Listen to This by Alex Ross

Author:Alex Ross
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2010-09-28T04:30:00+00:00

Verdi’s writing for voice is a camera that zooms in on a person’s soul. Consider the moment in Act II of La traviata when Violetta, the wayward woman, leaves her lover, Alfredo. Alfredo believes that she is merely going into the garden, but he will soon receive a letter from her saying that she is gone forever. “I will always be here, near you, among the flowers,” Violetta says to him. “Love me, Alfredo, as much as I love you. Goodbye!” Amami, Alfredo, quant’io t’amo. When a great soprano unfurls these phrases—I am listening to Callas live at La Scala, in 1955—you hear so much you can hardly take it all in. You hear what Alfredo hears, the frantic talk of an overwrought lover: “I love you even though I am going into the garden.” You hear what Violetta cannot bring herself to say out loud: “I am leaving you, but will always love you.” And you hear premonitions of her deathbed plea, at the end of the opera: “Remember the one who loved you so.”

This matrix of meaning is contained in a simple tune that you already know even if you have never seen an opera: a twice-heard phrase that curves steeply down the notes of the F-major scale, followed by a reach up to a high B-flat and a more gradual, winding descent to the lower F. Beneath the voice, strings play throbbing tremolo chords. Verdi’s operas often pivot on such curt, charged phrases, which singers are expected to make into epiphanies. The composer hounded his librettists to find the right words for these passages; he wanted banner headlines of emotion. When Francesco Piave, his favorite collaborator before Boito, was working on Macbeth, Verdi issued this command: “USE FEW WORDS … FEW WORDS … FEW BUT SIGNIFICANT.” So significant was “Amami, Alfredo” in Verdi’s mind that he made the melody the main theme of the opera’s prelude, even though its only appearance in the opera proper is in these eighteen bars of Act II. There is no more impressive demonstration of Verdi’s lightning art: the audience hardly knows what hit it.

Callas’s execution of “Amami, Alfredo” on the 1955 set is among the most stunning pieces of Verdi singing on record. In the tense passage leading up to the outburst, the soprano adopts a breathless, fretful tone, communicating Violetta’s initially panicked response to the situation—vocal babbling, the Verdi scholar Julian Budden calls it. Then, with the trembling of the strings, she seems to flip a switch, her voice burning hugely from within. When she reaches up to the A and the B-flat, she claws at the notes, practically tears them off the page, although her tone retains a desperate beauty. Her delivery is so unnervingly vehement—here is what Björk, in her discussion of Callas, called the “mr”—that it risks anticlimax. Where can the opera possibly go from here? When you listen again, you understand: Violetta’s spirit is broken, and from now on she will sing as if she were already dead.

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