The Cambridge Companion to Verdi (Cambridge Companions to Music) by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2004-11-18T05:00:00+00:00

* * *

Il vecchio Silva stendere

Old Silva dares to lay

Osa su lei la mano . . .

his hands upon her . . .

Domani trarla al talamo

Tomorrow the creature

Confida l’inumano . . .

hopes to drag her to the nuptial bed . . .

S’ella m’è tolta, ah misero!

If she is taken from me, woe is me!

D’affanno morirò!

I shall perish from anguish!

* * *

The real inhumanity of Silva’s wedding plan is that it would kill Ernani himself. The subsequent cabaletta , syncopated as if to underline Ernani’s impetuous nature, explains that Elvira’s love is his only comfort, confirming his self-centered outlook.

If Ernani and his boys open the opera in keeping with their rough, self-consciously unsophisticated surroundings, singing rowdily about the sweetness of love and protesting (too much?) their desire for feminine presence, Elvira is introduced, by contrast, in the exclusive company of women, inside a castle boasting every comfort and luxury. The conventional change to lyrical strings for this scene anticipates the cavatina of the prima donna – and emphasizes that this is specifically female space. Like her lover, Elvira thinks the grass is greener on the other side of the fence (or mountain) and rejects the security offered by Silva in favor of the more adventurous prospect of the “antri e lande inospite,” set to uneasy leaps, promised by Ernani (see example 11.1 ). 18 But what she wants is hardly relevant, as Ernani is certainly not her story: she hardly sings on her own after this entrance aria, which begins, significantly, “Ernani! . . . Ernani, involami” (“Ernani, carry me off!”). The creator of Elvira’s role, the soprano Sofia Loewe, desperately tried, right up to the rehearsal stage, to persuade Verdi to end the opera with a rondò for her, but the composer had definitively discarded the idea months earlier in an answer to Piave’s first draft of the libretto: “For God’s sake do not finish with the rondò but do the trio: and in fact this trio must be the best piece in the opera.” 19 Verdi’s patience with singers’ egos seemed already in short supply.

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