Respighi and Verdi

Below are the program notes I wrote for the upcoming concert of the Lubbock Symphony Orchestra – Saturday, January 18, 2025.

Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936) was the only important Italian composer of his era better known for his instrumental works than for his operas. Though he wrote nine operas, they are almost never performed. His orchestral compositions, on the other hand, are part of the standard concert repertory.

Respighi was born in Bologna to a family that encouraged his early interest in music. In 1891, he enrolled at the Liceo Musicale di Bologna, where he studied the violin, viola, and composition. He then became principal violinist at the Russian Imperial Theater, and studied briefly with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. His subsequent brilliant orchestrations show the influence of Rimsky the master of orchestral color.

He moved to Rome in 1913 to become professor of composition at the Liceo Musicale di Santa Cecilia. A decade later he resigned his professorship to devote himself to composition. In 1935 he contracted sub-acute bacterial endocarditis which in the pre-penicillin era was a death sentence. He died the following year. This was the same disease that took Gustav Mahler’s life in 1911.

His first orchestral tone poem, The Fountains of Rome, premiered on March of 1917. It was not successful. Arturo Toscanini conducted the piece in February 1918 to great acclaim. This performance established Respighi as a leading Italian composer. Respighi wrote two more Roman tone poems: The Pines of Rome (1924) and Roman Festivals (1928). After the last of these he felt he could no longer write pieces for large orchestra and thereafter wrote for smaller ensembles.

The Birds: Is a suite for small orchestra in five parts. The Birds was written in1928. It is constructed on little known music from the 17^th and 18^th centuries.  It is an attempt to transcribe birdsong into musical notation.

The first movement Prelude is a harpsichord piece by Bernardo Pasquini (1637-1710) transcribed for orchestra. It hints at a few of the musical themes and melodies played in later movements.

The second movement, The Dove, is a transcription of a lute piece by Jacques Gallot (1625-1695). It uses an oboe to resemble a dove.

Movement three, The Hen, is taken from a harpsichord composition by the French master Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1754). It uses violins which are said to be “clucking” in imitation of the eponymous fowl.

Part four, The Nightingale, is based on the folk song “Engels Nachtegaeltje” transcribed by the recorder virtuoso Jacob van Eyck (1590-1657). Here  woodwinds over strings represents the nightingale.

The last movement The Cuckoo is again based based on the music of Pasquini.

The Birds is a delicately wrought suite showing Respighi’s great mastery of past styles while retaining the attention of a modern audience. It is scored for 2 flutes (2nd doubling piccolo), oboe, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets,  celesta, harp, 1st and 2nd violins, violas, cellos, and double basses.

The Fountains of Rome: The piece is in four movements, each depicting four of Rome’s fountains. While it is interesting to know what the composer was inspired by, if the music is good it can be enjoyed on its own without knowledge of its program. Each of the four fountains are portrayed at a specific time of day. Starting at dawn, then morning, noon, and concluding at sunset.

The Fountain of Valle Giulia at Dawn – This fountain in the Valle Giulia area of Rome. It is best known because of Respighi’s tone poem. It is a pastoral piece intending to suggest the movement of sheep  in a humid dawn. Perhaps there were sheep grazing in Rome more than a century ago.

II. The Triton Fountain in the Morning  – Created by the Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini it was commissioned by his patron, Pope Urban VIII, the fountain is located in the Piazza Barberini. Naiads and Tritons appear, pursuing each other and mingling in an energetic dance beneath the fountain’s spray.

III. The Trevi Fountain at Noon – An 18^th century fountain designed by architect Nicola Salvi; it is the largest fountain in Rome. It is also the most famous. Toss a coin into it and… well, you know the rest. It’s located at the junction of three roads (tre vie) – hence its name. This section has the work’s most robust music. It assumes a triumphal  character. The titan Oceanus who is at the fountains center could be riding by on a shell chariot drawn by two-seas horses. He then vanishes. The movement ends quietly with soft chimes in the distance.

IV. The Villa Medici Fountain at Sunset – This fountain is modest compared to the gargantuan one of the previous section. It is made of red granite dating back to ancient Rome. The Villa Medici was founded by Ferdinando I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1576. The music is soft and melancholy. Day ends, birds twitter, and night looms.

Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) is opera’s supreme master. In the theater, his 26 operas are comparable only to Shakespeare’s 37 plays. He was born in Le Roncole a hamlet so small that Muleshoe seems a metropolis alongside it. The house he was born in has been a national monument since the year of his death. Le Roncole is near the town of Busseto where Verdi spent most of his life.

At about the age of 10 he moved to the house of Antonio Barezzi, in Busseto. Barezzi became Verdi’s patron and sponsor. When the teenage Verdi was denied admission to Milan’s Royal Conservatory, Barezzi arranged private lessons for him in Milan under the tutelage of  Vincenzo Lavigna who was the concertmaster at La Scala. Without Barezzi there would be no Verdi. Incidentally, the conservatory is now the Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi. When life deals you a bad hand, remember that Giuseppe Verdi couldn’t get into the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory.

Not only was Verdi supported by Barezzi, he married his patron’s daughter. The couple had two children who died in quick succession followed by their mother. Verdi’s austere persona was doubtless shaped by these personal tragedies. He was more like a Roman of the early republic than a modern Italian. The writer of some of the world’s most glorious love duets left behind not a single love letter.

Verdi’s works are usually divided into early, mid, and late periods with a final one added. The three final works are the Requiem Mass dedicated to the great novelist Alessandro Manzoni one of Verdi’s two cultural heroes – the other was Rossini – and his last two operas Otello and Falstaff. The Mass and the two operas were composed after Verdi had retired. Sixteen years separate Aida from Otello. He was 74 and 80 when his final operas were first performed they are both among the greatest works in this genre.

Rigoletto marks the beginning of his mid period. It was his 16^th opera. Unlike Victor Hugo’s play Le Roi s’amuse which opened and closed on the same evening, Rigoletto based on Hugo’s play was a huge success, a status it has enjoyed ever since. Hugo was upset that Verdi had made an opera out of his play, but when he attended a performance of it declared the opera a masterpiece. I can find no evidence that Verdi ever paid for the rights to set to music the plays by living authors that he used. By the time Puccini came along the copyright laws were well established and he had to obtain permission from and pay royalties to the authors of the plays he made into operas.

La Fenice in Venice commissioned the opera in 1850. Verdi had trouble with the libretto before he composed a note. The Austrian censors had numerous objections to the story, Austria controlled Northern Italy at the time of the opera’s composition.  The censors wouldn’t allow an unfavorable depiction of a king, thus King Francis I became the Duke of Mantua.

To satisfy the censors Francesco Piave the librettist made many other changes, Verdi completed the score in February 1851. Rigoletto was premiered a month later. Verdi withheld the music for the opera’s most famous number ‘La donna è mobile’ (Act 3) from the tenor as he knew that it would prove so popular that the stagehands would learn it and it would spread throughout Venice resulting in Verdi being accused  of stealing the tune.

When asked later in life, but before his late masterpieces, what his best opera was he named Rigoletto. The opera is unlike anything that had come before it. It marks the end of the bel canto era. It is through composed (one number moves to the next without a pause). It has no hero. The title character is a hunchback jester newly arrived in Mantua to serve in the duke’s court. He is a tragic anti-hero. The tragic hero of the great classical Greek plays, is undone by a tragic flaw. Rigoletto is undone by his only virtue – his love for his teenage daughter. Otherwise he’s a nasty piece of work. Parental encounters are a frequent theme in many Verdi operas, but Rigoletto has the most tragic father/daughter relationship found in any of his operas.

Rigoletto’s driving motive is a curse hurled at the duke and Rigoletto by Monterone in Act 1, the father of a girl abused by the duke. He condemned the father to death for remonstrating against the assault of his daughter. Rigoletto mocked the father as he was on his way to the executioner, hence the curse. It doesn’t faze the duke – nothing does. Rigoletto is very superstitious and is aghast at being cursed.

The scene (Act 1 Scene 2) in which Sparafucile, a professional hit man, offers his services to Rigoletto is unlike anything in opera prior to this point. The melodies are in the orchestra as an extended dialogue between the two continues. Rigoletto turns down the assassin’s offer, but later takes him up on a murder for hire.

Rigoletto’s daughter (Gilda) is a hormone-crazed girl who falls for the duke disguised as a poor student. His courtiers thinking her Rigoletto’s mistress kidnap her and give her to the duke. He rapes her and then discards her. She still loves him despite his lying and assault. She loves even after seeing him pursue a prostitute in a tavern run by her brother Sparafucile – she loves him no matter what. When she realizes that her father has hired Sparafucile to kill the duke to avenge the duke’s rape of his daughter, she decides to die in his place. The duke has so charmed the prostitute that she convinces her brother to kill the next person who enters the tavern as a substitute for the duke whose true identity is unknown to her. Gilda knowingly enters the tavern during a furious storm, is stabbed and put in a sack.

The sack is given to Rigoletto. He’s delirious with joy thinking the duke’s body is in it.  When he hears the duke singing a phrase from ‘La donna è mobile’ he opens the sack to find his mortally wounded daughter in it.The opera ends with Rigoletto crying “The curse.”

The duke is one of opera’s most repellent characters. He’s a despot, a murderer, and a rapist; he’s a psychopath. Like many of his kind he’s attractive at first encounter. That’s how Verdi paints him. His misdeeds are set to some  of Verdi’s most beautiful music. He’s a monster, but a superficially charming one. He destroys the lives of everyone he touches. Every leading tenor wants to sing this role of an attractive villain who never pays for his misdeeds.

Verdi wrote more great music for the baritone than any other composer of operas. He invented a new type of baritone, one whose vocal center is placed in the top third of the baritone’s range. Rigoletto is the summa of all baritone roles. It has the most challenging singing for baritone in opera coupled with the requirement that the singer portray a hunchback restricting his posture and breath control. If a baritone can master Rigoletto he has mastered Italian opera.

The part of Gilda needs a high soprano who can handle the difficult aria ‘Cara nome’ as well as her half of the numerous duets she sings with Rigoletto and the duke. She’s also part of the famous quartet in the last act.

This quartet is actually a double duet and is the first use of the ‘split screen’ technique. Gilda and Rigoletto are outside the tavern mentioned above observing the duke flirt with Maddalena the prostitute. The quartet is the most accomplished ensemble in opera. It combines beauty with dramatic thrust as it also advances the plot. The duke has already concluded his business with Maddalena as he goes upstairs to sleep after the quartet ends. She’s obviously satisfied with his performance as she wants to save his life.

Rigoletto has been a favorite with audiences from its first performance until today. The critics were more cautious. They were put off  by its easy accessibility and plethora of tunes. Verdi said that the only critic that counted was the audience and that critic has delivered its verdict. Today nobody disputes Rigoletto’s place at the top of the operatic canon. Igor Stravinsky wrote “I say that in the aria ‘La donna è mobile’, for example, which the elite thinks only brilliant and superficial, there is more substance and feeling than in the whole of Wagner’s Ring cycle.”

Verdi lived until his 88^th year. He was vigorous and active until until the stroke that killed him in a few days. He spent most of the eight years following the premiere of his final opera Falstaff supervising the construction of a home for retired musicians who are down on their luck. Officially called  Casa di Riposo per Musicisti (Rest Home for Musicians), everyone calls it the Casa Verdi. He insisted that each guest have a private room and left the home all the royalties from his operas. When they expired in 1951 the supervisors of the home had invested much of these royalties in real estate so that the home was financially independent and not in need of a government subsidy. Verdi and his second wife the soprano Giuseppina Strepponi are buried in the home.

Verdi wrote: “Of all my works, that which pleases me the most is the Casa that I had built in Milan to shelter elderly singers who have not been favoured by fortune, or who when they were young did not have the virtue of saving their money. Poor and dear companions of my life!” There’s a pun here. The Italian  word opera translates to work.

When Verdi’s body was transported from its temporary resting place, 300,000 Milanese lined the streets that went to the Casa Verdi. It’s still the largest public gathering in the history of Italy. They spontaneously started to sing the great chorus ‘Va pensiero’ from Verdi’ third opera and first success Nabucco.

Verdi’s place in Italian life is akin to that of George Washington in America. He is a national hero. Before Italy converted to the euro, Verdi’s picture was on the 1,000 lira note the equivalent of our dollar bill. During the peninsula’s struggle for independence, the Risorgimento, ‘Viva Verdi’ was everywhere shouted and written on almost every wall. It was an acronym for “Viva Vittorio Emanuele Re D’Italia.” Vittorio Emanuele was the King of Sardinia under whose rule Italy was united.

When Verdi died the soldier, journalist, poet, and playwright Gabriele D’Annunzio wrote: “He gave a voice to all our hopes and struggles, he wept and loved for all of us.”

On the 200^th anniversary of his birth the noted conductor James Conlon wrote: “The king of empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence – Giuseppe Verdi.

The excerpts performed this evening are:

1. The opera’s brief and ominous Prelude.
2. The duet between Rigoletto and Sparafucile mentioned above.
3. ‘Pari siamo’ (We are the same). Rigoletto compares himself to the assassin. “He kills with a sword, I with my tongue.”
4. Figlia!… Mio padre! (Daughter…My father) Rigoletto enters his house and I greeted by Gilda. He has hidden his daughter from the duke and the rest of the city; she does not know her father’s occupation. He has forbidden her to appear in public, she has been nowhere except to church and does not even know her own father’s name. Like all overprotective fathers he fails, for at church she meets the duke posing as a poor student.
5. When Rigoletto leaves the duke enters and he and Gilda declare their love. She means it.
6. When the duke leaves Gilda sings ‘Gualtier Maldé!(the duke’s pseudonym)…Caro Nome’ (Dear name)
7. After Gilda’s kidnapping the duke sings ‘Ella mi fu rapita!…Parmi verder le lagrime’ (She was stolen from me!…I seem to see tears). For a brief moment the duke seems capable of real emotion, but he’s only thinking of himself.
8.  ‘La donna e mobile’ (A woman is fickle). This from the inconstant duke.
9. The Quartet