Verdi arias v. operas

Who's with me on this? An individual aria of a Verdi opera can be emotionally effective by itself, as long as you don't consider it as a part of the opera that surrounds it. At least from today's understand of what works as theatre, one might never understand how Verdi and his librettists came up with the plots of his operas. Cases: "La forza del destino" and "Giovanna d'Arco"

Verdi's output

For a few weeks now, I've been listening to Verdi operas from the earliest of his output, at least as available in CDs from the library. The most recent listening has been the Lorengar performance of La Traviata (1853) under Maazel (Berlin 1968). I just picked up La Battaglia di Legnano (1849), available just a bit out of order.

The operas available excluded only the two earliest (Oberto of 1839 and Un giorno di regno of 1840) and a couple others of the output before Rigoletto: Alzira (1845), Il corsaro (1848), and Stifellio (1850). Since early March, I've listed to these operas several times each:

• Nabucco (1842)
• I Lombardi alla prima crociata (1843)
• Ernani (1844)
• I due Foscari (1844)
• Giovanna d'Arco (1845)
• Attila (1846)
• Macbeth (1847)
• I masnadieri (1847)
• Jérusalem (1847)
• La battaglia di Legnano (1849)
• Luisa Miller (1849)
• Rigoletto (1851)
• Il trovatore (1853)
• La traviata (1853)

Fifteen down, eight to go. I'll miss out on hearing the Paris versions of Le trouvère (1857), Macbeth (1865), Don Carlos (1867), and La force du destin (1881). I expect that their greatest difference from the originals is the addition of ballet in the third act. That, in my opinion, is no great loss, as Verdi's modifications of I Lombardi into Jérusalem were not compelling.

My favorites of the list are Giovanna (despite it's non-historic plot), Luisa, Rigoletto, and La traviata. I had high hopes for I masnadieri with its basis in Schiller's Die Räuber. But I was disappointed, as I was with Macbeth.

What I found surprising are these observations:

1. Verdi was more an imitator than I had thought. His melodic lines are seldom innovative, orchestration mundane, and harmony pandering. Generally pleasing, I'll give you that. It's little wonder that his popularity was so strong. I remember some wag's observation that the public were humming Verdi's tunes as they went into his operas.
2. I suspect that Verdi worked quickly and perhaps overbooked his commitments to produce new operas—and rework established hits—for European stages. His schedule left little opportunity to reflect on improving what he was considered a master at.
3. Of his output through 1853, great acclaim is misplaced for Il trovatore. The book is overly complex, the score is full of tunes but devoid of provoking music. What could have become a masterful tale of doubles, discovery, and damnation was squandered in petty melody.
4. Most striking is Verdi's dependence on recitative, even through Il trovatore and La traviata. Though the half-generation of great Italian opera composers before him—Donizetti, Bellini, Rossini—also used recitative, the practice had whithered elsewhere. Wagner was writing Der fliegende Holländer and on the way to leaving the set-piece and recitative entwined in a shallow grave.

Toward a comprehensive music analysis

While writing an analysis of Verdi's cavatina D'Egito là sui lidi, I've come to realize ways to make musical analysis more exact, more thorough. I consider these points to be important in understanding an example of a composer's work, and I present them for critical comment by musicologists, students, conductors, performers, and listeners.

1. Of special importance is the historical context of the composition and performance. Some composers are innovative, some culminative, and some merely imitative. Providing the background of the composer's own development to the point of composition is necessary, and the background is of more use if little is said of later artistic development. But it's also imperative to provide information about the contemporaries in the same country and of nearby regions that might have had an influence on the composer's work.
2. Related to the historical facts are observations on the work's particular style and form, and how those aspects relate to musical history to the time of the composition. For example, Verdi, in writing his operas even through 1855, used a clearly distinct recitative style to move the plot forward, some 50 years after the height of that form. Although Schubert, Donizetti, Rossini, Meyerbeer, and other composers of opera also used the recitative, the use dwindled through 1830. Thus it becomes an observation worth noting that Verdi continued the form while his contemporary Richard Wagner moved toward through-composing his operas.
3. It is always important to cite the basics of key, time signature, tempo, form, and orchestration.
4. It's also useful to cite the number of measures, the approximate performance time, and any aspects that may allow for variance from the performance time.
5. For works with solo voices, it is important to cite the range and to describe the tessitura in terms of the comfortable tessitura v. the extremes of high- and low-voice tones. I find it useful to count notes to quantify where the tessiturae lie. And two means of identifying tessitura issues are possible:
1. Simply dividing the vocal range into thirds to determine whether the vocal line fits well into a standard voice or fach.
2. Counting each of the tones required, and assigning to contiguous a group of, say, 75% of the pitches a "comfort" tessitura. From this, one can quantify and describe the approaches to tones above and below the comfort tessitura.
3. Counting the number and size of leaps down and up from one note to another, including between phrases that may have intervening rests.
4. Observing whether long stretches ask for declamation on one pitch or on a limited range of pitches. Obviously, this is important in recitative and plainchant, but it may also be important in discussing works from the 20th and 21st Centuries.
6. For works with voices and text, it is useful to quantify the text relationship to the vocal line(s).
1. One concern is how the number of notes in the line relates to the syllables in the text. For example, plainchant and recitative might have a low ratio of notes to syllables; a more florid vocal line would have a higher ratio of notes to syllables.
2. Another concern is how repetitive the text of the vocal line is in comparison to the source text. For example, arias in the Baroque era typically repeated text almost at will to follow a florid vocal line; in contrast, arias in the verismo style tend to use the text without repetition.
3. Yet a third concern aims more toward literary analysis, where the goal is to compare rhyme schemes, alliteration, internal rhyme, and motivic use of words to similar aspects of the music composition.
7. A rigorous analysis not only identifies themes and sub-themes, but also delineates motivic elements and clarifies their relationship to the themes and form.

Are other aspects of analysis available? Very likely. I plan to add to this posting as I come across new needs for analyzing music or as readers offer their opinions.