Ghost of Sunday Classics: A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste Dept. -- Two operatic heroines, part 1

In Act II of Verdi's La Forza del destino, Leonora (Jennifer Maines) meets the kindly Padre Guardiano (Marek M. Gasztecki), at Innsbruck's Landestheater, September 2013.

by Ken
Another ghost-of-a-post idea, and one that may require some eventual fleshing-out. It was born of conjoined images from two different operas that suddenly started playing together in my head. And the "ghost" theme is actually appropriate, since it happens that both of the operatic heroines of our post title is that both have been seeing, er, fantastmi, as our Heroine No. 1, Verdi's Donna Leonora di Vargas from La Forza del destino, puts it.

HEROINE NO. !: VERDI'S LEONORA DI VARGAS
(LA FORZA DEL DESTINO)

We've actually heard this before, at some length. in the May 2011 post "Verdi's Forza demonstrates from start to finish what only opera can do." Donna Leonora, held responsible for the death of her father, the Marquis of Calatrava, the night she attempted to elope with her beloved Don Alvaro, has fled her home in Seville, eventually winding up at the mountain monastery of Hornachuelos, where she throws herself at the mercy of its superior, the kindly Padre Guardiano. When he finds out who she is, he recoils at first, then shows her the first human kindness she has received since her father's death, and what we hear from her in this release of pent-up tension rather terrifies me.

VERDI: La Forza del destino, Act II, Scene 2: Leonora, "Più tranquillo l'alma sento" ("I feel my soul more tranquil")

LEONORA: I feel my soul more tranquil
since I tread this ground.
The fearful phantasms
I no longer feel making war against me.
No longer does my father's shade
rise bleeding before me,
nor do I hear him, terrible,
cursing his daughter.

Maria Caniglia (s), Donna Leonora di Vargas; EIAR Turin Symphony Orchestra, Gino Marinuzzi, cond. Fonit Cetra, broadcast performance, 1941

Renata Tebaldi (s), Donna Leonora di Vargas; Orchestra of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia (Rome), Francesco Molinari-Pradelli, cond. Decca, recorded summer 1955

Leontyne Price (s), Donna Leonora di Vargas; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Francesco Molinari-Pradelli, cond. Live performance, March 9, 1968

Verdi's Queen Elisabeth demands justice from King Philip but gets something else

Ferruccio Furlanetto (at the Met last year) as the sleepless King Philip in his study -- with the fateful jewel box

The KING's study in Madrid. The KING, plunged in deep meditation, leaning on a table covered with papers, where candles are near burning out. Day begins to illuminate the colored glass of the windows.

KING PHILIP [as if in a dream]:
She never loved me.
No, that heart is closed to me.
She doesn't love me, she doesn't love me.

I still see her again, contemplating with a sad look
my white mane the day that she came here from France.
No, she doesn't love me, she doesn't love me.

[in Italian, as above] Cesare Siepi (bs), King Philip II; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Fritz Stiedry, cond. Live performance, Nov. 11, 1950

[in Italian, as above] Nicola Rossi-Lemeni (bs), King Philip II; NHK Symphony Orchestra (Tokyo), Oliviero de Fabritiis, cond. Telecast performance, Sept. 2, 1967

[in French (slightly different text)] Erwin Schrott (bs), King Philip II; Rafat Jezierski, cello; Orquestra de la Communitat Valenciana, Riccardo Frizza, cond. Decca, recorded Jan.-Feb. 2008

by Ken

As I noted in last night's preview ("Poor King Philip receives yet another unwelcome early-morning visitor"), we're resuming our journey through the Don Carlos Act IV scene in King Philip's study which began with his pre-dawn monologue ("Verdi's King Philip -- a man in crisis," January 2013) and continued with the crack-of-dawn confrontation between the king and the 90-year-old blind Grand Inquisitor pay a just-at-dawn call on the king ("'The pride of the king withers before the pride of the priest!' (Verdi's King Philip)," March 2013).

Back when we began our journey, I said that sleeplessly half-deranged state in which we found the king, exacerbated by the severe bullying inflicted by the Grand Inquisitor, would lead him to commit a monstrous act. That act is the climax of the slender bit of scene which is our work unit this week.


WE GET DOWN TO BUSINESS PRETTY QUICKLY

Simon and Maria Boccanegra -- no longer alone in an unkind world

Plácido Domingo as the Doge and Ana Maria Martínez
as Maria Boccanegra in Los Angeles this past February

VERDI: Simon Boccanegra: Act I, Scene 1: Boccanegra and Maria, "Ah!" . . . Boccanegra, "Figlia a tal nome io palpito"

MARIA BOCCANEGRA: Father! Ah! Clasp to your breast Maria, who loves you!
SIMON BOCCANEGRA [simultaneously]: Ah! daughter my heart calls you!
[Orchestral outburst]
SIMON B: Ah! Daughter, daughter my heart calls you!
MARIA B: Ah! Clasp to your breast Maria, who loves you!
SIMON B: Daughter! At the name I tremble
as if Heaven had opened up to me.
You reveal to me
a world of unspeakable joy;
your loving father will create
for you a paradise;
the luster of my crown
will be your glory.

Leyla Gencer (s), Maria Boccanegra; Tito Gobbi (b), Simon Boccanegra; Vienna Philharmonic, Gianandrea Gavazzeni, cond. Live performance from the Salzburg Festival, Aug. 9, 1961

by Ken

Above we hear the moment of recognition, which we heard in last week's Sunday Classics preview, "Together again, and all's right with the world -- more or less," introducing opera's two great recognition scene. We listened last week to the one in Richard Strauss's Elektra, when Elektra and Orest, over great obstacles and with great difficulty, finally recognize each other as sister and brother.

Now we return to the scene in Verdi's Simon Boccanegra when both Simon, now Doge of Genoa, and the young woman who has been known as Amelia Grimaldi, understand that she is in fact his long-ago-abducted daughter Maria. As I noted, we heard the actual moment of recognition last week, but we stopped short of the meltingly beautiful solo that follows immediately.

I described these two scenes last week as "scenes whose power over me undoubtedly exceeds anything I'll be able to explain," and in presenting the Elektra scene I didn't even try. As we approach the Boccanegra scene (having listened, in Friday night's preview, to that supreme expression of grief, the aria "Il lacerato spirito," voiced by her grandfather, Jacopo Fiesco, at the death of her mother, Maria), I will just suggest that while there likely are people who have never felt some version, albeit likely less extreme, of the feeling of utter-aloneness-in-the-world felt by both pairs of characters, and consequently truly don't experience a wrench of the gut at these instances of the character pairs, against all odds, being reunited with another person who is closely related to them, and more importantly entirely with them, on their side, available to kiss the booboo and make it better.

Before we proceed to the full scene, I thought we might hear just the final word of the scene. According to the stage direction: "MARIA, accompanied by her father all the way to the threshold, enters the palace. SIMON contemplates her ecstatically as she disappears," after which "he says one last time": "Daughter!" This last "Figlia!" could hardly be set more simply: dolcissimo (very sweetly) and very softly, the first syllable on the baritone's high F (not that high for a baritone, but right on the vocal "break"), dropping for the second syllable to the F an octave below.

Here are four renditions of this final bit. I'll identify the performers in the click-through.

The final "Figlia!"




LET'S PRESS JUST A BIT FURTHER
INTO THE BOCCANEGRA-AMELIA SCENE