La Bella Lingua: My Love Affair with Italian, the World's Most Enchanting Language by Hales Dianne

Author:Hales, Dianne [Hales, Dianne]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Broadway
Published: 2009-04-29T16:00:00+00:00

“ARE YOU A MIMI OR A MUSETTA?” ASKS MAESTRO Mario Ruffini, a musicologist and composer in Florence, referring to the leading ladies—sweet-souled Mimi and coquettish Musetta—of Giacomo Puccini’s La bohème. An American might have tested my temperament (more Musetta than Mimi) with a choice between fiery Scarlett or placid Melanie from Gone with the Wind. But of course an Italian, especially one who spent years as an opera conductor, would think in terms of this wholly Italian invention.

Opera, a splendid confection of music, words, drama, costumes, sets, special effects, and complete suspension of disbelief, could not have emerged in any other country. “Italian opera is the ultimate expression of the collective Italian genius—the Italian sun captured in sound,” says Maestro Ruffini. “It stems from the Italian nature, the Italian voice, the Italian soul.”

Nothing looks like Italian opera. Nothing sounds like Italian opera. And no one (not even Petrarch, who inspired its language) speaks or has ever spoken the elevated idiom found in the libretto (little book) of virtually every classic Italian opera. As soon as she steps on stage, a donna (woman) becomes a beltà (beauty)—no matter how plain the singer—with lumi (lighted candles) for eyes. Rather than a chiesa (church), she goes to a tempio (temple), where sacri bronzi (sacred bronzes) ring instead of campane (bells). Stage directions for battle scenes invariably call for the firing not of a cannone but of a bronzo ignivomo (fire-vomiting bronze). An impassioned suitor entreats his beloved, “Stringimi al seno,” usually translated as, “Draw me to your bosom.” But seno, a Roman physician informs me, refers more precisely to the delicate spot between a woman’s breasts.

Absurd though it may be, opera’s stile gonfiato, or inflated style, can enchant—no less than the golden wings of music that carry the poetic words aloft. I fell under its spell long before I knew a single sentence in Italian. As a graduate student at Columbia, I would buy standing-room tickets to the Metropolitan or the New York City Opera and sidle into empty seats, working my way ever closer to the stage. At certain magical performances, the melding of words and music bypassed my ears and shot straight to my heart. I could actually feel it fluttering in my chest, directly beneath my seno.

When I moved to San Francisco to marry a man who had never even been to an opera, I won him over slowly. On Saturday evenings we would anchor our little sailboat off Belvedere Island in the San Francisco Bay, watch the stars, and listen to broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera on a portable radio. Without the benefit of supertitles or a libretto, we had to listen with our hearts, intuiting what the singers were saying. Within a year, Bob was hooked, and we had student tickets (he was a psychiatry resident at the time) to the Friday-evening series at the San Francisco Opera.

Back then I thought that learning Italian would help me understand opera better. Instead, the more I learned about la lirica, as Italians refer to opera, the better I understood Italian—and Italians.

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