a decisive role in the articulation of form according to their degree of emphasis. The last structural cadence is almost always perfect authentic in the initial key, and it is often followed, especially in solo arias, by a coda of unpredictable length. In principle, the grouping of phrases results from a style that attributes the same number of measures to each verse as the text is first exposed, although in practice, there is some variation with this. Higher level phrase groupings correspond to double quatrains, sestets, or octets.

The role of harmony in the syntax of Italian opera has generally not been sufficiently recognized. Over fifty years ago, Friedrich Lippmann described a particular grouping of sixteen measures that surfaces often in the works of Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi by referring solely to melodic content through an alphanumeric system, a1a2ba2, where each letter represents four measures and is assigned according to whether it is a variant of the first phrase or has new material. Julian Budden took up this approach in his voluminous study of the complete Verdi operas. Joseph Kerman and Scott Balthazar elaborated on it by using capital letters, apostrophe superscripts, and subscripts indicating the number of measures in each phrase, resulting in schemas such as A4A’4B4A’’6 to describe a melody in which the last phrase is a variant of the first but stretched to six measures. In the case of a melody where the last phrase does not take up material from the first, the last is identified by the letter C. The introduction of parentheses allows a mirroring of the poetic layout. For example, A4 A’4 (S11–4) B4 C6 (S25–8) summarizes a typical melody in which the first quatrain (referenced by a capital S1 to signify the first strophe) is distributed over eight measures, and the second quatrain (S2) distributed over ten. From the time of Kerman's work, Anglo-American musicologists and even some Italian researchers have taken to describing the sixteen-measure scaffolding as examples of a lyric prototype.

Runeberg was not the only Romantic poet to pique Sibelius’s interest. During his years studying in Helsinki, in 1887, he wrote Trånaden (Longing) JS 203, a five-movement suite for piano and recitation, inspired by Stagnelius’s poem “Suckarnas mystär” (Mystery of the Sighs). Erik Johan Stagnelius (1793–1823) was one of the early Romantics in Sweden. The details of his life are rather obscure. His father was a priest in a small congregation on the island of Oland, where Erik Johan and his five siblings were born. After his father was appointed Bishop of Kalmar in 1807, the family followed him there in 1810. Erik Johan started writing poems in his youth. He began studying theology and law, first in Lund and later in Uppsala with poor results, partly due to his poor health. A clerk’s job as copyist in a central ecclesiastical office in Stockholm from 1815 gave him time to study, write poems and get to know the capitol. His models were Sweden’s Romantic poets: Esaias Tegner, Per Daniel Atterbom and Carl Jonas Love Almqvist. Despite his salaried position, he remained dependent on financial support from his father. Stagnelius’s health was fragile, his manners were bohemian, and he suffered from both alcohol and drug abuse. Gradually he became a reviled outsider and died at the age of thirty. He published a few books during his lifetime, but his breakthrough as a poet came only posthumously, when his complete works were published in 1824–26.

Stagnelius’s early poetry has been said to reflect three different currents, which his biographer Fredrik Böök called “Thule, Zion and Athens.” Thule stands for the Norse sagas. Zion bespeaks his Christian faith and the Biblical symbolic tradition that he had inherited from his early life. Athens stands for the Latin and Greek poetry that he translated (Horace, Propertius). This last bestowed on him the sensuality and hedonism that his puritanical Christian beliefs restricted, and he disguised strong erotic yearning through symbols from classical mythology: “Early on he was attracted to erotic motifs, which he filled with a characteristically sensual, morbid longing and contrasted with loneliness and nocturnal anxiety.

Having described the organization of the libretto and the range of textures and phrase syntax used in its musical realization, the time has come to consider how these elements congeal into the complete numbers that form the backbone of Verdian opera. Taking a historical perspective, the number of set pieces diminishes considerably in Italian opera after the eighteenth century: Mozart's Don Giovanni has twenty-four numbers (in the Prague version), Così fan tutte thirty-one, and La clemenza di Tito twenty-three, whereas operas by Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi himself generally have between ten and fifteen set pieces. It is true that nineteenth-century Italian operas are usually somewhat shorter, but we should also recognize that a reduction in the number of set pieces was accompanied by their expansion (except in the case of finales, already long in opera buffa) through the spinning out of contrasting sections that collectively exhibit the entire range of textures available in the style. Arias, duets, and ensemble pieces with many sections written in different textures are relatively rare in eighteenth-century opera, especially in opera seria.

The enlargement of individual numbers went together with a change in the rhythm of plots. A series of variegated set pieces that develop around gripping theatrical situations and strong confrontations replaced a chain of ringlets that required a relatively rapid rotation of characters on the stage in a series of actions-reactions that produced a slowly evolving and complicated plot and many arias (a highly reductive description of opera seria). Although the narrative links from one big set piece to another big set piece are not necessarily very smooth, the multisectional number does facilitate the musical elaboration of different dramatic elements within a single piece: dialogue, ecstatic revelation, dramatic shock, juxtaposition of evocation of the past with the experience of the present, couleur locale, contrast between public and private subject positions. The chorus, usually a projection of the public dimension of the plot, has a much more important role in nineteenthcentury opera than before, and this produces more opportunities for its close-knit exchange with solo voices within the framework of individual set pieces. In the same vein, the sequence of different textures in multisectional numbers facilitated the confrontation of characters expressing different points of view and, in arias, the musical expression of the evolving emotions of a single character.

Unity and Analytical Paradigms

Theoretical tools designed to show unity have long been used implicitly to substantiate the integrity of composers (and theorists) faced with the commodification of culture, functioning as tropes for creative authority and autonomy, and a ready criterion for value judgment. In the wake of Romantic aesthetics that critiqued conventional harmonic syntax and stereotypical melodic figures as a basis for coherence, such tools became particularly urgent. “Everyone knows,” wrote Roger Parker over thirty years ago in a study of motivic development in Aida, “[that] in good music a search for ‘motivic coherence’ will almost always be rewarded in overabundance.” These kinds of remarks have most often been tested with reference to German repertory extending from Bach to Wagner and beyond. But for quite some time now, the wall erected by critics such as Arnold Schoenberg and Carl Dahlhaus between works that putatively follow their own internal designs and those beholden to social practice and institutions (such as nineteenth-century Italian opera) has crumbled, not only because the former have been seen as grounded in ideology and society but also because the latter have been subjected to a new and wide variety of theoretical tests of what constitutes “good music.”

Varieties of Unity

Yet although the new apparatus of music theory has modernized Verdi research—just as productions of the works themselves have been modernized—it has come under fire over a range of concerns. Quite some time ago, the houselights dimmed on the type of musical logic that privileges motivic and tonal relationships. Some have objected to a tendency to “terrorize” historical Others and crush figures of the past with the heavy armor of modern analytical techniques, others to a plethora of graphs and charts and tedious prose. These complaints have been effective in encouraging greater nuance in critical and analytical discussions but often do not seem to foster methodological pluralism any more than their targets. We would do well to remember that methodologies are the product not only of ideologies, authority structures, and/or consensus-seeking communities but of personal temperaments as well.

One prominent suggestion that opera criticism should forgo analyses that seek coherence in unity came from James Webster in the late 1980s. He admonished readers “to conduct our searches for tonal coherence as skeptically as we know how, and to accept from the beginning and without bias the possibility that we may not find it.”

Although Abramo Basevi did not attempt a systematic study of Verdi's style in his important Studio sulle opera di Giuseppe Verdi (1859)—the book, rather, offers a blow-by-blow survey of the operas before Simon Boccanegra—he occasionally uses certain terms that have been folded into the analytical vocabulary in the last half century, notably in the work of Harold Powers (as we will explore in chapter 4). One is the expression solita forma (the usual form) to refer to the large-scale organization of operatic numbers, little developed by Basevi himself but much discussed in the modern musicological literature. Other terms also relate to architecture, such as stretta or pezzo concertato, and have become common coin. But before we look at these, it is important to consider the musical elements of pezzi: the textures employed and (in chapter 3) the organization of musical phrases at a local level.

Typology

The term related to texture that surfaces most frequently in Basevi's book (and that he discusses more than solita forma) is parlante. He defines it initially in his chapter on I Lombardi, describing it as a passage where “the motivo is in the instrumental part rather than in the voice” (Basevi understands motivo here not as a short musical fragment but as a synonym of phrase or theme). He continues by proposing a typology of different kinds of parlanti, to be considered later in this chapter. For now, we should note that in his discussion of Simon Boccanegra where he criticizes the putatively mediocre quality of the recitatives at the beginning of this opera, Basevi situates parlante in the context of other textures: recitativo on the one hand and aria on the other hand. He starts this analysis, one that has an explicitly anti- Wagnerian agenda, by retracing the history of recitative since the work of Jacopo Peri at the beginning of the seventeenth century to establish the separation of recitative into two types: semplice and obbligato. Traditionally, the former designates a realization with basso continuo or solo keyboard. After the late works of Rossini, Basevi implies that recitativo semplice includes participation of the orchestra but in a minimal way, whereas obbligato signifies a more important orchestral role.