Aida: finding the meaning in melodic shapes

The melodies in Verdi's Aida were not constructed by their composer merely for abstract musical pleasure alone; they provide insights into the psychology of the characters who sing them. Their implications are cross-cultural and cross-generational. They're worth examining, so here's a survey of the most intriguing examples.

Verdi: composer of melodies with meaning

CELESTE AIDA

Radames' sole aria comes just a minute and a half into Act I, scene i. Unlike "Questo o quella", the Duke's opening solo in Rigoletto, "Celeste Aida" is no warm-up piece for the tenor's voice. It's a challenge even for dramatic tenors, thanks to two features:

• Verdi's marking of pianississumo (very very soft) on the final note, a high B flat. Perhaps one tenor in 500 will attempt this live in performance. (The tenor Helge Rosvaenge, singing in German translation croons the ending as written in this 1938 recording.
• The opening theme consists of several phrases with an ascending motion that lies awkwardly for all but experienced, highly trained voices with facility in the passaggio: 

But this theme, so simple, so songlike, is much more than "ear candy". The text of the aria refers to the skies; he calls her "heavenly Aida" and promises her "a throne near the sun" (with the clear subtext of the Sun god Amun-Ra). Thus, most of the vocal lines sweep upward to reflect his preoccupation with celestial images, as if "reaching for the skies" (as lawmen used to say in TV Westerns).

On another aspect of the aria, we observe that Radames is not a deep thinker. The chief reason he wants to lead Egypt into battle with Ethiopia is 

"To return to you, my sweet Aida,

decked with the victor’s laurels,
to say. “I fought, I won for you!”

The irony of impressing her with his military prowess by slaughtering her countrymen does not appear to have registered with him. His bravery exceeds his sensitivity at this point.

RITORNA VINCITOR

And here's some more irony: for a split-second, being carried away by the excitement of Radames' investiture as military commander, Aida actually IS impressed with his military glory. The difference, of course, is that this irony immediately hits her like a gut-punch. "Ritorna vincitor" is a soliloquy during which she comes to realize that hers is a no-win situation; no outcome of the coming battle will bring her happiness. The music is a roller-coaster of conflicted emotions, totally "through-composed" with each section set to new musical ideas.

It's the final section that blows my mind.

This is when Aida, feeling doomed and out of control, lifts a prayer to the gods. "Numi, pietà del mio soffrir!" (Gods, take pity on my suffering). I would draw your attention to the vocal line Verdi gives these words:

Try something: sing the first four bars out loud. If it sounds familiar, there's a good reason. For comparison's sake, now sing these children's songs and chants out loud:

• Nanny-nanny-boo-boo
• It's raining, it's pouring, the old man is snoring
• Ring around the rosy, a pocket full of posy
• AIR-BALL, AIR-BALL (heard at basketball games when the shooter misses the net)

Hear the common thread? They're all sung to the same basic tune, a tune that includes the first four notes of "Numi, pietà". It turns out that this collection of pitches is something hard-wired in human DNA. It's something that children in every culture just naturally sing when playing or when taunting others. (Or, in the case of "air-ball" when reacting like taunting children.)

No less a musical mind than Leonard Bernstein explored this phenomenon in the first of his famous series of lectures at Harvard University: "The Unanswered Question". In the first lecture, "Musical Phonology", Bernstein considered children's taunting chants:

"Research seems to indicate that this exact constellation (of pitches) is the same all over the world, wherever children tease each other, on every continent and in every culture. In short, we may have here a clear case of a musical-linguistic universal."

In other words, what we have here is something primal: call it a cross-cultural, cross-generational universal refrain of childhood. When playground taunts follow this "tune", no child is thinking "I shall now employ the Universal Refrain of Childhood -- that'll show him!" No, it's apparently just hard-wired in his DNA.

In the case of Aida, the meaning of the tune seems clear: Aida's dilemma has reduced her to a child-like state of helplessness and neediness. While the conception of a god as "God the Father" - that is, a loving personal God who cares about our happiness - was likely foreign to Egyptian religion, for Verdi's purposes that conception is at the heart of Aida's prayer. Appealing to her gods as a child begs a parent, Aida reverts to the Universal Refrain of Childhood.

Now, if Giuseppe Verdi could read this blog, there are exactly three ways he could logically respond:

1. "Bravo, Glenn! You have correctly read my intent; I applaud your refined musical understanding." or:
2. "Glenn, Glenn, Glenn... you're thinking too hard, son. It's just a tune and you're not that clever." or:
3. "WHOAHHH - I had no idea, but you may be on to something. This totally makes sense! Must have been my subconscious mind that came up with that, because I didn't realize it til now."

But regardless of Verdi's intent... the musical connection is there.

THE AMNERIS-RADAMES DUET IN ACT III

In this, the finest tenor-mezzo duet ever created, Verdi displays his unsurpassed brilliance at setting texts with such vividness that the emotions of the characters leap off the page and force us to feel what they're feeling.

And this is accomplished by means of melodic contour.

The duet falls into three sections (You can hear it in this video with Grace Bumbry and Franco Corelli) The first section, beginning at 2:58 of the video, features a melody apt for the dramatic situation. Amneris, aware that Radames does not love her but still wanting to save his life, advises him to defend himself at his imminent trial on charges of treason. The vocal line, accompanied by unhurried clarinet triplets, is reserved and somewhat formal, reflecting their strained relationship.

When Radames declines to defend himself, preferring death, Amneris (always too impulsive) cannot restrain her passionate love, guilt for having had him arrested, and desperation. This new theme begins at 5:22; it erupts out of her. Here is the vocal line: note the wide range and contour:

Follow along as you listen; Radames repeats it with his own outburst after Aida, so you hear it twice in succession. The melody dips and soars from low to high to low to high again. This has the effect of mimicking the rise and fall of human speech in an agitated, excited utterance. Sometimes we might say: "I can't believe you never told me where you were going." 

But if we're particularly outraged, it sounds more like:

"I can't be-LIEVE you NE-ver told me where you were GO-ing!!!", with a similar roller-coaster rise and fall of inflection. The effect of the outbursts of Amneris and Radames is visceral.

And one more.

O TERRA ADDIO

Just as Radames' melody in "Celeste Aida" seemed to stretch upward, reaching for the sun and the heavens, Verdi comes full circle in the final duet with Aida, bidding farewell to earth as the supply of air in their underground tomb brings on death by suffocation. (Listen to the duet here.)

In an inspired bit of orchestration, observe that, as Aida introduces the melody of the finale, the strings are playing a thread of softly sustained notes in their highest register; this is a metaphor for the thinning-out of oxygen as death approaches.

But the tune itself features an upward leap of an octave, approached from the half-step below, obviously a gesture of reaching upward for the eternal life all Egyptians expected:

For the second time in this post, I wonder if any aspect of the theme strikes you as familiar from another context. It should. "O terra addio" has three grandchildren; one each in music theater, film and opera.

• The Wizard of Oz: Dorothy's iconic "Somewhere over the rainbow" begins with its own upward leap of an octave. I need not point out that rainbows are "up there" - in the sky.
• West Side Story: The song "There's a place for us", sung by Consuelo during the Act II balleta and later by Maria as Tony dies in her arms, is an anthem for the Puerto Rican teens who feel alienated in New York. The melody follows the pattern of a "reaching" gesture, this time falling one step short of an octave, only to make it all the way up on a second effort. Bernstein likely had Beethoven in mind more than Aida, as the opening phrase is a clone of a portion of the slow movement of Beethoven's "Emperor" piano concerto. But the symbolism matches that of Verdi.
• Susannah: The title character of Carlisle Floyd's American opera sings the aria "Ain't it a pretty night" in Act I, In its affect and declaration of hopes and dreams, it has always struck me as a forerunner of Ariel's song "Part of their world" in the animated musical The Little Mermaid. Both characters feel trapped in the confines of their limited environs and long to explore new horizons. But only Susannah's solo contains the Aida-like leap from "do" to "ti", one half-step short of the octave. Unlike "O terra addio", which then continues on up to the full octave, "Pretty night" falls a full-step down from its highest note. Here's a facile but possibly valid interpretation of the difference in meaning:

Aida and Radames, in their minds at least, make it to eternal life above the "vale di pianti" of earthly sadness; thus, they "make it" up to the octave.

Susannah, as events unfold, ends up a permanent prisoner of her isolated cabin, a lifetime of bitterness stretching out in front of her. She doesn't make it all the way up.

Aida and three millennia of Egyptian-Ethiopian conflict

Faithful readers will recall that I was flabbergasted by the astonishing way in which current events in Chile dovetailed with Virginia Opera's production of Daniel Catán's Il Postino. I still can't get over that news headlines were reporting protest demonstrations and violence in Santiago even as the curtain went up on an opera depicting Chilean protest demonstrations and violence. Life imitated Art, as I noted in this post.

Author: Lourdes Cardenal
Used via the GNU Free Documentation License,

And now it's happening again with Verdi's Aida.

Most of us who learned Bible stories as kids likely frame Egyptian wars in terms of Israel. Moses in the bulrushes, "Let my people go", the plagues, and the parting of the Red Sea. Tensions between the two nations continued up to the Camp David accords of 1978. This was followed by a peace treaty that resulted in Anwar Sadat and Menahem Begin sharing the Nobel Peace Prize.

But, as Aida reminds us, Egypt's history of violent conflict with Ethiopia also extends back centuries before Christ. The difference?

Egypt and Ethiopia are on the brink of war even today, even as I write this.

To give Aida some helpful context, lets' examine relations between the two nations during three different eras.

1000 B.C.
This, more or less, is the period during which the doomed events of Verdi's masterpiece play out. War between Egypt and Ethiopia was continual, if not continuous. Today the two nations are separated by Sudan and Eritrea; in ancient times this buffer zone was known as Nubia, home to various empires such as the Kingdom of Kush which fought its own battles with Egypt in the 8th century B.C.

It seems that among the various gods worshipped by each country, they shared one in common known as Amon or Amun. In Egypt, Amun eventually became associated with the sun god Ra, called Amun-Ra. The cult of this god spread outside Egypt to Libya, Nubia and Ethiopia.

Interestingly, important people were sometimes given names acknowledging Amun; we observe this in Verdi's Aida where the Ehiopian king is Amonasro and the Pharaoh's daughter is Amneris. Common deities, however, did not prevent the back-and-forth of bloody battles.

The 19th Century
Egyptian-Ethiopian wars of the 1870's were partly a result of the decline of the Ottoman Empire. As the Khedive of Egypt broke away from Ottoman rule, he formulated ambitious plans: the incorporation of Sudan and Ethiopia into a new and powerful African Empire under his control. The Khedive was educated in France; as a result, his outlook was very pro-European and cosmopolitan (this helps to explain why he wished the Italian Verdi to create a French-style grand opera to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal).

So, in order to train his troops to the proper battle-ready standard, he recruited military men from all over the globe, including - ready for this? - American veterans from the American Civil War! Other military personnel came from Great Britain and Switzerland. These various experts were sent to Ethiopia to oversee two important battles: the Battle of Gundet in 1876 and the Battle of Gura the following year.

Despite the Khedive's planning and utilization of international assistance, both battles ended in victory for Ethiopia, with catastrophic loss of life and armaments for Egypt. It was a demoralizing loss; reports from the front mention panic on the part of Egyptian troops, abandoning their weapons and fellow soldiers in cowardice as enemy troops advanced.

TODAY
For the second time in one opera season, real life is mirroring the fictional events in a music drama. As recently as October 2019, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for Egypt and Ethiopia engineering peace negotiations with Eritrea. Well and good, but the fact is that his country and Egypt are on the brink of war, enmeshed in a hotly-contested dispute over the allocation of water from the Nile.

The Nile River has always been central to the survival of those countries through which it makes its northward journey. The past ninety years have seen three milestones in the regulation of water distribution. Great Britain brokered the 1929 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty, an agreement cementing Egypt's share of this resource. Thirty years later Egypt's allocation was increased in a revised treaty.

But Ethiopia has thrown a wrench into the arrangements for water rights. In 2011 Ethiopia began construction on a gigantic project: the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. This involves a major tributary of the Nile known as the Blue Nile (see map above). The source of the Blue Nile is Ethiopia's Lake Tana which merges with the "White Nile" at Khartoum, the capital of Sudan.

The dam will improve Ethiopia's infrasturcture by providing much-needed electricity. There are massive objections on the part of Egypt, mainly based on these areas:

• The dam will feature a new reservoir projected to contain 67 billion cubic meters of water;
• It will take seven years to fill the reservoir to capacity;
• During this seven-year period, the flow of water to Egypt will be reduced by 25%; and finally,
• 90% of Egypt's drinking water comes from the Nile.

Right now, the dam construction represents the irrisistible force to Egypt's immovable object. Both sides refuse to give an inch. There have been at least two attempts at mediation, one set of talks overseen by Russia and another by the United States.

No progress.

It is said that any possible peaceful resolution will require the water ministers of Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia to work with South Africa. If there is no resolution, Northeastern Africa may become a powder keg of possible regional war posing a grave threat to global stability.

And all this is playing out as the curtain rises on our production of an opera about war between these very nations. The shades of Amonasro and Radames are hovering restlessly over the banks of the Nile right now.

This is why I roll my eyes when modern critics complain that classic operas "are no longer relevant". 

Really? 

Count me as among the die-hards who believe that it's impossible for art to be irrelevant.

The time the cops came for Rossini

Rossini’s La Cenerentola is an opera that might never have been written without the involvement of local police. 

The year 1816 saw Rossini juggling several assignments in a particularly hectic period of his burgeoning musical career. Projects included a revival of L’Italiana in Algeri in January; the premiere of Il barbieri di Siviglia in February; a new cantata in April; and two more new operas in September and December. It’s a shame railroads were not yet available, as Rossini was living the commuter life, making frequent jaunts from Naples (where he was Director of Royal Theaters) to Rome and back again.

A big opportunity brought the composer to Rome: the impresario Pietro Cartoni offered him a contract to create a new opera for the Teatro Valle on December 26 to open the Carnival season. The terms included the generous fee of 500 scudi, or about $30,000.

As time passed, however, things got complicated. Rossini was expected to report to Rome in October to meet with Cartoni and begin work in earnest. But delays resulting from his over-crowded schedule pushed the start-up date to December 3; this caused the new opera to be moved from the first production of the season to the second. Even December 3 proved impossible as it conflicted with the premiere of Rossini’s Otello on December 4.

A second snag involved a complete rejection of the original subject and librettist chosen. The new opera was originally to be called Laurina alla corte, with a libretto by Gaetano Rossi. At first, Rossini appeared pleased with the drafts he received from Rossi, expressing praise for its theatricality. But as October turned to November, Rossini seemed to lose interest in the whole project, ignoring Cartoni and going incommunicado.

That’s when the cops got involved.

Cartoni, after what must have been several sleepless nights, requested that the Chief of the Naples Police Force compel the wayward genius to comply with the contract he’d signed or face the consequences. Resigned to his legal obligations, Rossini finally showed up in Rome to begin work. But more problems were to come!

The draft of Laurina alla corte, the proposed libretto for Rome, ran afoul of the censors. After fruitless attempts to avoid censorship without drastically altering the story, the opera was abandoned. Another snag: Rossi was no longer available, committed to another project. Cartoni now had a composer, but no subject and no librettist, with the Carnival clock tick-tocking ominously.

This is when all parties agreed on the subject of the familiar fairy-tale Cinderella at literally the last possible moment. You may wonder how this opera was composed – and rehearsed! – in such a brief window of time.

The answer is: Rossini and his new librettist Jacopo Ferretti, um, “borrowed” the libretto of a recent Cinderella opera called Agatina, o La Virtù premiata by Stefano Pavesi, staged at La Scala only two years earlier! Fortunately for posterity, the concept of intellectual property was not yet in existence.

The downside of Rossini’s procrastination is described in Herbert Weinstock’s biography of the composer. With the music having been completed at such a late date, there was insufficient time for the artists – oh, pity the artists – to learn their roles. Ferretti wrote of the first performance that “all those taking part in the performance on that fatal first night had rapid pulses and the sweat of death dripping from their pallid foreheads.”

It must have been a horrendous performance; it was greeted with catcalls from the audience. Rossini predicted that once everyone learned their parts his Cinderella would be fought over by prima donnas and performed all over Europe.

He wasn’t wrong.