Baltimore Opera Company

Study Guide

La Forza del Destino

Verdi's Operas With Spanish Themes

By the mid-seventeenth century, the Spanish court of Philip IV had begun to nurture the relatively new genre that would come to be called opera. Expressions of Spanish dramatic music including comedias and zarzuelas quickly developed alongside other European operatic traditions such as English ballad opera, German Singspiel, French opéra, and Italian opera seria and buffa. Although other nations routinely exchanged their works, there was little interest in importing Spain’s homegrown productions. Yet in the nineteenth century, Iberia’s colorful history and vivid folktales of gypsies and bandits became prime sources for novels, short stories, and plays, all of which were eagerly adapted into librettos. Several of Gaetano Donizetti’s operas were set in Spain (Alahor in Granata, Elvida, La Zingara, Sancia di Castiglia, La Favorite, and Maria Padilla) and Gioachino Rossini’s “Spanish” works include the comedies Matilde di Shabran and—of course—the story of Seville’s most famous barber, Figaro. In the Verdi canon, five operas feature Spanish elements: Ernani (1844), Alzira (1845), Il Trovatore (1853), La Forza del Destino (1862) and Don Carlos (1867). Each libretto found its source in a literary work, demonstrating Verdi’s (and his librettists’) acquaintance with prose, poetry, and plays. Only two of these sources were actually Spanish, though; the others were by Victor Hugo, Voltaire, and Friedrich von Schiller, who themselves had been intrigued with the dramatic possibilities of Spanish locales, characters, and themes.

The first of Verdi’s Spanish works was the dramma lirico Ernani. Even before its premiere, the tale’s story was well-known. The source was Victor Hugo’s play Hernani, which had had a raucous stage history in Paris, beginning with an opening night disrupted by fights between liberal Romantic and conservative Classicist audience members, the playwright leading the former group. Although the work’s themes could be traced to contemporary Spanish tragedies, its title was little more than a childhood memory of Hugo’s travels through a Spanish village named Hernani. Also from the pen of a Frenchman came Verdi’s second Spanish work: Alzira, a tragedia lirica. In 1736, Voltaire published a play entitled Alzire, ou Les Américains. As is the opera, this tale was set in Peru in the sixteenth century. Although its characters feature Peruvians who inhabit the famed City of Kings (now Lima) founded by Francisco Pizarro, the work considered the clash of cultures between the Spanish officers and representatives of the New World of Peru. Voltaire’s work gained such instant popularity that it received the greatest form of flattery: a comic parody entitled The Savages, which debuted just two months after the play.

Friedrich von Schiller’s dramatic poem Don Carlos, Infant von Spanien served as inspiration for the French librettists Méry and DuLocle, who provided the text for Verdi’s Don Carlos. Premiering at the Paris Opéra, the opéra stemmed from an unwieldy drama that had taken Schiller four years to write and eighteen to revise. His purpose was to expose “the shameful horrors of the Inquisition,” but the plot actually reflected little Spanish history. Instead, it centered on the motives that drive its characters: Philip II, his son Carlos, Princess Eboli and, most of all, Posa, who assumed the central point in Schiller’s play. Verdi transformed these characters into dynamic musical interpretations.

The two remaining works were inspired by Spanish playwrights Antonio Garcia Gutiérrez and Angel de Saavedra, Duke of Rivas. The former’s El trovador was the basis of Il Trovatore and the latter’s Don Alvaro, o La furze del Sino (with an added scene from Schiller’s Wildenstein’s Lager) inspired La Forza del Destino. El trovador is one of the best examples of drama caballeros, and its author is acknowledged today as one of Spain’s important Romantic dramatists. Ironically, his self-styled training came from translating works by the French playwright and librettist Eugene Scribe, whose works formed the core of nineteenth-century grand opéra. Gutierrez’s first success, El trovador introduced Verdi to one of his most beloved characters: the gypsy Azucena, whom, if truth be told, he perceived as the center of the opera. Rivas, influenced by Spanish neo-Classicism, chose the more modern direction of Romanticism. His play, Don Alvaro, premiered in Madrid in 1835, was one of the most successful Romantic expressions of its day, becoming in Spain what Hugo’s Hernani was in France.

When discussing Spanish elements in Verdi, one can not forget the scene in Act II of La Travolta when revelers dressed as gypsies and matadors entertain the guests at Flora’s house in Paris. During this divertissement, the chorus and dancers sing about a matador from Biscay who falls in love with an Andalusian woman. She challenges him to prove his love by entering the ring and slaying five bulls in a single day. The matador, they sing, does just that and wins the woman’s heart. Oddly out of place in a Parisian townhouse, this scene nevertheless adds a distinctly exotic flavor to the world of these demimondes. It also serves as a reminder that Traviata, which premiered in March of 1853, was composed alongside its predecessor, Trovatore, which had opened a mere two months earlier.

Of course, nineteenth-century Spain was nothing like the works that inspired Verdi. Yet its literary local color and “revised” history gave him just the material that enticed his sense of drama and inspired his musical genius.

Denise Gallo

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