![]() Casting aside the stereotyped aria form in favour of duets in which Verdi could more easily present the emotions of characters and deciding to write in the more expressive cantabile settings than the modified ternary of his youth, he worked to transform what was otherwise still grand opera into a form that held similar aesthetic ideals to the Gesamtkunstwerk of Wagner. While it is not true to say that the music of earlier opera was entirely disparate from the subject matter, they often would tread different paths with little regard for each other, and Verdi’s decisions to employ a greater sense of not necessarily word-painting, but emotional reflection in his music represents a movement towards greater musical realism in the middle of the 19th century.Īs Verdi grew older and began to experiment more with his musical language, his compositional style grew at greater odds against that of his predecessors, an experimental period stretching through most of his later life revealing explorations into harmonic complexity and structural freedom unseen before in Italian opera. A far more liberal use of orchestration is employed, Verdi choosing to push the orchestral accompaniment above the solo vocal line in the last few bars with crotchets in the flutes in an attempt to represent the emotion at play within the music. Nonetheless, the later date of the opera does yield some differences (although not apparent from the vocal score reproduced above). The extract above illustrates the influence of the Bel Canto operas on Verdi’s early writing clearly, the florid melodic lines and quite staid accompanying orchestra leaving a slightly jarring incongruity between the bitter subject matter and the elegant, if not care-free musical material. 1: An excerpt from “Anch’io dischiuso un giorno”, Act 2 Scene 1 of Verdi’s Nabucco This would change in Verdi’s later works, as he embraced a freer approach to form, but in his earlier operas, there is a deep sense of the all-permeating legacy of the Bel Canto operas on his compositional taste.įig. Again, the use of recitative without particularly much musical meaning is a reminder of the limits of the Bel Canto style, the abstracted music forcing the composer’s hand in writing sections to purely explain the plot, due to a lack of convention in doing so with the music in the arias instead. The presence of musical material quite emotionally detached from the subject matter at hand necessitated such structure, as indicators to an audience of pivotal moments in lieu of particularly engaging musical storytelling. ![]() The structural elements of the operas too echoed the works of his predecessors, Verdi largely maintaining a modified ternary form for his arias, typically preceded by a recitative to establish the dramatic situation. His early operas, Oberto (1839), Un giorno di regno (1840) and Nabucco (1842) in particular, show the hallmarks of the Bel Canto style, florid vocal lines matched with plots of mythic proportions or the mischief of higher society of an era somewhat passed. Partially due to the pure diversity of Verdi’s opera subjects, spanning Shakespearean comedy to dark melodrama, the musical language of his work his incredibly mixed, the composer selecting different tools of different origin to create cohesive dramatic works. That is not to say, however, that Verdi was quite the reformer of opera in the sense that Wagner was, indeed, many of Verdi’s works fall closely in line with early Italian and French grand opera, and the influence of the giants that came before him is distinctly present. In doing so, he often elected to retain elements of earlier opera, most noticeably in his opera subjects and adherence to form, while injecting new life into his work through a gripping sense of drama undeniable even to the most pessimistic of critics. Much like Wagner, Verdi is often perceived as a revolutionary of form, reinventing his art forms to better suit the times he was surrounded by. Rising out of the fading glory of Bel Canto opera came the works of Giuseppe Verdi, who would come to dominate the Italian operatic scene for decades until Puccini would be considered his successor in the latter parts of the 19th century. During the period in which Wagner had been revolutionising German operatic form, Italian opera had not remained stagnant entirely. While both a thesis and antithesis had been formed in the dialectical progression towards Puccini’s middle period operas, there are several remaining influences that need to be accounted for to explain how the musical language and operatic form of La Bohème came about in 1896.
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