Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-v9fdk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T07:20:43.603Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Grieving in the mirrors of Verdi's Willow Song: Desdemona, Barbara and a ‘feeble, strange voice’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2008

Brooks Toliver
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

When ‘la mesta’ (the sad one) intones ‘Salce!’ from the lonely heath within the Willow Song, she creates a situation at once compelling and artificial — a song within a song within an opera:

Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , November 1998 , pp. 289 - 305
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Text and translation from Weaver, William. Seven Verdi Librettos (New York, 1975), 502–7.Google Scholar

2 A note regarding terminology: I adopt ‘singing’ and singing as a convenient shorthand. Cone, Edward T. uses ‘realistic’ and ‘operatic’ song, respectively, in ‘The World of Opera and its Inhabitants’, in Cone, Music: A View from Delft, ed. Morgan, Robert P. (Chicago, 1989), 125–38.Google Scholar His vocabulary has been adopted by Kivy, Peter, ‘Opera Talk: A Philosphical “Phantasie”’, this journal, 3 (1991), 63–77,Google Scholarand Rosen, David, ‘Cone's and Kivy's “World of Opera”’, this journal, 4 (1992), 61–74.Google ScholarAbbate, Carolyn opts for ‘phenomenal’ and ‘noumenal’ in Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Reproduced in Zink, Michel, Les chansons de toile (Toulouse, 1978), 86–7.Google Scholar

4 I refer to ‘Sotto ad un salice’ of 1879. A word on the chronology of textual drafts: extensive revisions in 1885 resulted in the final version of the Willow Song, ‘Piangea cantando’. Between 1879 and 1885, Boito made minor changes to ‘Sotto ad un salice’ at Verdi's request; these intermediary changes do not affect the issue of quotations, and thus are not dealt with here. For a comprehensive treatment of Boito's Willow Song texts, see Fairtile, Linda B., ‘Verdi's First “Willow Song”: New Sketches and Drafts for Otello’, Nineteenth-Century Music, 19 (1996), 220–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Hepokoski, James, ‘Boito and F.-V. Hugo's “Magnificent Translation”: A Study in the Genesis of the Otello Libretto’, in Reading Opera, ed. Groos, Arthur and Parker, Roger (Princeton, 1988), 49–50.Google Scholar See also Hepokoski, , Giuseppe Verdi: Otello, Cambridge Opera Handbooks (Cambridge, 1987), 41, 43, 191n6.Google Scholar

6 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, ed. Percy, Thomas (London, 1886), 200. For Hugo's French translation of this stanza, see Hepokoski, ‘Boito and F.-V. Hugo's “Magnificent Translation”’, 49.Google Scholar

7 The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Bevington, David, 4th edn (New York, 1991), 1158.Google Scholar

8 Berio has conflated Barbara and ‘la mesta’ in the character of Isaura: like ‘la mesta’, Isuara is the heroine of the ballad: like Barbara, she is Desdemona's old acquaintance.Google Scholar

9 Text from Edizione critica delle opere di Gioachino Rossini, 19, ed. Collins, Michael (Pesaro, 1994), 786n9; the translation is my own.Google Scholar

10 Text and translation from Fairtile (see n. 4), 220–1.Google Scholar

11 Fairtile (see n. 4), 223, 230.Google Scholar

12 Moreover, Desdemona now tells Barbara's history in roughly a third the space of Boito's earlier draft (these lines preceding ‘Sotto ad un salice’ are published by Luzio, Alessandro in Carteggi verdiani, II [Rome, 1935], 117–18). Barbara, like ‘la mesta’, is thus described less and quoted proportionally more in the final version.Google Scholar

13 The question of whether or not Verdi specifically called for an increase in quoting in the Willow Song has no clear answer. In the composer's earlier music for ‘Sotto ad un salice’ (Fairtile [see n. 4], 223–6), I find no delineation of ‘la mesta’ comparable to that of ‘Piangea cantando’ discussed below.Google Scholar

14 Quoted in Chusid, Martin, ‘Verdi's Own Words: His Thoughts on Performance, with Special Reference to Don Carlo, Otello and Falstaff’, in The Verdi Companion, ed. and trans. Weaver, William and Chusid, (New York, 1979), 160. Hepokoski observes that the Ricordi Production Book demands four vocal qualities of Desdemona: for ‘Salice!’; for the rest of the Willow Song; for the text representing her present; and for her references to the past;Google Scholar see Otello di Giuseppe Verdi, ed. Hepokoski, and Ferrero, Mercedes Viale, Musica e Spettacolo (Milan, 1990), 46, 79n54. In his Dix ans de carrière (Paris, 1897), Victor Maurel — Verdi's first Iago — recollects that the composer insisted on a special quality of voice for the word ‘Salice!’. Maurel elaborates on this comment in a way that squares with neither my view of a tri-partitioned discourse nor the basic information in the score.Google Scholar Hans Busch reprints Maurel's account and summarises its questionable accuracy in Verdi's Otello and Simon Boccanegra (Revised Version) in Letters and Documents, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1988), II, 629–65 (for Maurel's version of Act IV, see 664–5).Google Scholar

15 Chusid, , 160.Google Scholar

16 Translated in Busch (see n. 14), II, 600. Regarding Verdi and the Ricordi Production Book, see Hepokoski, Giuseppe Verdi: Otello (see n. 5), 116–7.Google Scholar

17 Translated in Busch, II, 603.Google Scholar

18 The author of ‘Willow’ indicates it in the refrain (‘Sing, O the greene willow …’) and even more explicitly in the second stanza (‘He sighed in his singing …’).Google Scholar

19 I derive my summary of reflexive strategies and their significance from the following sources: Alter, Robert, Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre (Berkeley, 1975);Google ScholarLucien Dällenbach, The Mirror in the Text, trans. Whiteley, Jeremy and Hughes, Emma (Oxford, 1989);Google ScholarStonehill, Brian, The Self-Conscious Novel: Artifice in Fiction from Joyce to Pynchon (Philadelphia, 1988);CrossRefGoogle ScholarWaugh, Patricia, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London, 1984). For an exploration of reflexivity in music, see Abbate (n. 2), Chapter 3, ‘Cherubino Uncovered: Reflexivity in Operatic Narration’, 61–118.Google Scholar

20 I paraphrase Stonehill, 8; see also Dällenbach, 30–5.Google Scholar

21 Dällenbach establishes three degrees of reflexivity (p. 35): (a) ‘Simple duplication’, where part of a work resembles the work as a whole; Hamlet belongs to this category. (b) ‘Infinite duplication’, which extends the previous category through a longer sequence of similar sub-works. Given that the sequence need not literally extend to infinity (obviously), Act IV scene 1 of Otello qualifies as an example. (c) ‘Aporetic duplication’, or ‘a sequence that is supposed to enclose the work that encloses it’. Here, the replication is so exact that one loses a sense of hierarchy between work and sub-works. In this way, Les Faux-monnayeurs, along with Gide himself, become participants in — more than instigators of — a chain of Faux-monnayeurs.Google Scholar

22 Technically speaking, Barbara ‘sings’ the story of ‘la mesta’, not her own. But Desdemona's prefatory words to Emilia make clear that Barbara took up the Willow Song to express her personal misfortune.Google Scholar

23 I take the image of the music ‘rocking’ from Budden, Julien, The Operas of Verdi, 3 vols. (New York, 1981), III, 392.Google Scholar

24 Budden, III, 392.Google Scholar

25 Stonehill (see n. 19), 31, includes the mirror in a list of ‘thematic images of reflexivity’; Dällenbach (n. 19), 10–12, discusses a similar use of mirrors in the visual arts.Google Scholar

26 Busch (see n. 14), II, 601. For the props listed in the production book, see Busch, II, 597.Google Scholar

27 Fig. 1 is traced from Busch, II, 601.Google Scholar

28 Busch, , II, 601.Google Scholar

29 Ibid., II, 601–2.

30 Le Sage, Laurent, Jean Giraudoux, Surrealism, and the German Romantic Ideal, Illinois Studies in Language and Literature 36/3 (Urbana, 1952), 29.Google Scholar

31 Furst, Lilian, Fictions of Romantic Irony (Cambridge, 1984), 229.Google Scholar

32 Kerman, Joseph notes the influence of literary drama in operas development towards greater continuity, in Opera as Drama, rev. ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988), 109–10, 113.Google Scholar

33 Dahlhaus, Carl describes Verdi's fitting of convention to realism in similar terms, in Realism in Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. Whittall, Mary (Cambridge, 1985), 67.Google Scholar

34 Along similar lines, the Ricordi Production Book indicates that she should move an arm to imitate the flight of birds described in the third stanza (Busch [see n. 14], II, 601).Google Scholar

35 Shakespeare's Desdemona interrupts her song with, ‘Nay, that's not next’ (IV.iii.55). In Rossini's Otello, Desdemona grows frustrated at her inability to remember the song: Che dissi! … Ah m'ingannai! … Non è del canto questo il lugubre fin. M'ascolta … [What have I said! … Ah, I was mistaken … / This is not how the sad song ends. Hear me …].

36 Furst, (see n. 31), 12.Google Scholar

37 For the French version of Otello in 1894 — reviewed here by Bellaigue, — Gailhard, Pierre had translated ‘Cantiamo!’ as ‘Qu'ils chantent!’ Bellaigue, 's review is translated by Busch (see n. 14), II, 743.Google Scholar

38 Richard Taruskin's passing comment is clearly relevant to my discussion of reflexivity: ‘If we are operatically literate we do not wonder whether the characters are aware of the music they inhabit …’. Taruskin, , ‘Review: Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices, this journal, 4 (1992) 194.Google Scholar