Abstract
After assessing the complexity of the crossed relationships between verbal language and musical language—which in turn include no less complex interactions between vocal music and instrumental music—, Giuseppe Verdi’s opera La Traviata is analyzed from the point of view of the main figures of classical rhetoric, especially tropes. All musical numbers of the work are scrutinized in view of the explicit and implicit use of rhetorical devices by the composer, while fifteen musical examples from the opera’s full score are provided. Under its apparently straightforward and occasionally simple writing, the study reveals much semantic complexity in the way in which text and music—and voices and instruments—interact in order to complement, underline, deepen, nuance, anticipate, and even contradict each other, according to what seems a carefully planned design by Verdi.
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Notes
- 1.
Said figures are adjectivation, alliteration, anaphora, antithesis, apostrophe, asyndeton, calambour, comparison, concatenation, dilogy, enumeration, enjambement, epithet, etopeia, gradation, hyperbaton, onomatopoeia, paradox, parallelism, personification, pleonasm, polysyndeton, prosography, portrait, synesthesia, and rhetorical question.
- 2.
Hyperbole exaggerates reality, to exalt it or demean it. Irony expresses something very far from what is said, so that the receiver recognizes the true intention. Metaphor generates an identification between two elements, one more specific than the other. Metonymy is a transnomination: it substitutes one proper term for another, considering a relationship of contiguity between the two. Synecdoche is the substitution of an expression that refers to a whole for another that indicates a part, or the opposite.
- 3.
Allegory is a chain of metaphors, in which each one is related to the previous and the following one. Emphasis consists in using an expression in a more restricted and precise sense than it usually has. Antonomasia uses an appellative name in place of its own, or vice versa.
- 4.
The goal of each section of a composition was to produce a particular emotion: the composer manipulated meter, tonality, melody, and harmony to that end, just as the performer did with tempo, dynamic, articulation, and timbre. A re-reading of the 19th-century treatises places us well in this context.
- 5.
On this subject, see Tizón Díaz (2018).
- 6.
For further clarification see Sala (2008).
- 7.
As pointed out by Budden (1978).
- 8.
Anonymous (ed.). La traviata: Partitura d’orchestra. Casa Ricordi, Milan (1914).
- 9.
Della Seta, F. (ed.). La Traviata: Critical Edition Score. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago (1996).
- 10.
Let’s mention here a performative consequence of neglecting the correct tempo for this waltz: if orchestras usually solve these precious virtuosities without great difficulty, the same does not usually happen with the singers—and sometimes that is precisely because the Brindisi is conducted too fast, like a Viennese waltz, making the precise vocal execution of what is written impossible.
- 11.
Here we follow some of the thoughts presented in Parker (2007).
- 12.
One of such analyzes is to be found in Powers (1987).
- 13.
In Fidelio’s Act II, no. 12, Melodrama et duetto, Leonore (soprano) and Rocco (bass) go down to the cistern in which Florestan (tenor) is hold prisoner. The place is dark, cold and menacing. Both Leonore and Violetta shiver; the darkness in Fidelio is objective, the one in La Traviata is in the girl’s mind.
- 14.
A curiosity within this symmetry: the composer indicates the same metronomic mark (quarter note = 66) in both cases, but with different verbal indications of tempo: Adagio and Andante respectively.
- 15.
This wonderfully effective term is used in Conati (1985).
- 16.
For the very close relationship between desease and love in La Traviata see Groos (1995).
- 17.
This is a quite common locus in XIX century’s Italian opera: when a character reads a letter, he or she stops singing and a very rare moment of spoken declamation is carved out, due to the additional rhetorical emphasis sought.
- 18.
See Mila (1999).
- 19.
The centrality of cabalette in Verdi’s duets is posited in Powers (2000).
- 20.
It’s one of the main ideas this author tries to prove in De Filippi (2022), while discussing Arturo Toscanini’s recording of the opera in concert form.
- 21.
Considered once as little more than a “composer of popular music”, the operista of the masses in contrast to Wagner’s intellectualism, a kind of Belcanto musician who until his intermediate creative period (which includes Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, and La Traviata) limited himself to writing beautiful and metrically regular melodies, accompanied by simple chordal figures, Verdi now helds his rightful place in the history of musical theatre—and not just because of Aida, Otello, Falstaff, and his other mature masterpieces.
- 22.
As Webster (1987) states right from the title of his article.
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Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank four colleagues and friends who generously read the manuscript and contributed valued advice to improve both its content and its form: Prof. Julio D. Auster, Dr. Fátima G. Musri, Dr. Nora H. Sforza and Prof. Daniel C. Varacalli.
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De Filippi, S. (2023). Love, Death, and Rhetoric. Meaningful Textual-Musical and Vocal-Instrumental Relationships in Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata. In: Heister, HW., Polk, H., Rusam, B. (eds) Word Art + Gesture Art = Tone Art . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20109-7_8
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