Primal Scenes: Proceedings of a Conference Held at the University of California, Berkeley, 30...

Philippe and Posa Act II: The Shock of the NewAuthor(s): Roger ParkerSource: Cambridge Opera Journal, Vol. 14, No. 1/2, Primal Scenes: Proceedings of aConference Held at the University of California, Berkeley, 30 November-2 December, 2001(Mar., 2002), pp. 133-147Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3878287 .

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Cambridge Opera Journal, 14, 1 & 2, 133-147 ( 2002 Cambridge University Press

DOL" 10. 1017/S0954586702000095

Philippe and Posa Act II: The shock of the new

ROGER PARKER

The artists are asked to pay great attention to this piece, which is very difficult not only musically but also scenically.-The actors should thoroughly identify with the two characters, who stand face to face and who represent two great principles in the history of mankind.'

One of the contemporary production books for Don Carlos thus austerely sums

up the Philippe-Posa duet in Act II (of the five-act version); its none-too-subtle indication of grand themes handled seriously is one that has consistently driven the

piece's reception. As so often, Verdi himself encouraged the trend - most signifi- cantly by treating the duet to more substantial revision than any other major piece in his entire output. Some drastic cutting occurred even during rehearsals, so that the supposed Urfassung predates the first performance. What is commonly referred to as the 'original' version corresponds, then, to the music performed at the 1867 Paris premiere. This was substantially refashioned for Naples in 1872 (with Italian text only), and given an even more thorough overhaul in 1884. The four versions have been much discussed: indeed, revisions such as these were one of the proving grounds on which Verdi (and thus his admirers) became musicologically respect- able.2 Where would we stand today without those four versions and their many Verdian copains? Possibly on some other, less comfortable podium.

The action of the duet might best be described as an intense political struggle that gives way, radically in the later versions, to an equally intense moment of

private emotion for one of the principals. Posa, detained by King Philippe, takes the chance to press his idde fixe, which is the plight of the oppressed people in Flanders. Philippe brushes this liberal nonsense aside with a brutal display of

1 Disposizione scenica per l'opera Don Carlo di Giuseppe Verdi compilata regolata secondo la mise en scine del Teatro Imperiale dell'Opera di Parzgi Terza Edizione (Milan: Ricordi, n.d.), 19. 'Raccomandasi agli artisti di porre molta attenzione a questo pezzo, il quale e difficilissimo non solo dal lato musicale, ma anche dal lato scenico. - Gli attori devono bene immedesimarsi dei due personaggi che stanno di fronte e che rappresentano due grandi principi nella storia dell'umaniti'. Although this disposizione scenica carries no date, it clearly refers to final version of the opera in its 1886 five-act form: the so-called 'Modena' version.

2 Important early points in the voyage of discovery include: Andrew Porter, 'A Sketch for Don Carlos', The Musical Times, 111 (1970), 882-5; and David Rosen, 'Le quattro stesure del duetto Filippo-Posa', in Atti del Ho Congresso internazionale di studi verdiani (Parma, 1971), 368-88. Almost the entire contents of the Atti are devoted to Don Carlos. Many important documents are reproduced in Ursula Giinther, 'La genise de Don Carlos', Revue de musicologie, 58 (1972), 16-64; 60 (1974), 87-158; and in Giinther and Gabriella Carrara-Verdi, 'Der Briefwechsel Verdi-Nuitter-Du Locle zur Revision des Don Carlos', Analecta musicologica, 14 (1974), 1-13; 15 (1975), 334-401. As always, many complications are ably summed up in Julian Budden's chapter on the opera, in The Operas of Verdi, 3 vols. (London, 1981), III, 3-157, esp. 20-39.



134 Roger Parker

Realpolitik, but the king then admits to Posa, with gathering explicitness as the versions succeed each other, that he has suspicions about the relationship between his wife Elisabeth and his son Carlos. Posa is worried for Carlos's safety, but above all pleased to have gained the king's confidence. Philippe grimly warns him to curb his libertarian ideals, and to beware the Inquisition.

As well as the status he lent this duet through composerly attention, Verdi's

epistolary statements suggest that an unusual amount of effort and dramatic weight attached to this number. Even from the very first moments of thinking about Schiller's play, he had singled out a confrontation between Posa and Philippe as

something needed in the operatic drama, and during the period of composition he let slip remarks about its extreme difficulty, saying at one point - rather inelegantly - that composing it had caused him to 'spit out his lungs'.4 The various revisions

encouraged further Verdian pronouncements. The duet was one of only two numbers he revised for those 1872 Naples performances, and he wrote that the

changes made the duet 'shorter, and more lively from the scenic point of view'.5 For the major revision in the 1880s he was even more explicit: his first letters to Charles Nuitter on the topic describe the piece as a 'punto nero' (black spot) in the score,6 and soon after he decreed that 'we need not only to shorten the piece, but also to revise it completely, giving it another form and in this way obliging the composer to redo the music'.7 Perhaps encouraged by Nuitter's idea that, instead of being a conventional duo, the piece should have 'the form of a dramatic dialogue',8 Verdi returned to Andrea Maffei's translation of Schiller and himself sketched out a new

prose version of the words, instructing the librettist (Camille Du Locle) that 'as we won't be dealing here with Cantabili and motivi musicali, poetry of whatever kind will be fine'.9

Yet again, Verdi has supplied us with a powerful script. The emphasis here is on hard work, wrestling with intractable but crucial dramatic material, perhaps above all on escape from fixed forms (what he called 'Cantabili and motivi musicali') into 'dramatic dialogue'. In a remarkable diatribe to Franco Faccio a few years later, he commented gloomily on a revival of Don Carlos that had just taken place at La Scala:

I was even more doubtful when I knew that the part which stood out was that of Posa - a

marginal and purely singing role. ... Neither the quartet nor Posa's aria nor Eboli's have

prime importance. These too are essentially episodic pieces that can awaken momentary interest but not lasting impressions. Applause is one thing, impression is another, and it is impression that fills the theatre.10

3 I borrow the term from the title of Paul Robinson's stimulating chapter on Don Carlos, in his Opera and Ideas: From Mozart to Strauss (Ithaca, 1985), 155-209.

4 Letter to Leon Escudier of 20 May 1866; Giinther, 'La genese de Don Carlos', 40. 5 Letter to Giulio Ricordi of 10 October 1872; Franco Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, 4 vols. (Milan,

1959), III, 606-7. 6 Letter of 9 June 1882; Giinther, 'Briefwechsel', 349. 7 Letter to Charles Nuitter of 14 June 1882; Giinther, 'Briefwechsel', 349.

8 Undated note by Nuitter; Giinther, 'Briefwechsel', 350-2, here 352. 9 The instructions are via a letter to Nuitter of 28 September 1882; Giinther, 'Briefwechsel',

355. 10 Letter of January 1879, quoted in Budden, III, 29.



Philippe and Posa Act II: The shock of the new 135

We can be in no doubt that, for Verdi, the Philippe-Posa duet was a classic, even the classic, 'impression' piece.

It was this austere context, Verdi doggedly struggling against the 'episodic' nature of fixed, applause-provoking numbers, that was overwhelmingly taken up during the period of Verdi's academic recuperation, those years in the 1960s and 1970s that led to the critical edition and the collected correspondence, and that fostered the analytical movement generally. Small wonder, then, that the progress of the duet told commentators a simple story, albeit one elaborated with varying degrees of subtlety. It narrated, to be blunt, a welcome move away from convention into ... well, the other side of the binary was always a little more variable, but it might be 'dramatic truth' if you were bold and sure of your cultural heritage; the less evangelical could always rely on 'dramatically effective', thus casting the responsi- bility for the value judgements on to a hypothetical audience."1 As was made clear, the first versions of the duet clearly hinged on 'static' set-piece movements. They are, if I can be excused the anachronism, an unproblematic example of what was later to be enshrined as 'la solita forma de' duetti', albeit with a Traviata-Act-II-like enrichment or proliferation of movements, some of which are lyrically developed to a surprising degree.12

However, this conventional form was discarded during the revisions. By 1884 neither of the two 'static' movements (the Meno mosso 'Un souffle ardent' and the cabaletta 'Enfant! A mon coeur') survived. They were replaced by a more unpredictable musical surface, one that above all allowed the characters (those 'two great principles in the history of mankind') to maintain a proper sense of musical distance from each other at all times. This passage from one version to another was, as mentioned a moment ago, unequivocally welcomed. Historical Principles Made Flesh might be imagined to manifest themselves musically in all sorts of ways, but during the 1960s and 1970s, singing in parallel thirds was, it seems, not one of them. The progress from 1867 to 1884 was thus judged overwhelmingly positive; it was, after all, progress towards nothing less than opera as drama, perhaps even towards Opera as Drama.

I need hardly add that one of the most enduring features of the last twenty years of Verdian criticism has been the gradual way in which this attitude has become dated. As well as echoing a general distrust of views of musical history predicated on 'progress', formal or otherwise, the local Verdian scene became famously interested in what we might call the morphology of various fixed forms. Along with a passionate belief in the explanatory power of abstract formal templates - a confirmed solitaformismo - came increasingly flexible awareness of the manner in

11 The final sentence of David Rosen's groundbreaking 1971 article reads: 'L'innovazione fondamentale sta nel fatto che le due sezioni non sono pid i pezzi chiusi di prima, bensi rispecchiano un atteggiamento molto pid flessibile, pid disposto a cercare la soluzione ad hoc che meglio si adatti all'azione drammatica'. ['The fundamental innovation resides in the fact that the two sections [of the duet] are not the closed forms of the earlier version, but rather reflect a much more flexible attitude, more disposed to seek ad hoc solutions that would be better suited to the dramatic action'.] See Rosen, 'Le quattro stesure', 388.

12 The classic discussion of 'la solita forma' appears in Harold Powers, '"La solita forma" and "The Uses of Convention" ', Acta musicologica, 59 (1987), 65-90.



136 Roger Parker

which forms can make musical drama. True, the new enthusiasm may also have led to excesses, and was sometimes not entirely free from a lingering attraction to progress models.13 However, coupled as it was with the well-nigh complete rehabilitation of early Verdi in the opera house, it has left us in a more plural formal world, one that can, for example, see Verdi's exhortations about 'episodic' pieces as a reflection of his particular aesthetic stance during that period, and thus as

historically contingent rather than timeless. Perhaps, then, it is time to return to the

Philippe-Posa duet; to ask some new questions, ones that might even extend to the whole issue of whether we need tacitly to accept that Verdi's revisions are invariably improvements. Such a stance would - after all - be unremarkable in many other repertoires and art forms: so let me at least try it on for size, concentrating on two particular aspects.

One of the most intriguing issues surrounding this duet and many other Verdian revisions is that of stylistic disparity, of the way in which Verdi seemed largely indifferent to the fact that his revisions often create - at least so far as scholars today are concerned - strange stylistic dissonances. There are famous examples from several moments in his career, one of the most obvious being Lady Macbeth's aria 'La luce langue', added for the Paris version of that opera in 1865, which makes no

attempt to adapt to the late 1840s musical atmosphere of the surrounding material; it is, rather, one of the most radical pieces (orchestrally, harmonically) that Verdi had written even by the mid-1860s. In this and other cases, some will want to find an elaborate rationale behind the disparity: perhaps that Lady Macbeth becomes - let me invent something enticing here - doubly Othered by dint of her 'advanced' language. But when the mass of such moments is considered, it's at least as

convincing to assume that Verdi was largely indifferent to matters of stylistic consistency. One might even suggest that he used revisions generally as a chance to make radical moves onward in musical language, and did so whether or not the results then unbalanced other elements. Such a stance is, after all, understandable from his point of view. The reason Verdi often gave for making changes was that an earlier version had become in some way 'outmoded' (Lady Macbeth's cabaletta in the 1847 version certainly fell into this category). He was working in a world in which the idea of 'repertory opera' was in its infancy: to be judged outmoded was still (often) to be judged unsuccessful. What more likely, then, that his mission in revisions would be to bring the most backward-looking aspects of a piece violently up to date?

Might this argument be applied to the Philippe-Posa duet? Two passages from the 1884 version come to mind. The first unfolds as Philippe prepares to admit to Posa his jealous suspicions about Elisabeth. As was pointed out long ago by Julian Budden, the opening, unison melody here bears an obvious resemblance to

Iago's famous 'jealousy' motive, 'E un'idra fosca, livida', from Act II of Otello (see

13 I have explored these issues at some length in ' "Insolite forme", or Basevi's Garden Path', in my Leonora's Last Act: Essays in Verdian Discourse (Princeton, 1997), 42-60.




Ph. O

Vo- tre re- gard har- di _

s'est le - v6 sur mon tr6 - ne... mais de ce front oi p - se

Allegro moderato = 100

allarg. mar

Ph.

la cou - ron - ne sa - chez les tour - ments et le deuil!

poco allarg.

i:;•<: ;J

Ex. la: Don Carlos (1884), Act II. [Phiippe: Your daring gaze has been raised to my throne ... / learn the torment and distress / of this brow on which the crown weighs heavy.]

Ex. la and b).14 But as well as the near-identity of the themes, the unison that supplies that generic sinister undertone also alerts us in both cases to what might be called the 'motivic' quality of the melody. This was a quality that would in both cases be exploited later in elaborate, self-consciously symphonic developments, tech- niques peculiar to late Verdi but, it might be argued, sharply out of focus within the surrounding musical language of Don Carlos, in which the lingua franca of motivic working involves quite other procedures.15

Perhaps more striking still is a further incursion of 'late Verdi'. Consider the passage in Act II of Otello in which lago prepares his ground for the 'confession' he will deliver in recounting Cassio's dream (see Ex. 2a). Fragments of recitative eventually flower into a legato descending melody. The solo horn, which insistently punctuates the recitative, so obviously carries semantic weight in this context that it lies on the edge of irony, on the edge of the knowingness about operatic tradition

14 Budden, III, 95. 15 In Otello the 'idra fosca' motive is orchestrally developed at the start of Act III; the Don

Carlos motive appears in diminution only a few bars after its initial statement, as the orchestral underpinning to Philippe's words 'Soyez leur juge et mon appui! .. .'. David Rosen ('Le quattro stesure', 387) mentions that the latter's motivic working is also comparable to that found in Falstaff, notably in Ford's 'jealousy' monologue in Act II.



138 Roger Parker

cupo e legato

,ago -

- .. t un'id - ra fo sca, li - vi- da, cie - ca, col suo ve -

Lo stesso movimento = 88

pp legato piu piano

-le - no sh stes - sa at - to - sca, vi - vi- da pla - ga le

-:--

:y. a a, -V ,- -1 ----------

Rp

zi___

Ex. ib: Otello, Act II. [Iago: It is a spiteful monster, livid, / blind, with her own venom / self-poisoned, with a vivid wound... .]

that is (again) typical of late Verdi. It is, though, strangely dissonant with the world of Don Carlos. In this context, Philippe's preparation for his 'confession' (see Ex. 2b) is striking: again the fragments of recitative, again the culmination in

descending melody, again the knowing horn. Admittedly the presence of this link with Verdi's late style, however disjunctive in terms of its surrounding musical context, is on another level rather satisfying: both excerpts are, after all, intimately concerned with a similar dramatic theme (that of sexual jealousy), and they of course take place within a similarly intense confrontational duet. However, looked at more closely, even this very similarity might give pause, if only because what one might call the 'positionality' of the protagonists is so strikingly at odds.

Philippe, after all, thinks himself the victim, the bearer of that horn made so

insistently musical. Iago, on the other hand, is (famously) the arch imaginer, fabricating suspicion in another's mind. (Perhaps that is that why his corno is more elaborate?)

Such questions are intensified by a second passage in which Otello is notably anticipated, this time in what most would agree is the strangest moment in the 1884 duet. Posa's second grand appeal to liberty ends on a climactic cadence in E major




lago

s,

I ,I Ip!

Iif I17---V Itr

lo Ma purse gui - da 6 la ra-gio-neal ve - ro, u-na si for-tecon-get-tu - ra ri-

1•T1

L I I I I I I

-ser - bo che per po - coal-la cer- tez- za vi con-du ce. U - di- te.

VI u W - LL• #

i 'M-

Ex. 2a: Otello, Act II. [Iago: but yet if reason be the guide to truth / I may propose a circumstance so strong / that it will lead you to certainty. / Listen.]

as he once more begs Philippe to support 'la libert6'. For what happens next, I can do no better than quote Julian Budden:

Like a stone cast into the dark pool of Philip's mind Posa's eloquence seems to create a succession of ripples that spread round the central point ...16

The imagery is so apt because, in stark contrast to the bluff certainties of Posa's idealism, and even to Philippe's later moments of interiority in the opera (in particular the aria 'Elle ne m'aime pas'), Philippe's reaction (see Ex. 3) is a moment of intense descent into the labyrinth of the soul. The resulting impression of musical and - I choose a modern word to suit self-consciously modern music- 'psychological' fragmentation is again peculiar to Verdi's last style, and in particular to certain moments in Otello, a similarity made more obvious by the shared harmonic territory (from E major to C major via a string of non-sequiturs is a classic move into Otello-country). There is, I think, no sense of a connecting theme between the operas here (although, as with the previous passage, the points of reference would lie primarily within lago's musical

language). Rather, I would suggest that Verdi is in both cases experimenting with the most radical elements of his newest style during years in which he had the

16 Budden, III, 94.



140 Roger Parker

plus animd

>Ph

Re- gar - dez ma mai - son... le trou-ble l'en- vi -

Poco pid mosso =126

t

o

--,4I -]

-7

P r P

con dolore

Ph.

ron- ne. Oui!... p - re mal- heu - reux, plus mal-heur-eux &

,.A __ _ _ 4oP

-*" •. " -* I' t

Ph. 6L

- poux!

/• I

Ex. 2b: Don Carlos (1884). [Philppe: Look at my house ... trouble surrounds it ... / yes! ... an unhappy father, a husband unhappier still!]

Otello project already powerfully shaped in his mind.17 The experimentation was, as I mentioned earlier, understandable from Verdi's historical position; but the fact remains that his late style in some powerful ways created a radically different sense of musical personality from that in place in the remainder of Don Carlos, which is necessarily locked into the world of cabalettas and other fixed forms. (This is not, I think, a problem that Verdi entirely solved in Otello itself; but that's another story.)

A second aspect of the revisions again concerns shared musical ideas, but ones of a different type. As already mentioned, large parts of the Philippe-Posa duet are comprehensively rewritten for the final, 1884 version (new words, as Verdi wrote

17 Otello was first mooted in 1879; by 1882 the libretto was largely finished. For a detailed chronology, see James Hepokoski, Giuseppe Verdi: Otello (Cambridge, 1987), 19-40.




Posa

t>

PHILIPPE

Quel sin- gu-lier re - veur!

Ph. __ p

Vouschan- ge - rez da - vis quand vous sau rez le coeur de

LI 11 1 , " -.

,I m

tt" #P

Ex. 3: Don Carlos (1884). [Posa:... freedom! / Philppe: What a remarkable dreamer! / You will change your opinion when you know the hearts / of men as Philippe does!]

in a letter quoted above, 'obliging the composer to redo the music'). However, there are nevertheless some conspicuous and rather odd instances of thematic cross-over between the various versions, almost as though some of the more exclusively musical aspects of the discourse were alarmingly neutral, or at least much more flexible than we might like to imagine. The first instance involves a passage already



142 Roger Parker

-t! pp0 sombre PHILIPPE

"

Quel lan - ga - ge nou - veau! Ja- mais, au- pres du trO - ne, per- son - ne n'6~- le -

P l -|---

Posa '-"--

- -----

-

cresc. Don- nez la li - ber -

Ph. OR

- va la voix si haut... per - son- ne. per- son- ne, per - son ne!

? .Tzz-•---i.. u_. ---

Ex. 4: Don Carlos (1867), Act II. [Posa:... freedom! / Philippe: New words these! No one close to the throne has ever raised his voice so loudly ... / no one, no one, no one!]

discussed, unique to the 1884 version: Philippe's gloomy, F minor preparation for the airing of his domestic woes (Ex. la). This seems so particular to the psychological woes of Philippe that it comes as some surprise to find that part of its musical substance is 'rescued' from the first of the discarded, 1867 'static' set pieces, the Meno mosso 'Un souffle ardent'. What is more, its context there (see Ex. 4) is quite other: again it is Philippe, but this time, as the words demonstrate, he is still deep in political mode, obstinately objecting to the manner of Posa's increasingly flamboyant appeals to liberty.

Perhaps even more perplexing is a further thematic 'rescue operation', this time involving the 1872 Naples revision. In that version, the entire scene concludes with a cabaletta a due led off by Philippe, who hopes that Posa's intercession will calm his suspicions of Elisabeth and Carlos (see Ex. 5a). Given this context, the fact that the 'cabaletta substitute' which replaces this number and closes the 1884 version leads off with the same motive (see Ex. 5b) is, to say the least, interpretatively challenging. Here the singer is Posa, and the sentiments expressed are of restrained joy that he has gained Philippe's confidence. What is more, this motive plays a critical part both




POSA

Me Si - re! cantabile

P h . 9 1 • -

• • I - .. . .

- ?

- - -- - - "- ' - - z , Ph. voi. Di lei, di Car - lo in

Allegro giusto = 100

s- f staccate assai

Ph.

co - - - re lo sguar - - do tu o di -

3 3 3 3 3 3- 3 - 3---

Ex. 5a: Don Carlos (1872), Act II. [Posa: Me, King! / Philippe: The look she and Carlo exchange at court ...]

in the remainder of the scene, and in the entire passage leading up to the cabaletta,

beginning as far back as Example la again. What are we to make of this motivic leakage from one version into another? At

the least, it makes clear that when Verdi thought of 'redoing the music' he was minded to manipulate existing material, and manipulate in a way that is, again, an

important marker of his last style. Indeed, the journey from one version to another serves if anything to highlight the radically different compositional process that informs the new passages in the later version.

It will now be clear that my 'alternative history' of the multiple text of this duet has, like so many histories these days, a less than compelling narrative direction. Rather than finding in the various versions of the Philippe-Posa duet a neat illustration of our views about Verdi's formal development (a perfectly possible approach, and one that may still have fresh things to teach us), I have preferred to draw attention to certain discontinuities in musical process that Verdi's revisions brought forth; the

stylistic disjunctions, the quotations, anticipations and reminiscences that leave

quizzical echoes in the mind. Such moments are, perhaps, to be expected given the time period over which the revisions took place. But they do nevertheless exist, and



144 Roger Parker

a part transport6 de joie POSA

"_

Ah! queble au- ro - - - - - - re, quel - le au -

Ph.

mains! dolcissimo

dolcissimo

Posa

- ro re au ciel se 1 - - - - - ve!

Ph.

tr dans tes mains!

legg. pp staccate assai

A r - Pose -F.,

Ii est ou- vert ce coeur qui

Ph.

dolcissimo

• i e ;

t" ••

•, ,

. ,

.

.

-.- ---

_-hKi

- oF,,o,,--O-M• •- -

? "

,,4

Ex. 5b: Don Carlos (1884), Act II. [Posa: Ah! What a dawn rises in the sky! / It is open, this heart that ... / Phijlppe:... / in your hands!]

may have been ignored or downplayed for some obvious reasons in our immediate musicological past. Of course (I hear the objections already), it is as fashionable now to stress disjunction and incoherence as it was to stress 'unity', 'formal




progress' and 'dramatic truth' twenty or thirty years ago. The whole matter might in that sense merely be a less-than-momentous exercise in academic aggiornamento. But there is, I think, one sense in which consideration of the whole debate might have an effect in a larger world, and that is the world in which Don Carlos is performed.

One of the small ways in which Don Carlos is challenging (there are very many large ones) is that it obliges modern-day performers (or at worst their agents) to make large decisions about the musical text. Ursula Giinther's critical edition of the

opera, which everyone uses these days and which contains all available versions, has

(rightly in some ways) come under fire because it is so difficult to use.'1 But it has the great advantage of necessitating performance choices: you can't just start at page one and bat through; because of the layout of the score, you have to omit large swathes of music whichever version you choose. This has in turn encouraged a great deal of creative thinking about which particular sections of music to use, creative

thinking that is often (as it was in Verdi's time) bound up with singers' individual

capabilities and - let's face it - their pulling power over audiences. Should

musicologists (yes, sometimes they are in a position to influence) act as policemen here?

An extreme example. My current favourite recording of the duet is that between Thomas Hampson and Jose Van Dam. Why it's my favourite is some ways to do with the usual matters (certain high notes, the commitment and diction of the

protagonists, the fact that I saw them perform it on stage at a period when I was

intensely engaged with the opera).19 As it happens, though, the textual decision makers in this case concoct a remarkably strange version of the duet: the first two-thirds are from the original, Paris edition; we then switch to 1884 for the final section, starting with Example la, in the process stealing a few bars from Naples 1872 to paper over a crack. This has the effect of making Posa sing lyrically almost

throughout the duet, as though the number were his solo scene. Philippe is

correspondingly downplayed, becoming by contrast rather monochromatic. Most remarkable of all, though, he also becomes almost monothematic or, rather, monomotivic: the mix-and-match of original and 1884 versions means that he sings his F minor motivic fragment (Exx. la and 4) in both the original and reworked versions, and this in spite of the very different sentiments that underpin each statement.

Should we condemn such performance decisions? Should we argue that one of Verdi's four versions must always be decided upon to the exclusion of others? I cannot speak for those 1960s pioneers who discovered this embarrassment or wealth of authorial signature, but from the standpoint of the present, any such firm line would seem hard to justify. Verdi had reasons for making his changes; but they are not ours. What is more, delving further into the way his revisions relate to each other if anything makes us less sure of their integrity as objects that must be passed on as the composer left them. And the less sure we become, the more an abyss of

18 Ursula Giinther, ed., Don Carlos: Edizione

integrale..., vocal score (Milan, 1980); for a critique, see James Grier, The Critical Editing of Music: History, Method, and Practice (Cambridge, 1996), 206-13. 19 EMI Classics, 7243 5 56152 2 0, conducted by Antonio Pappano.



146 Roger Parker

freedom might seem to yawn before us. Let us, for a moment, lean over and peer down.

These days, we hear a great deal about staging Verdi, and there may now be a scholarly (as opposed to critical) consensus that there is (can be) no fixed text, no prescriptive Verdian - or indeed other - signature for the visual side of any given opera. But such consensus tends, implicitly or explicitly, to be allied to an acceptance of the relative fixity of the verbal and musical text. In this context, the competing versions of the Philippe-Posa duet can, at the least, remind us that this fixity is not necessarily, and not always, present. But there is a larger point. An awareness of such cases - awareness of multiple versions, of revisions, pentimenti, what you will - may even help liberate us from such constrictions elsewhere, encouraging us to play creatively with Verdian texts of all sorts, adapting them (as we will perforce adapt the Philippe-Posa duet) to suit our local needs and transient concerns. For me, today, for example, Philippe's double enunciation of that F minor passage, his leap across the compositional years, his return to a motivic fragment, is peculiarly apt, making Van Dam's somewhat dour and underplayed obsessiveness expressive on yet another level. In another performance, another space, some completely different decision might emerge.

Let me put this one final way, a way that brings us back to the text with which I started: the disposizione scenica for the final version of the duet. In a document that runs to forty-two pages, and often goes into considerable detail, the account of this number, a number so unusual and challenging in its subject matter, is until the end almost entirely bland and uninformative:

At the words: Nulla per me! Ma per altri, Filippo, surprised, replies: Favella; and Rodrigo with great expression offers the Racconto: O signor, di Fiandra arrivo.

Filippo, after having listened with attention, calmly responds: Col sangue solpotei. Rodrigo answers with fire: Che voipensate seminando morte, etc., and with greater force: Orrenda pace e dei sepolcri!

At the end of the duet, to Filippo's words: Ti"guarda, Rodrigo replies: Sire! The King offers his hand to Rodrigo, who kneels and kisses it; in the meantime the curtain falls rapidly on the loud F major chord.20

Let's recall once more, though, the disposizione's richly interpretative, 'novelistic' final paragraph: 'The artists are asked to pay great attention to this piece, which is very difficult not only musically but also scenically. - The actors should thoroughly identify with the two characters who stand face to face and who represent two great principles in the history of mankind'. It seems, as on other occasions within these types of document, that this rather pompous ending marks a gap felt by the

20 Disposizione

scenica per l'opera Don Carlo di G. Verdi..., 18-19. 'Alle parole: Nulla per me! Ma per altri, Filippo sorpreso risponde: Favella; e Rodrigo con molta espressione dice il racconto: O signor, di Fiandra arrivo. Filippo, dopo aver ascoltato con attenzione, risponde con calma: Col sangue sol potei. Rodrigo con fuoco risponde: Che voipensate seminando morte, ecc., e con maggior forza: Orrenda pace i dei sepolcri! Alla fine del duetto, alle parole di Filippo: Ti guarda, Rodrigo risponde: Sire! I1 Re stende la mano a Rodrigo che s'inginocchia e bacia, frattanto la tela cala rapidamente sul forte accordo in fa'.




compilers, a gap caused by the absence of staging instructions during the duet.21 The gap is easy to explain. One imagines that the final version of the duet was simply too strange in musical form; that, missing the usual formal markers, the compilers of the disposizione scenica became unsure of how to punctuate critical moments in the dialogue with decisive stage rearrangements, as was their wont elsewhere.22 In that sense, their task was rather like ours; a confusion of detail leaves a question mark, calls for an answering, healing narrative. But if we now are the novelistic narrators, and if our subject is the entirety of the duet - words, music and all - we might do well to recall from time to time that Hermes was the god of eloquence as well as a messenger; that our discourse, like that of all story tellers, will necessarily adopt a point of view. This awareness may sometimes distress us: the spectre of relativity, of the fact that our messages will, like our professional and other selves, eventually be ignored and then forgotten, is not always easy to contemplate. But it may encourage us to be more daring with the entire Verdian text, to think more radically about ways in which, for a time, it can become ours.

21 I explore such gaps further in 'Reading the Livrets, or the Chimera of "Authentic" Staging', in Leonora's Last Act, 126-48.

22 It is interesting in this context that the disposizione scenica for the first version of the duet is much more informative about stage movement, most of which (typically) occurs at moments when it would punctuate the various 'set pieces' within the number. See

DisposiZione scenica per l'opera Don Carlo di G. Verdi compilata e regolata secondo la mise en scine del Teatro Imperiale dell'Opera di Parigi (Milan: Ricordi, n.d.), 21-2.



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