Virtually all aspiring singers begin their vocal studies with the early Italian songs of the 17th and 18th centuries—songs that develop the skills of maintaining legato flow supported by the breath, equalized registers, dynamic control, and the rudiments of executing melismatic runs and ornaments. Always included among them are the three Juan Diego Flórez has chosen to open this program; as we remember our own struggles with them, it is a pleasure to be able to hear them sung by a consummate master.
German-born Christoph Willibald Gluck is renowned as the great reformer of mid–18th-century opera. Late-Baroque opera had become swollen with virtuoso display and endless da capo arias; Gluck pared all this away. As he wrote, “I believed that my greatest labor should be devoted to seeking a beautiful simplicity.”
Premiered in 1770, Gluck’s late opera Paride ed Elena retells the classical story of the love affair between Paris and Helen of Troy. Though it is seldom heard today, it contains the immortal aria “O del mio dolce ardor,” with which Paris declares his love in Act I. Gorgeous legato phrases spin above the piano’s constant accompaniment pattern, in which the little gasp before each of the right hand’s figures expresses the breathless urgency of Paris’s words.
A brilliant singer and teacher allied to Florence’s Medici court, Giulio Romolo Caccini published the song collection Le nuove musiche in 1602, which was an instant sensation. Perhaps its most famous song is “Amarilli, mia bella.” Here the lover pleads gently with his sweetheart to abandon her fears and trust him. Subtle chromatic shading enriches this flowing song, which closes with pianissimo phrases of ravishing beauty.
Though courts throughout Italy and in Brussels tried to lure him away, Giacomo Carissimi devoted his entire career to service as the maestro di cappella at Rome’s Collegio Germanico, one of the Jesuit order’s leading educational centers. There he won fame as the first major composer of sacred oratorios as well as a pioneer of the secular cantata. His solo cantata “Vittoria, mio core!” was published in 1656 in the Canzonette amorose and still flourishes today in homes and studios around the world. In this splendid example of early Italian bel canto—replete with coloratura runs—the lover rejoices, not because he has won his mistress’s heart, but rather because he has shaken off her deceptive charms and is no longer love’s slave.
After premiering his Guillaume Tell in Paris in 1829, Gioachino Rossini abruptly retired from his operatic career and wrote nothing more for almost 30 years. Retreating to Italy, he suffered years of illness and crippling depression. It was the wise and sympathetic support of his second wife, Olympe Pélissier, as well as a return to Paris in 1855 that brought about his mental and creative recovery. Beginning in 1857, Rossini resumed composing via an expansive series of miniature works, both piano pieces and songs, he called Péchés de vieillesse (Sins of Old Age). Rossini delighted in performing them at his celebrated soirées, which lured leading composers such as Liszt, Saint-Saëns, Gounod, and Verdi, as well as the most sought-after performers of the day.
From the third volume of Péchés, we hear the bittersweet waltz “L’esule” (“The Exile”), which reflects Rossini’s own situation in old age—living amid the beauties of Paris, but far away from his beloved Italian homeland. The first three strophes end with the melancholy phrase “but this soil is not my homeland.” The tempo increases in the last stanza as the singer proudly salutes his true home, washed by the Ligurian Sea. From volume one, “La lontananza” (“Distant Love”) is a lilting evening serenade to the singer’s distant beloved, decorated with the piano’s sparkling imitations of birdsong. Written specifically for a tenor, it includes an ardent, high-flying operatic finish.
Also included in the Péchés is a volume of piano pieces Rossini labeled quelques riens (“some nothings”). Tongue in cheek, he added a dedication: “I dedicate these Sins of Old Age to pianists of the fourth class, to which I have the honor to belong.” The antic polonaise “Danse Sibérienne” is a relentless little barnburner that closes as fast as the pianist can play it.
Decades earlier, Rossini launched his brilliant career by writing a series of five operatic farces for Venice’s tiny Teatro San Moisè. One-act operatic comedies were very popular in early–19th-century Italy, and they offered an ideal training ground for a teenage composer learning his craft. As Rossini remembered: “It is easy to see that everything tended toward facilitating the debut of a beginner maestro, who, better than in an opera of four or five acts, in a farsa could sufficiently display his innate imagination (if heaven had granted it to him!) and his technique (if he had learned it).”
Premiered in January 1813, Il signor Bruschino is famous today for its lively overture that features violinists tapping their music stands with the wood of their bows. It tells the story of two lovers, Florville and Sofia, who are not allowed by her father, Gaudenzio, to wed because Florville’s father was an old enemy. Instead, Sofia is pledged to the son of Signor Bruschino, Gaudenzio’s ally. However, when the son gets into trouble, Florville disguises himself and takes his place to marry Sofia before the ruse is discovered. The opera opens with Florville singing the yearning “Deh! tu m’assisti amore,” in which he pleads for love’s aid while expressing his fear that his fate will be unhappy. Here the 20-year-old Rossini elegantly displays his mastery of lyrical legato, the foundation of bel canto.
A decade later, Rossini was at the peak of his career and now creating an opera for a much larger Venetian theater: the renowned La Fenice. Semiramide was to be the last of his Italian operas; its weak reception by the Venetians after its premiere in February 1823 nudged him toward writing French-language operas for Paris. Based on Voltaire’s tragedy Semiramis, it is set in ancient Assyria, ruled by Queen Semiramide, who has conspired with the military leader Assur to murder her husband. She has now fallen in love with one of Assur’s officers, Arsace, whom she bizarrely fails to recognize as her own son.
Two secondary characters are the Indian prince Idreno, who loves the Assyrian Princess Azema, who herself prefers Arsace. After Semiramide announces that she will wed Arsace, Idreno presses his case with Azema and receives her half-hearted assent. Idreno’s “La speranza più soave” is a spectacular example of the Italian double aria known as the cavatina-cabaletta; it combines a slow opening song emphasizing long-spun legato phrases with a faster cabaletta in which impassioned emotions are expressed through virtuosic coloratura. Both sections emphasize the trumpet-like brilliance of a tenor’s highest notes.
Premiered in 1842 in Vienna, Gaetano Donizetti’s pastoral romance Linda di Chamounix is rarely revived today, but remains a cherished work for aficionados of bel canto opera. Full of wonderful melodies for its sympathetic title heroine and her loyal tenor lover, Carlos (secretly the Viscount of Sirval), it boasts a happy ending even though, midway through, Linda is driven to a state of madness—the better to sing an obligatory coloratura mad scene.
An innocent villager in Chamounix in the French Alps, Linda falls in love with Carlo, believing him to be a penniless painter. That love naturally survives the revelation of his aristocratic identity and their joint arrival in Paris, where he sets her up in a luxurious apartment before their wedding. But there is a fly in the ointment: Carlos’s mother, the proud Marchesa, refuses to allow the marriage to go forward. Anguished, Carlos sings “Linda! Si ritirò!” while Linda is away in another room. Unfortunately, he is so caught up in his own torments he cannot summon the courage, when Linda returns, to explain to her what has happened. When he suddenly runs off, Linda believes she has been jilted (hence the mad scene). After a sorrowing recitative laying out the situation comes Carlos’s slow-tempo aria “Se tanto in ira agli uomini”: a romanza exploiting the beauty of long, flowing lines filled with subdued pathos. For those unfamiliar with this opera, you’ll be relieved to know that all obstacles are overcome in the end.
Far more obscure is Donizetti’s unfinished opera Il duca d’Alba, originally commissioned by the Opéra national de Paris in 1839 as the grand opera Le duc d’Albe to a libretto by the famous Eugène Scribe and Charles Duveyrier. Unaccountably, the Opéra decided to terminate the commission after Donizetti had written about half the score. He then turned his attention to another libretto for Paris, La favorite, staged successfully in 1840. (Interestingly, in 1855 Scribe and Duveyrier’s libretto was revised into Les vêpres siciliennes for Verdi.)
Thirty-four years after Donizetti’s death, the Milanese publisher Lucca entrusted Donizetti’s one-time pupil Matteo Salvi with the task of completing Il duca d’Alba now in an Italian translation; this was premiered in Rome in 1882. And it was Salvi, not Donizetti, who actually composed the beautiful tenor aria “Angelo casto e bel.” Set during the Flemish wars of the 1570s, it is sung by Marcello, the illegitimate son of the Duke of Alba, who loves Amelia, the daughter of the Flemish patriot Egmont, executed by the Duke. Amelia is now determined to assassinate the Duke—a situation that leaves Marcello torn between his beloved and his loyalty to his father. As he observes Amelia praying at her father’s grave, Marcello wonders at her beauty and prays she will be protected, even at the price of his happiness. This aria is a wondrous tissue of chiaroscuro shadings, with blazing top notes shining against haunting pianissimos, especially in its ethereal ending. One imagines Donizetti would have been proud of his pupil’s exquisite creation.
When his opera Rigoletto premiered at Venice’s La Fenice in 1851, Giuseppe Verdi achieved his full mastery of the operatic form and remained mostly at that exalted level for the rest of his career. He not only knew how to create an irresistibly appealing melody in “Questa o quella,” but how to use it to define a character in less than two minutes. Shortly after arriving on stage in Act I, the Duke of Mantua expresses his philosophy of life and love with this light-as-a-feather arietta and simultaneously foretells that Gilda’s brief involvement with him will lead to tragedy.
Jérusalem fulfilled Verdi’s first commission for the Opéra national de Paris in 1847, but it wasn’t a new creation: Instead, it was a translation into French and revision of his fourth opera, I Lombardi, premiered at Milan’s La Scala in 1843. The Lombards fighting the First Crusade at the end of the 11th century are here transformed into Frenchmen from the Court of Toulouse. The showy tenor role becomes the Viscount Gaston of Béarn, who falsely accused of murder has been exiled to Palestine, not far from Jerusalem. Captured by the Emir of Ramla, he longs for his fiancée Hélène, whom he is desperate to see again, in the aria “Je veux encore entendre.” Opening with a scene-setting recitative, this lilting aria will be familiar to many listeners, for it is Lombardi’s well-known “La mia letizia infondere.” Since Verdi’s cast included Gilbert Duprez, the first tenor to electrify audiences by singing high notes in full chest register, Verdi added some high Cs to display his powers.
Verdi rarely wrote for instruments alone, but Vincenzo Scalera opens this section with a brief piece he composed in 1844, “Romanza senza parole” (“Romance without Words”). In 1865, Verdi’s first publisher, Giovanni Canti, turned to various prominent composers of the day to assemble a collection of short piano pieces entitled Gioie e sospiri (Joys and Sighs). Grateful for Canti’s help when he needed it most, Verdi offered this romanza. Delicate and dreamy, it exploits the tinkling sounds of the piano’s highest notes.
A Frenchman of Spanish descent, Edouard Lalo is best known today for his colorful Spanish-flavored work for violin and orchestra, Symphonie espagnole. The greatest triumph of his career, however, came in 1888 when he premiered his opera Le roi d’Ys at Paris’s Opéra-Comique. Originally written in 1875, it had initially been turned down by the Opéra national de Paris, but Lalo’s revision over the next decade finally led to its warm embrace by French audiences.
The opera is based on the old legend of the city of Ys on the coast of Brittany that was drowned by the sea, but whose church bells can still be heard in the waves by susceptible listeners. Rozenn and Margared, the daughters of the King of Ys, both love the same man, the knight Mylio, but he chooses Rozenn. On their wedding day, in accordance with Breton custom, Mylio sings the enchanting aubade (a lover’s morning serenade) “Vainement, ma bien-aimée” outside the guarded doors of Rozenn’s house. To a rhythmically infectious accompaniment mimicking a mandolin, this aria’s highlights include octave leaps to a lightly caressed high A. What the two lovers don’t know is that the jealous Margared is about to open the water sluices that will drown the city. (Happily, they are among the survivors.)
Premiering on April 27, 1867—only a month after Verdi’s Don Carlos debuted at the Opéra national de Paris—Charles Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette enjoyed a far greater success than Verdi’s grand opera. Audiences packed the Théâtre Lyrique night after night to see it. Its immense popularity was amplified by the Exposition Universelle, which had opened on April 1; this gigantic World’s Fair—celebrating all things French and the glories of Haussmann’s recently rebuilt Paris—drew national and international visitors to the capital in numbers never seen before. Unlike Don Carlos, it was an intimate drama focusing on the two lovers, and Gounod outdid himself in the arias he wrote for each as well as in their glorious duet scenes. “Ah! lève-toi, soleil” is Roméo’s Act II showpiece, sung as he arrives below Juliette’s balcony after meeting her at the Capulet ball. The ecstasy of coup de foudre love is perfectly captured in its ardent lines, topped off by those golden high B-flats. (Despite all the frenzy about top Cs, B-flat is the real tenor money note.)
Like Verdi, Giacomo Puccini was a theatrical composer through and through and wrote very little for instruments without voices. From his small sheaf of piano pieces, Mr. Scalera has chosen “Foglio d’album” (“Page in an Album”), believed to have been written in either 1907 or 1910 in New York City while Puccini was assisting with productions of his operas at the Metropolitan Opera. Marked Moderato, con affètto (“with tenderness”) and in B-flat major, it’s in the style of a salon piece with dense, chromatically infused harmonies that are suggestive of the impressionism found in some of his later opera scores.
The Central European legend of the vila—young women betrayed by their lovers who turn into dancing nocturnal spirits bent on vengeance—received its most famous dramatic representation in Adolphe Adam’s classic ballet Giselle in 1846. Four decades later, Puccini chose it for his first opera, Le Villi, composed for a competition in 1884. Though it didn’t win, composer-librettist Arrigo Boito was sufficiently impressed that he backed it for a premiere at the Teatro dal Verme in Milan. However, when other theaters mounted Le Villi, the initial excitement dissipated as Italian audiences rejected it as “too Wagnerian.”
Added by Puccini in 1885, its greatest number is “Torna ai felice dì,” the scena drammatica for a repentant Roberto. He had abandoned his fiancée, Anna; she subsequently died of a broken heart and was transformed into a vila. Pursued in his imagination by the villi, he approaches Anna’s house, not sure whether she is alive or dead. We hear the disembodied voices of the villi in the opening recitative’s accompaniment (“Ecco la casa”) as he sings that his remorse is more powerful than their threats. The impassioned aria that follows is pure Puccini, filled with soaring sequences and blazing high notes, as he wishes he could return to the spring days when he enjoyed Anna’s love. All is in vain, though, for the vila Anna appears with her troupe and dances him to death.
—Janet E. Bedell