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Maestro's Essay

BALLO IN MASCHERA - A HISTORY

In November 1857, Verdi began sketching Gustavo III, an opera about the assassination of the Swedish monarch, derived from an 1833 libretto for Daniel Francois-Esprit Auber by Eugene Scribe. He notated a complete continuity draft of act 1. When the Neapolitan censors asked for some changes, he and his librettist, Antonio Somma, moved the action to a ducal court in Pomerania and modified details of the plot. Its title became Una vendetta in domino, the form in which Verdi drafted acts 2 and 3 between December 1857 and early January 1858. Except for an interruption in act 2, the draft is complete. Indeed, on 9 January he wrote to the theater that “L’opera e finita” (The opera is finished) and reported that he was working on the skeleton score. He had essentially completed the skeleton score when he arrived in Naples on January 14 and was ready to have the vocal parts extracted. The performance would have followed by mid-February. Because of the attempted assassination of Napoleon III in Paris in mid-January, Neapolitan censors became adamant and all attempts at compromise failed. Verdi now had a complete opera in skeleton score and nowhere to perform it. On 21 March 1858, hoping to present his opera in Rome, Verdi sent the impresario of the Teatro Apollo a libretto of Gustavo III, the work he had set to music, but with the action returned to Stockholm and the characters again members of the royal court. With the refusal of the Roman censors to accept this libretto, the history of Gustavo III ends and the history of UN Ballo in Maschera begins. During the following summer, Somma, after considerable negotiations, modified his libretto as per the demands of the censors; Verdi acknowledged receipt of the new text on 11 September 1858, having done no work on the opera since January. He made his revisions during the autumn. By the time Verdi arrived in Rome in January 1859, UN Ballo in Maschera was finished and orchestrated. The premiere followed on 17 February.

While it is clear that Verdi had laid out the entire skeleton score of Una vendetta in domino, the changes in text between Gustavo III and Una vendetta in domino were minimal (no more than those between the sketched first act of Rigoletto, which still sets the opera in the court of Francois I, as in Victor Hugo’s Le Roi s’amuse, and the completed first act of Rigoletto at the court of the duke of Mantua).  Hence, it is no surprise that, when Verdi realized his opera was not going to be performed in Naples, he offered it in February and March 1858 to the Roman impresario, Vincenzo Jacovacci, as Gustavo III (restoring the original setting in the royal Swedish court in Stockholm), not as Una vendetta in domino which was set in a ducal court in Stettin a seaport town in Germany. The completed manuscript of UN Ballo in Maschera in the Ricordi Archives preserves in large part the original pages of the skeleton score of Una vendetta in domino. As Verdi transformed that work into UN Ballo in Maschera during the autumn of 1858, he not only made corrections directly on the original pages--where both the original version and the modifications can be seen--but he also canceled several pages from the original skeleton score, substituting new pages in their place. Some seventy-five percent of the pages the autograph manuscript of UN Ballo in Maschera are the original pages from Una vendetta in domino; many other pages were replaced for trivial reasons. So, for example, when Verdi decided to transpose Oscar’s solo in the first act describing the ("sibilla," or Oracle Ulrica) down by a half step (from B major to B flat), he replaced practically all the relevant pages. The version of this melody ("Pallida, Pallida") in the continuity draft, however, is identical to the version in UN Ballo in Maschera ("Volta la terrea"). The most important difference--anything but modest--between the continuity draft for Una vendetta in domino and the autograph manuscript of UN Ballo in Maschera is that Verdi replaced an earlier aria for Anckarström (Renato), “E sei tu, with the famous “Eri tu.” There are three important differences between this continuity draft for Una vendetta in domino and the final version of UN Ballo in Maschera: 1) Verdi originally wrote his continuity draft of the final ensemble, “Ve’ se di notte, qui colla sposa,” in B major. By the time he entered the musical material in his skeleton score, however, he had already decided to present it a half tone lower, in B flat major.

2) The declamatory passage when Anckarström (Renato) addresses his wife ("Ho giurato che alle Porte") was drafted in eighth notes in the continuity draft. By the time he prepared his final version for UN Ballo in Maschera, Verdi had decided to declaim it essentially in sixteenth notes.

3) In the continuity draft, it is only after the chorus concludes its laughter that Anckarström (Renato) and Amelia depart for the city and the curtain falls, whereas in the final version of Un Ballo in Maschera the order is reversed: as the husband and wife depart, the final mocking chorus is heard again from offstage ("sempre più piano” and “morendo") and the curtain falls.

Only after he had fully orchestrated this ending did he decide to have the mocking laughter of the conspirators bring down the curtain. There is every reason to believe that the earlier version is how act 2 would have ended had Verdi been permitted to present Una vendetta in domino to the Neapolitan audiences at the beginning of 1858. While it is not necessarily true that every compositional decision made by a composer during the course of his work on an opera is--almost by definition--an improvement, in this case there can be little doubt that this reversal was an act of genius. Those mocking voices penetrate our consciousness just as they penetrate the consciousness of Anckarström (Renato), encouraging him to commit the murder that from this point in the opera seems all but inevitable. The “skeleton score” of an opera is normally the same as Verdi’s final autograph manuscript, but with only the vocal lines (complete), the bass, and occasional instrumental parts entered. The composer prepared the manuscript in this form so that vocal parts could be copied immediately and rehearsals with the singers could begin; during those rehearsals, the composer normally completed the orchestration of the score on the very same pages. Where he decided to modify parts of the opera during the rehearsal period, he would remove the original skeleton-score pages and replace them.

So much has changed both inside and beyond the opera house since Verdi’s time that directors, conductors, and performers justifiably approach his works with little confidence as to the nature or appropriateness of attempting “the authentic.” For many of the operas, our knowledge of the first performances is incomplete and confusing, while for some, we have production manuals describing the premieres in detail. Nevertheless, is it practical to attempt a faithful restoration? What worked in the Venice of 1850 may seem impractical or absurd in the Houston, Stuttgart, or London of 2009. What does the score suggest? What does it leave out? When should we bend to “tradition,” even if new resources indicate that it is “wrong”?  The theatre is not a place where one pays homage to a written score, but where one performs an opera with real singers and orchestral musicians; audiences with trains and buses to catch; administrators who are employed to watch the cash box as well as the artistic product; successive generations of critics, each of which remembers a past golden age but fails to appreciate its own. Our aim should not be to provide a museum for the petrification of performances of the past, but the re-recreation (within the context of our very different social structures) of the characteristics that made Italian opera a vital art form of the nineteenth century and can help it remain so today.

William M. Weibel