The Secrets of "Il Trovatore". The adventurous life of a masterpiece

On 29 April 1859, Camillo Benso di Cavour had been shut away in his study for hours, waiting for a dispatch. When his trusted aide Costantino Nigra brought it to him, the news was what the Prime Minister had long been awaiting: the Austrians had crossed the Ticino, the war had begun and the alliance with France could now be activated. Cavour threw open the window and sang ‘Di quella pira’, the only tune he knew how to sing. From that day onwards, his staff would gauge his mood by whether or not he was humming it.

The fact that the head of the Piedmontese government had precisely that little ditty on his mind says a great deal about what Giuseppe Verdi’s Il trovatore had become six years after its premiere. Julian Budden, one of the leading Verdi scholars of the twentieth century, speaks of a triumphant march through the world of opera, and the figures prove him right. In the three years following its Rome debut, Il trovatore was staged at least 229 times worldwide; in Naples, during the same period, eleven productions across six theatres totalled 190 performances. Not all those in power, however, loved that Verdi opera as much as Cavour did. In January 1859, Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies, en route to Bari for his son’s wedding, was staying in Lecce. A gala performance of Il Trovatore had been arranged for him, but the king, having learnt that the famous Neapolitan comic actor Mazzara was in town, demanded Nicola De Giosa’s Don Checco instead: “Enough of this Il Trovatore business; I want to hear Don Checco; I want to have some fun.”

Verdi, for his part, had no doubts. In 1862, from London, he wrote to his friend Opprandino Arrivabene that there was no corner of the world with a theatre and two instruments where Italian opera was not sung, and concluded with a sentence that today sounds like a prophecy: ‘When you go to the Indies and into the heart of Africa, you will hear Il Trovatore’. In 1878, during the Congress of Berlin, the caricaturist Augusto Grossi was already able to use the figure of the troubadour and the weeping lady on the fortress to mock the negotiations between the European powers, confident that everyone would understand; the print, entitled “Parodia del Trovatore”, is preserved at the Library of Congress.

And yet that opera which everyone was humming had come into being amidst a thousand conflicts. Verdi was unable to read the original of the source play, “El Trovador” by Antonio García Gutiérrez, because he did not know Spanish, and it was Giuseppina Strepponi, his partner at the time, who translated it for him. The composer sent that home-made version to Naples, presenting it, with a certain degree of honesty, as ‘more of a guess than a translation’. It was the sort of story that strikes fear into the heart: Budden himself described it as ‘a bombastic and rambling melodrama’, adding that ‘it is crammed with fantastical and bizarre episodes’. Verdi liked it precisely for this reason. He asked the librettist to preserve all its novelty and eccentricity, otherwise it would be better to give up on the project altogether, and he even wanted to name the opera after the gypsy woman, ‘la Gitana’. Had he got his way, we would be listening to something quite different today.

His collaboration with the librettist, the Neapolitan Salvadore Cammarano, was stormy. Verdi was in a hurry; Cammarano was not. The maestro confided to his friend Cesare De Sanctis that he was ‘furiously angry’, only to ask him a few lines later to ‘give Cammarano a kiss from me’ all the same. The poet, however, refused to be intimidated: he expressed his gratitude for the objections, pointed out that ‘art is difficult’ and did not back down an inch. When Verdi wanted to remove Azucena’s madness from the finale, Cammarano replied with a phrase that no composer could have refuted: “When Azucena does not reason, the drama makes more sense.” Verdi eventually gave in, though he put in writing that he was by no means convinced. By July 1852, the work was almost complete. From Busseto, the composer received the final verses; he read them with enthusiasm, wrote to his ailing friend urging him to cheer up, and promised him a celebration on the day of his recovery. Cammarano had died in Naples two days earlier, and Verdi would only discover this weeks later – as he himself would lament – from ‘a stupid theatre newspaper’.

It is from this letter, which never reached its recipient, that “Letteralmente Verdi” begins – the show staged at the Teatro Comunale Pavarotti-Freni in Modena as part of the Modena Belcanto Festival: Alessandro Preziosi lent his voice to Verdi’s letters selected by musicologist Giuseppe Martini, with Massimo Mercelli on the flute and Giampaolo Bandini on the guitar. “It is commonly believed that the great composers were boring men,” says the actor, “yet Puccini, Verdi and Rossini were men of such high standards – towards others and towards life – that only their works can justify them. If they had written mediocre pieces, it would have been unbearable.” For Aldo Sisillo, artistic director of the Comunale, it is “a piece of history that the general public often ignores almost entirely”, and the flute and guitar duo also has its own significance: “It evokes salon music, the medium through which opera spread throughout the cities of the nineteenth century, when a piece became popular because someone played it at home, arranged for two instruments.”

Returning to the narrative, it fell to a thirty-year-old poet to complete the libretto: Leone Emanuele Bardare, whom Verdi casually refers to as ‘Baderni’ in his early letters. Among other requests, Verdi asked him to give Leonora greater prominence. The maestro desired a song for Azucena and, to clarify his intent, jotted down four model verses, adding a note in the margin: ‘(laugh!!)’. Those lines would become ‘Stride la vampa’. In the same letter, Verdi also claims the libretto for a King Lear that had turned up amongst Cammarano’s papers – an old project he considers his own – but De Sanctis points out that the deceased left ‘much glory and no wealth’ to his family: if he wants it, the maestro must buy it. There is even room for a grammar lesson: his Neapolitan friend, whilst proofreading the manuscript, takes the liberty of reminding Europe’s most famous composer that ‘giubilo’ is spelled with just one ‘b’, as the purists insist. In December, Verdi announced to another friend, Vincenzo Luccardi, that the score was finished, ‘not a single note is missing’, and his only request was that a good piano be waiting for him in Rome. Shortly afterwards, Strepponi urged him to deliver ‘our Trovatore’ as soon as possible, and that possessive pronoun speaks volumes about the work being a home-grown project.

The premiere took place on 19 January 1853 at the Teatro Apollo in Rome, with parts of the city flooded by the Tiber, which had burst its banks. The audience turned up anyway. Rehearsals had been marred by tensions between the two prima donnas, Rosina Penco (Leonora) and Emilia Goggi (Azucena), but the opera was an instant success. Verdi, having returned to Sant’Agata, wrote a brief assessment of a few lines to Clara Maffei: “They say this opera is too sad and that there are too many deaths, but after all, in life everything is death!”. Too many deaths, and a plot that seems tailor-made to be summarised poorly. We are in Aragon, in the early fifteenth century, during a civil war. The Count of Luna loves Leonora, who loves Manrico, a troubadour and leader of the rebels. Years earlier, a gypsy woman had been burned at the stake for witchcraft, and her daughter Azucena, seeking revenge, had abducted the old Count’s newborn son to throw him into the flames; in the confusion of that night, however, it was her own child who ended up in the fire. The abducted infant grew up as the gypsy woman’s son and became Manrico. In the end, Leonora poisons herself rather than yield to the Count; the Count orders Manrico’s execution and, once it has taken place, Azucena reveals to him that she has just killed her own brother: ‘You are avenged, O mother!’. The gypsy appears in just three of the eight scenes, yet it is she who holds the opera in her grip from beginning to end, as Verdi had intuited from the very first day.

With a plot like this, mockery was inevitable. Some have interpreted the switched babies in Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1878 opera H.M.S. Pinafore as a dig at Il Trovatore, even though the authors never stated as much. Luchino Visconti set Cavour’s cabaletta against the backdrop of the Risorgimento: Senso begins by showing the patriots at La Fenice, right in the middle of ‘Di quella pira’, cheering Manrico from the gallery, whilst tricolour leaflets rain down on the stalls where the Austrian officers are seated. The sequence is so successful that even today some people recount it as an account of events from 1866, but in reality it is a creation of the director.

The curious detail is that Verdi never actually wrote the most eagerly awaited note in that little aria. The low C that closes ‘Di quella pira’ is a traditional addition, attributed either to Carlo Baucardé – the first Manrico, who is said to have introduced it during the Florentine revivals – or to Enrico Tamberlik. For a century and a half, the audience has demanded it as if it were printed on the stave, and woe betide anyone who omits it. Riccardo Muti had already done so in 1977 at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, with Carlo Cossutta as the tenor. On 7 December 2000, he tried it again at La Scala, on the evening of Saint Ambrose’s Day, which marked the start of the celebrations for the centenary of Verdi’s death, with Il trovatore absent from that stage for twenty-two years and a Manrico chosen by him personally, Salvatore Licitra. When the final note came, the C was missing, and protests rang out from the gallery, directed more at the conductor than at the tenor.

After all, this opera stirs the spirits, especially those of the tenors. In the winter of 1960 at the San Carlo in Naples, Franco Corelli, annoyed by a member of the audience who was heckling him from a box, left the stage and went in search of him, still in costume, ‘with bellicose intentions’. The incident made the headlines in every newspaper, and on 1 March the weekly magazine Grand Hotel even dedicated a colour illustration to him. The legend – which Corelli never denied – adds that he was wielding his prop sword and that he smashed through a door with a shoulder charge. In 1978 at the Vienna Staatsoper, during a dress rehearsal open to the public, Franco Bonisolli – irritated, according to some, by the boos following ‘Ah sì, ben mio’, and according to others by Herbert von Karajan’s manner – hurled his sword towards the conductor’s podium and walked out shortly before ‘Di quella pira’; Plácido Domingo was called in at short notice to replace him, and it is with him, alongside Raina Kabaivanska, Fiorenza Cossotto and Piero Cappuccilli, that this production – directed by Karajan himself – can still be heard on record today. It is said of Bonisolli himself that in Barcelona, after missing the final C, he threw his sword onto the stage and, with the curtain closed, stepped out onto the proscenium to sing it alone, a cappella, as if to set things right.

In the anecdotes surrounding Il Trovatore, the upper galleries are no less eventful. In Bologna, in January 2019, the boxers that Robert Wilson had staged in place of the ballet originally featured in the French version, Le Trouvère, were met with cries of “It’s appalling!” and “To the stake!”, which, given the subject matter, sounded almost like a spoiler. Another member of the audience suggested putting the director himself right there amongst the boxers, “to give him a proper thrashing”. In Parma, at the 2010 Verdi Festival, the audience at the Regio drowned out Marianna Tarasova’s Azucena with boos, with some dissent also directed at the conductor Yuri Temirkanov, and from the upper tiers someone shouted: “Do you actually pay that woman?”. La Gazzetta di Parma rightly described it as rudeness rather than criticism.

Perhaps a quip that has been doing the rounds for a century – sometimes attributed to Enrico Caruso, sometimes to Arturo Toscanini – hits the nail on the head: to stage Il Trovatore, all you need are the four best singers in the world. A true but partial assessment, because the score presents profound psychological and emotional nuances that require carefully considered directorial choices and a lighting design rooted in the colour that bursts forth in Verdi’s music. A work with a ‘prodigious and vehement’ rhythm that can capture the attention of even the younger generations. For those who have never listened to an opera, Preziosi suggests starting right here: ‘Put on your headphones, turn up the volume and listen to Leonora’s aria, where she sings something sublime: “I felt a joy that only angels are granted to feel!”’.