Background Notes
Il trovatore completes Verdi's three middle-period operas that have become a staple of the repertory. Though composed between the other two, the opera is somewhat estranged from its siblings, which may preclude its ranking among today's top ten. Whereas Rigoletto and Il traviata are essentially domestic dramas, Il trovatore is full-blown romantic melodrama, a culmination of the passing bel canto age, which was giving way to new compositional styles and more truthful subject matter by the early 1850s.
Another roadblock for the opera's popularity in the contemporary realm is its inherent complexity. Though the plot does make sense, it requires the audience to pay close attention, with two major plot developments running concurrently and an unusual amount of action that has occurred before the first downbeat. Hardly the only Verdi opera with four major roles ( Don Carlos come to mind), it is essentially a singer's opera, and the economics of its vocal demands versus the limited resources of today's opera industry make Il trovatore expensive to produce.
Not that these obstacles would have stopped 19 th -century impresarios. The opera was an instant success and quickly circulated around the world, reaching nearly 300 different houses in its first three years. It was a veritable cash cow, remaining popular with audiences to the end of the century. Critics were less generous, holding the ?antiquated? opera in close comparison to those on either side, both of which display more forward-thinking techniques. When viewed next to La traviata , which was composed at about the same time, the two works couldn't be more dissimilar, with Trovatore 's emotional extremes, representative of the nearly outmoded Romantic style, in sharp contrast to Traviata 's own brand of Realism, the new artistic trend coming in vogue in the middle of the century.
Curiously, from the outset Verdi had intended to venture into the avant-garde and create opera without the conventional cavatinas, duets and finales. We don't know when the composer first came across Antonio García Gutiérrez's play (first produced in 1836), though it was probably in Paris , which maintained a direct line to Madrid as the city had a once been a haven for exiled Spanish authors. The play is still found among Verdi's personal effects in a French-bound collection of Spanish dramas ? likely Giuseppina Strepponi had a hand in translating it from its original language into Italian.
he composer was especially struck by the character of Azucena, whom he saw as the story's fundamental focus (the opera was almost named after her). So excited by this discovery, he didn't even wait for an opera house to commission the work before he began developing the project, which was unusual for the day. Bypassing his most frequent collaborator, Francesco Maria Piave, he turned to Salvadore Cammarano, by then at the height (and, tragically, near the end) of his career. Cammarano had already served Verdi on three other occasions as well as supplying eight libretti for Gaetano Donizetti (see Cornerstones: Lucia di Lammermoor ), and others for less-familiar bel canto giants Saverio Mercadante and Giovanni Pacini. Cammarano was house poet for the renowned Neapolitan Teatro San Carlo, a theater to which Verdi had vowed never to return, after strained relations over the botched premieres of Alzira and Luisa Miller. Though the San Carlo continued to pursue Italy 's most popular composer, Verdi had managed to wrangle out of his existing commitments to the theater.
Verdi had coaxed Cammarano away from his theatrical home base once before with La battaglia di Legnano (which premiered in Rome ), and he hoped to employ this strategy again. His first attempt was with a play by Victor Hugo, Le roi s'amuse (to become Rigoletto ) for Venice 's Teatro La Fenice, but the librettist (rightfully so) feared rebuke from the censors. Then Verdi offered up a subject most sacred to him, Shakespeare's King Lear, the opera that would never come to pass. Cammarano drafted a scenario, but made no further progress. Guterríez's El trovador, however, piqued his interest. Full of powerful melodrama and gothic horror, the play was well-suited to the librettist's particular talents and work soon began.
In spite of Verdi's desire to be experimental, Cammarano seemed to have determined the conventional shape of Il trovatore, as he was firmly grounded in the bel canto tradition and did not share Verdi's visionary ideas. The composer had hoped to dispense with the traditional chorus introduzione and Leonora's first cavatina, and begin with the troubadour's song, but there was no way of getting around all the preliminary information that needed to be told before arriving at that point in the drama. Still, the composer had his customary control over the development of the libretto. Cammarano struggled with the character of Azucena, whom he understood as deranged and wanton, but Verdi insisted that her reason remained intact, though marred by her life's painful family events.
Gutiérrez's convent scene also posed a problem, which Cammarano predicted would run afoul of the censors. In the original play, Leonor's brother, Don Guillén de Sesé, as keeper of the family name, demands she either marry di Luna or enter the nunnery. By Part Two, supposing Manrique to be dead, Leonor chooses the latter, only to discover immediately after taking the vows that she had been mistaken. Throwing caution to the wind, she wantonly discards her commitment to God and runs away with Manrique, intent on marriage. Verdi suggested that she simply fall faint at the sight of Manrico and be carried away before any oath could be taken. As it turned out, the censors forbade any mention of a convent (instead calling it a ?place of retreat?) as well as references to anything sacred, to witches, the stake or suicide (Leonora was to take her poison out of the audience's view). Thankfully, Ricordi did not print the Roman edition.
Surprisingly, Verdi showed considerably more respect for Cammarano's ideas than he ever would have done to his more malleable colleague, Piave (another reason why both Rigoletto and La traviata are slightly more progressive ? Verdi was more likely to have gotten his way). As work continued, it became clear to both parties that the role of Leonora would have to become more prominent than they initially had conceived. Unfortunately, toward the end of their collaboration, the librettist died unexpectedly. His protégé, Leone Emanuele Bardare was ready to step in to finish the nearly completed libretto, albeit with Verdi's steely instructions. The premiere was eventually ceded to Rome , where Verdi could be assured of the cast of his choosing. The premiere was thunderous and the adoring Romans persuaded the composer to stay for the fourth performance (contractually he could leave after only three).
Though the opera would quickly travel around the world, Verdi was especially careful with the Paris premiere. It first appeared at the Théâtre Italien a few years later in its original language, a production begrudgingly allowed by the composer (the theater had been notorious for presenting unauthorized performances of his works without the proper payment of royalties). Partly to ensure the work's copyright, Verdi agreed to a French-language version to be presented at the Paris Opéra the following year. Besides adding the customary ballet (in Part Three, a gypsy divertissement performed before di Luna's soldiers), the composer made a number of changes, bolstering the orchestration to please the more advanced French tastes and fleshing out the final scene, which ends rather abruptly in the original version. Although he already had had two lackluster premieres at Paris 's house of first rank [ Jérusalem (1847) and Les vêpres siciliennes (1855)], Le trouvère (1857) was greeted with enthusiasm.
