About

What is Il trovatore “about?”

1. a. the standard dramatis personae of Italian Romantic opera: heroic tenor, yearning soprano, unpleasant and unsuccessful baritone, wronged and vengeful mezzo-soprano, loyal bass, plus these people's various attendants.

2. b. the Romantic Middle Ages.

3. c. the Middle Ages as romanticized in the later novels of Sir Walter Scott.

4. d. the Middle Ages as further romanticized by Scott's followers, above all, in the dramas of Victor Hugo and his followers – most notably for Il trovatore, in the play El Trovador by Antonio García Gutiérrez.

5. e. the characteristic structure of arias and duets of its time: recitative leading into the cantabile, then the tempo di mezzo, and, finally, the cabaletta.

6. f. the dangers posed by gypsies (though gypsies did not yet reside in Aragon at the time the play was set).

7. g. the gypsy's revenge, revenge becoming an emotion the audience can identify with since it is mediated by a romantically distant setting and by music that seeks to overwhelm any moral compunctions we may have (see violence).

8. h. very little in the present and a lot in the past (see narrating).

9. […]

The affinities between opera and lyric are longstanding. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in France, non-comic opera was distinguished from spoken drama by the term tragédie-lyrique. In Italian the word lirico is appended as an adjective to opera to form the generic term opera lirica, for the word opera can refer to a variety of things such as work or action. The term lyric has been preserved in the names of opera houses such as the Théâtre-Lyrique, which functioned in mid-nineteenth-century Paris, and in such present-day institutions as the Boston Lyric Opera and the Chicago Lyric Opera.

The word lyric derives from that ancient instrument, the lyre, which accompanied the recitation of poems. During the early modern period the word was revived to define shorter poems accompanied by plucked instruments supposedly descending from the lyre. In its early manifestations, opera demonstrated its affinity to lyric through the dominant role that these instruments – baroque harp, chitarrone, theorbo, and lute – played in the small chamber ensembles accompanying the singers. When we hear a performance of, say, Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria or La Calisto, we are constantly aware of how conspicuously the various plucked instruments define the rhythms and the harmonies of the declamations uttered by the characters.

Consider the following statements, written within less than a decade of one another:

Why should we even speak of opera and society in the same breath? Is there, for instance, a special affinity between these two terms, and if so, is it different from or more intense than the relationships we seek to establish between other artistic forms and society – between, for instance, painting and society, comedy and society, or, to cite the title of a famous essay by Theodor Adorno, lyric and society?

As we listen to these various combinations, the phrase “opera and society” seems particularly amenable to discussion. With painting, for example, one is faced with a multitude of forms, each rooted in a particular social context, from the animals depicted on the caves of Lascaux to the political messages drawn by muralists on barrio walls. Opera, by contrast, seems comfortably circumscribed. It encompasses an easily definable history extending back four hundred years in Europe and the Americas. It has flourished continuously within a discernible institution, the opera house, though also, at least in its earlier years, within aristocratic courts. And despite the substantial differences in national traditions of opera, the particular roles assigned to those who create and sustain it – impresario, singers, librettist, composer – have maintained a degree of constancy over these four centuries rarely to be found in other art forms.

Modernist opera?

The terms we use to periodize opera are not necessarily the terms we use to characterize other forms of music. “Baroque opera,” a label attached to well over a century of works from Monteverdi through the early Gluck, belongs to the same category we apply to all the arts. But although the music of Mozart and Haydn is classified as marking the so-called Classical style, we do not readily speak of Don Giovanni or Die Zauberflöte as Classical operas. Yet we do speak of Romantic opera, but this, as mentioned earlier, is a relatively narrow term that suggests Weber and his successors up to early Wagner, and it is most often applied to German examples. Yet how do we bring the Germans together with their contemporaries Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti? Better perhaps to keep the Italians by themselves and speak of the Age of Bel Canto, a period concept intrinsic to opera and not transferable to other music, let alone the other arts.

Modernist opera, however, is a concept that seems to have caught on, if only because the operas we see as “modernist” emanate from composers whom we have already classified with this term. Unlike their nineteenth-century predecessors, the modernist composers of opera were not primarily “opera composers.” Very few of the great nineteenth-century opera composers created significant oeuvres outside the opera house – the most notable exceptions being Beethoven, Berlioz, and Tchaikovsky.