Cambridge Opera Journal, 28, 2, 179–182 © Cambridge University Press, 2016

doi:10.1017/S0954586716000203

From Orpheus to Opera – Singing about

Singing in Verdi’s Il trovatore
Verdi, ‘Tacea la notte’ (Leonora), Il trovatore, Act I
ELIZABETH HUDSON*

Opera is fundamentally about singing, communicating story through song. Histori-

cally, composers (and critics) have found a range of ways in which employing
music qua music enhances operatic expression – hence the longevity of Orpheus as
ur-operatic narrative, as a story about a singer and the power of song (indeed, of
music itself ), in which the musical impact of song resonates simultaneously within
the story and in the opera house.1 Indeed, in this context singing’s enactment as
performance for an audience on stage can challenge the very boundaries of the stage,
breaking the fourth wall by reaching out directly to communicate to the audience as
they become one with the intended fictive audience, bypassing the story even while
continuing to function within it.
In general, Verdi criticism has not dwelt on Orphic moments of singing about
song. Yet Il trovatore – as one of Verdi’s operas with an undeniably broad influence
across the nineteenth century and beyond – is first and foremost an opera about
a singer, the power of song and remembered voices.2 Crucially, I believe that
Trovatore’s focus on singing helps to highlight a transition, a historic evolution in
operatic style that expands ways to exploit the vocal utterance – the aria, ‘song’ – as a
powerful emotional sign, a marker of a new kind of theatrical ‘realism’ (that has
nothing to do with ‘realistic’ narrative content), in which the singer and the singing is
what is ‘real’ – that is, capable of direct impact within the opera house, helping
audiences to connect what is unfolding on stage with their own experience. Not
coincidentally, Trovatore plays a double role: as an opera about singing, it also became
one of the nineteenth century’s quintessential repertory operas. And it is the growing
emphasis on repeated operatic performance that further helped to establish our
experience of singers as both individuals and simultaneously embodiments of a vocal
type. Arguably, the focus not just on self-conscious song (music as music), but also

* Elizabeth Hudson, Northeastern University, MA; n.elysse@neu.edu.

1
On these ideas, see Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth
Century (Princeton, 1991) and In Search of Opera (Princeton, 2001), and Gary Tomlinson,
Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (Princeton, 1999).
2
Elsewhere, I am exploring the relationship between what I describe as a kind of affective
dramaturgical discourse in Trovatore with the emerging nationalist sentiment of the time. I posit that
the two are perhaps entwined: that the establishing of a powerful collective emotional processing of
traumatic experience in fact provided an emotional valence and substance for an emerging sense of
Italian national identity. It is this, I suggest, that might have helped turn Verdi into the hero of the
Risorgimento, as he indubitably emerged across the decade after the failed 1848 revolution.

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 180 Elizabeth Hudson

on the self-conscious awareness of singers (as both individual and type) allowed the
Orphic concept of operatic singing to move beyond narrative, to become situated in
the institution of the opera house itself. Let me explain.
Histories of singers have tracked, somewhat mournfully, ways in which bygone eras
took the individuality of voice for granted: composers such as Verdi wrote only for
particular singers; finalised the score only in collaboration during rehearsals; and even in
relation to existing repertoire, opera houses still employed composers to alter the vocal
parts to suit individual voices. This emphasis on the individuality of voice (and thorough
mining of Verdi’s letters has emphasised just how seriously he took the individual
qualities of the voices for which he wrote) would seem to contradict the ways in which
the fairly rigid vocal types (the Fach system still in practice today) was coming into force
in the mid-nineteenth century, and being made stronger by the (largely economics-
driven) turn to repertory opera. In Verdi’s popular trilogy, for instance, whereas our
histories have tended to emphasise the emergence of new vocal characters (vocally and
dramatically) that defied conventions – Rigoletto, Azucena, even Violetta – ironically
most of the characters in these popular operas actually serve to lock in dramatic/vocal
stereotypes, as in Trovatore’s soprano/tenor/baritone love triangle. Thus, the seeming
conundrum: that the complete individuality of voices is taken for granted even while we
can observe an increasing emphasis on linking roles to increasingly strictly defined vocal
types. What I am suggesting here, then, is that in the context of an opera such as
Trovatore, the collision between voice and character as singer (within the story) and as
vocal type (outside the story) helped exploit a sort of hyper-awareness of voice as voice.
In other words, the explicit focus on singing about singing linked simultaneously to
dramatic character as singer/vocal type, thereby allowing a focus on voice type to create
the same kind of slippage of significance between vocality and voice both internal and
external to the story as occurs in Orphic singing qua singing. In Trovatore, in addition to
marking singer and voice within the story, the vocal role is also enacted both within the
operatic work and simultaneously on the audience as a sign of signification that reaches
beyond the fourth wall, so that awareness of voice is simultaneously individual and
specific (to a particular singer’s voice and body, to a particular moment of performance)
and abstracted (as an instance, increasingly, of a vocal ‘type’, which can sharpen the
spectators’ own awareness of the voice, in the moment, as an instance of a type, and in
relation to personal memories of voices previously heard in the role).3 Thus, the role of
the vocal type actually works to make the notion of voice qua voice and music qua
music part of opera itself. And this creation of a musical hyper-awareness allows the
spectator to create from past and present experience multiple levels of emotional
engagement, to become an active participant in the creation of the experience.4

3
While there is of course a long history of vocal types, the settling of these vocal stereotypes into the Fach
system, as a way of managing singers’ casting in operas and eventually acting to police and control the
relationship of individual voices to operatic texts, escalated with the consolidation of a core repertory
opera – a consolidation that arguably started to settle around works such as Verdi’s Rigoletto and Trovatore.
4
To see a detailed reading of how triggering the spectator’s memory of song can serve as a
powerful enhancement, engaging the spectator directly, see my article ‘Moulin Rouge ! And the
Boundaries of Opera’, Opera Quarterly (Opera in Transition) 27 (2011), 256–82.

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 From Orpheus to Opera – Singing about Singing in Verdi’s Il trovatore 181

In my formulation, this transition represents a historic transformation in the

history of opera, from Orpheus (stories that connect us to the idea that the musical
moment is about music) to Opera (so that voice, through operatic singers as types,
evokes the power of music to link operatic narrative and discourse directly to the
audience). Just as the notion of the singer singing a song – the Orpheus story –
allows us to understand the role of music in the story and to foster at the same time
our response to the music outside of the story, so now the operatic aria collapses the
distance between the abstraction of the vocal type and actual, physical experience of
individual voices, allowing us to experience the particular singer/operatic aria and
narrative simultaneously as about music and singing itself.
Leonora’s Act I aria, ‘Tacea la notte’, offers a case in point. Within the story, it is
a song about the memory of song, specifically Leonora’s memory of the troubadour’s
serenade. For the spectator, the aria simultaneously enacts our own memory of
songs, both through the musical conventions invoked by text and musical form (i.e.,
of other sopranos singing similar ‘lonely soprano’ arias) and through the familiarity
of the aria itself (personal memories of other prima donnas singing ‘Tacea la notte’).
The aria thereby telescopes various forms of vocal memory for the spectator (and
all the emotional engagement that entails) into an aria that is also, within the story,
about the power of the memory of voice. At the same time, in live performance, our
memories interact powerfully with our experience of a particular singer’s voice and
body in the moment. So, as Leonora performs her memory of Manrico’s voice
through her singing, we remember other voices, our own memories of (operatic/
soprano) voices are invoked; and it is at the moment in which the words highlight
Leonora’s memory of Manrico’s voice (at the end of the first stanza: ‘Dolci s’udiro e
flebili / Gli accordi d’un liuto, / E versi melanconici / Un Trovator cantò’) that the
vocality of the moment is itself most powerfully unleashed–and, arguably, the
spectator’s own present experience and past memories also engage. At this moment
voice is the story; the retreat into pure vocality is simultaneously the point of the
story; it is both the evocation of the past and the engagement with the present. And
if it explicitly focuses our awareness on listening to voice, it also establishes Leonora
as having a kind of ultimate ‘voice-over’: the actual, embodied voice in front of us
simultaneously invoking the acousmêtre – the disembodied/absent voice.
Strikingly, as the musical material that follows Leonora’s aria demonstrates, in
Trovatore it is not only these instances in which song is explicitly invoked that the
experience of the vocal type (as invoking our memories of voices) is activated.
Immediately following Leonora’s aria, Manrico enacts the disembodied, offstage
voice in his Serenade; but that enactment is arguably less complex than Leonora’s
evocation of voice and the memory of voice, because it does not build up as many
simultaneous layers of vocal experience. On the other hand, though, his vocal
appearance ushers in a dramatic engagement between the operatic characters as
a confrontation, fundamentally, between vocal types.5 In this sense, then, the

5
The oft-observed relationship of Trovatore’s Act I trio to the Act I trio in Ernani only illustrates the
ways in which the features of opera that for me coalesce in a particular way in Verdi’s 1850s
footnote continued on next page

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 182 Elizabeth Hudson

Act I trio is interesting for the way in which it can be understood as an extension of
Leonora’s evocation of remembered voice: because only through understanding the
vocal types, in the trio, do we understand the nature of the dramatic confrontation
(the soprano and tenor together, the baritone as interlocutor/disrupter). Here,
without any explicit reference to music or voice within the story, the vocal types set
up the context for relating to voice as voice – simultaneously in the story and for
the audience.
Crucially, in the final act, the same set of relationships and unfolding of vocal
realities is repeated almost exactly: Leonora’s evocation of an aria about singing an
aria (as Roger Parker has put it) precedes Manrico’s offstage voice; the dramatic
engagement of characters as vocal types then ensues. Trovatore, I think, sets up
a transition from Orpheus to Opera in such compelling ways because it continually
and in a variety of ways enacts experiences of voices as types while simultaneously
being an opera about voice and remembered voices.6 Most crucially, it explicitly
establishes an aspect of the experience of opera that we tend to take for granted
today, against broad swathes of repertoire: namely the way that operatic moments,
operatic arias, can escalate levels of experience, both within the operatic story and
without, enacting powerfully on the individual spectator in ways that defy the reaches
of the narrative itself.

ELIZABETH HUDSON has taught music at the University of Virginia and in New Zealand;
she is currently the Dean of the College of Arts, Media, and Design and Professor of
Music at Northeastern University. She publishes on topics in nineteenth-century Italian
opera, and is currently researching Verdi and trauma.

operas had been gradually formulated and enacted in a variety of contexts in Italian opera across
the previous two decades.
6
Interestingly, Azucena – as the voice that relies least on traditional notions of Fach – also does not
have that direct relationship with singing as singing: while she begins the ensuing act with her own
enactment of the memory of voice, her revoicing of vocal memories as constituting the very
essence of her own voice and identity, the voice invoked by Azucena is her mother’s death cry –
a powerful (traumatic) vocal moment, but not a singing one.

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