"You just drank poison!"
I've raved recently -- here and here -- about the cabalettas in 19th century Italian operas, the rousing pieces that bring each scene to a crashing close. I talked especially (in the second link above) about the cabaletta from a duet in Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia, where the music just sweeps along, mostly ignoring the drama playing out on stage.
So now I've put this cabaletta online. Listen, and see what you think. Doesn't physical verve trump everything else? And if it does -- and if these pieces crop up over and over again in every opera from this period -- what does that say about what these operas mean, and how they should be performed? Shouldn't we go for broke, and make them more than a little wild?
What happens on stage: Lucrezia Borgia has a problem. Her husband just poisoned her son, but his son doesn't know it. (He also doesn't know he's her son, but let that go for now.) So now she has to tell him. "Unhappy man!" she sings. "You just drank poison!" And then we're off to the races. The soprano sings the tune, the tenor sings the tune, there's a noisy interlude, both singers sing the tune together, and then there's a noisy coda. Somewhere in there, Lucrezia gives her son an antidote, but you can't tell when. The music just doesn't bother with such trivial details.
One note: in my earlier post, I said this cabaletta has horror movie chords, but they don't stick out as much as they did in the 19th century. To find them, listen to the way the melody rises to a high note. It does this twice. The first time, the chords underneath are nothing special. But the second time, they're pure melodrama.
The performance: Montserrat Caballé is Lucrezia, Alfredo Kraus is Gennaro, her son, and Jonel Perlea conducts.
Categories:
AJ Blogs
AJBlogCentral | rssculture
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Andrew Taylor on the business of arts & culture
rock culture approximately
Rebuilding Gulf Culture after Katrina
Douglas McLennan's blog
Art from the American Outback
John Rockwell on the arts
Jan Herman - arts, media & culture with 'tude
dance
Apollinaire Scherr talks about dance
Tobi Tobias on dance et al...
media
Jeff Weinstein's Cultural Mixology
Martha Bayles on Film...
music
Greg Sandow performs a book-in-progress
Howard Mandel's freelance Urban Improvisation
Focus on New Orleans. Jazz and Other Sounds
Exploring Orchestras w/ Henry Fogel
Kyle Gann on music after the fact
Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...
Greg Sandow on the future of Classical Music
Norman Lebrecht on Shifting Sound Worlds
publishing
Jerome Weeks on Books
Scott McLemee on books, ideas & trash-culture ephemera
theatre
Elizabeth Zimmer on time-based art forms
visual
Public Art, Public Space
John Perreault's art diary
Lee Rosenbaum's Cultural Commentary
Tyler Green's modern & contemporary art blog

Leave a comment