André Tubeuf offers an analysis of Verdi’s work, and above all in the place
voices in this repertoire. This work is more a literary story written by a
enlightened amateur to the GAI Knowledge, which was formed by the attentive listening of the works of the
Italian composer, that a detailed musicological study of Verdi’s works.
A year after his noted work on Beethoven, who had received the 2009 trial prize from the French Academy, André Tubeuf offers the reader a completely personal journey through Verdi’s immense vocal work, starting with the Requiemwhich is certainly a work of the maturity of Verdi, but which represented for the author a real revelation-literally and in the figurative sense-during a concert in 1953 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, in which In particular Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, magnificent initiator. The recalling of this extremely detailed concert shows how this work is not a new biography of the Italian composer, but a journey proposed to the reader in the work of Verdi, through the prism of memories of representations and Listen to André Tubeuf. Several temporalities intersect in this study and form its frame: the composer’s biography, the temporality specific to the booklet, to which are added the history of the different performers who have marked the roles and finally the memories of concerts or Operas. In this intermingling of temporalities, it is the memories and the memory of the writer that constitute the guiding thread of the work.
The bias of André Tubeuf, announced from the start of his study, is clear: he wants to analyze certain works by the Italian composer, without claiming completeness or impartiality, Rigoletto,, Il Trovatore (The finder),, La Traviataof course – works that form the “ popular trilogy ” – but also Macbeth, Simone Boccanegra, a Ballo in Maschera (A masked ball – Opera which experienced a scathing failure in its creation), Don Carlos, Aida (the first undisputed triumph of Verdi), Otete And Falstaff. André Tubeuf does not stop however at the popular few tunes that are the immense success of Verdi, such as the choir of Israelites in exile, Go thinkingchoir of Nabucco who imposed on a patriotic, generous and vibrant composer. A very personal description of these works is proposed by the author, passionate about opera for whom “ As the song widens, flourishes the voice, thus the opera will fulfill the theater “Because it allows a” Double tightening (dramatic) and amplification (sung) process. »»
André Tubeuf thus offers the reader a study by Verdi “ vividly “, Because it is above all an analysis of the types of voice and stamps specific to this repertoire, as well as the performers who have marked the history of these roles. He studies for example a specificity of Verdi’s writing, which represents a real innovation in the design of roles at the opera and which is the absence of airs for certain main characters. In Aida For example, Amneris, an authoritably present, even invasive character, does not sing any solo – paradox which marks a break in the history of the opera and which Verdi will then resume in other works.
The author also highlights the special place of low baritons in the work of Verdi, which are traditionally relegated to secondary roles: Simone Boccanegra is for example Verdi’s first work in which the two main roles are entrusted to low baritons, and Rigoletto introduces the pre -eminence of baritons into male characters. This is how the Metropolitan Opera of New York was able to program in 1932 Simone Boccanegraopera still decried at the time, because he had two magnificent artists, Lawrence Tibbett and Ezio Pinta ; Faced with them, the tenor and the soprano, which usually make the success of Verdi’s operas, are nothing more than valve, even if it was in this distribution of Giovanni Martinelli and Elisabeth Rethberg, singers of renown. Is it necessary to quote too Falstaffthe latest work by Verdi, impressive by his sense of fantasy, buffoonery and magical and whose title role is held by a low baritone with impressive stature, burlesque antihero.
But the voice in question in the title is mainly that of André Tubeuf, in turn passionate, enthusiastic, severe also and which gives this essay a very personal dimension, which can sometimes annoy by its partiality. The accumulation of implicit references, of references to other works by Verdi or the repertoire can make the text tedious for the profane ; The book is first aimed at all those who, already familiar with the work of Verdi, will be able to enjoy reading a fine and detailed analysis of the voices, performers and themes present in the work of Verdi. The study ends, like all the works published by Actes Sud / Classica, by a succinct chronology – unfortunately too succinct – and by a discography, which only avoids the pitfall to be a “ Catalog of a thousand and three »Disks to listen to.
Verdi loudly is also a literary analysis of Verdi’s works because if the composer has not written his opera booklets himself like Wagner, he has continued to impose numerous cuts on condenser and pick up the drama. His booklets, and in particular those of Macbeth, Otello, Falstaff, Don Carlos, Luisa Miller (drawn from Kabale und Liebe) And Ernani Establish the greatest European playwrights, Shakespeare, Schiller and Hugo. The setting of Schiller’s plays to music, however, is not obvious and reveals Verdi’s dramatic intelligence. Because for André Tubeuf, “ Nothing is built less in scenario than ideas, the height of sight ; Nothing lends itself less to becoming a lyrically palpable, sound, vibrant character than these great characters very truthfully came from history, but ideologically treated, flattened. We think here of Mallarmé, who affirms in a letter to Degas that we do not make poetry with ideas, but with words. Aida also reveals this deep sense of dramaturgy. If the characters have no dramatic thickness or inner truth, if there is a lack of correspondence between the situation represented on stage and the intensity of the song, the fact remains that the booklet is a model of arrangement Dramatic: the ballet and the parade, which are in other operas than obligatory entertainment, breaks in the narration, are here perfectly integrated into the action and allow to put in the presence of different characters, from which arise from passionate passion and dramatic twists and turns.
The rewriting of Simone Boccanegramore than twenty years after its creation in 1857, by a Verdi crowned with the success ofAida and Requiemalso shows the concern for the development of the deep dramatic springs of the opera, to extract the “ noun marrow “: While the initial version of the work hesitates, according to the expression of André Tubeuf, between a” Stolen children’s soap opera and a historico-escapist fresco », The concentration of action and the dramatic tightening around the call to the union of parties beyond the quarrels of clans give a new face to this work which has found a very particular echo in Italy whose unit was still under construction.
Verdi tightens musical time, which then becomes real time: in the first and fourth act ofOtete For example, musical time and action time coincide. Verdi breaks there with the conventional lag at the opera between the supposed time of action and its musical stretch. It is this concern for dramatic tightening which explains in particular why Verdi has gradually abandoned decorative song, pure entertainment, with its myriads of virtuoso vocalizations, characteristics of the characteristics of beautiful cantoto prefer a vocality accompanying the drama. For André Tubeuf, Verdi is above all a man of theater: music and song are nothing if they are first action, living beings, tension.