Giuseppe Verdi 
Overture to La Forza del Destino
Duration: 8:00

The foreboding overture to the 1862 opera La forza del destino presages a tale of vengeance, ill-fated love, and intra-family warfare.  Its composer, Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901), though now identified as Italian, grew up with no official nationality until 1861, when various city-states on the peninsula were finally united, and Italy took the physical and national shape it has today.  Interestingly enough, this opera was commissioned by Russians, while the drama takes place in Spain:  family tragedies never cease to have international appeal.  In the overture, the initial, fatalistic theme is given to the brass, whose six annunciatory blasts open up a score filled with churning emotion.

Aaron Copland 
“The Promise of Living” from
The Tender Land
Duration: 5:20

The music of Aaron Copland (1901-90) has become synonymous with the most genuine musical depiction of the American spirit.  After his early, successful but fundamentally unsatisfying musical career Copland stated that he no longer felt the need to look for “conscious Americanism” in his music. “When our music is mature,” he added, “it will also be American in quality.”  And the theme of his 1954 opera The Tender Land is quintessentially American, set in the Midwest with a cast of hardscrabble farmers and itinerants.  The first act ends with a gathering of the rustic villagers at harvest-time; they sing Copland’s adaptation of a Southern revival song, “Zion’s Walls” where “mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers” join in praise and thanksgiving.  Even in the characters’ difficult lives there is promise and hope.

Georges Bizet
“L’Amour est un oiseau rebelle,” Habañera from Carmen
Duration: 4:15

This is perhaps the most well-known music of the opera Carmen, by Georges Bizet (1838-75) of France. This aria announces the arrival—at the end of Act I—of the main character, Carmen.  She is a feisty, uncompromising woman with great physical appeal.  She sings an habañera, a folksy tune with origins in exotic (for the French) Havana, characteristically set in a sensuous, swinging rhythm.  The translation begins “Love is a wild bird / that no one may tame,” which becomes her challenge to all would-be suitors.  She continues, in a mock-serious way:  “Be on your guard. . .Love, you think you hold it tight, it dodges you. You think you dodge it, it holds you.”  Her words, evocative and foreboding, enchant an eavesdropping French soldier, Don José, who is stationed in her Spanish town.  Passion ensues.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
“Soave sia il vento” from
Cosi Fan Tutte
Duration: 3:17

This lovely trio appears in Mozart’s (1756-91) comic opera Così fan tutte, first performed in 1790.  The Italian title may be most literally rendered as “They (=women, since the pronoun is feminine) are all like that,” which trades on the then-popular and misogynistic trope that all women are silly and easily fooled.  As the opera begins, two military men, Ferrando and Guglielmo, wager that their fiancées, Dorabella and Fiordiligi, could never be unfaithful.  A friend (one may question the use of the term) insists that the two officers are deluded and proposes that they pretend to go off to war (a war was always generally available in Europe at the time), only to return in disguise and attempt to woo each other’s betrothed—a truly manly test of women’s fidelity. The music to this point is jouncy and light, though Mozart takes a serious turn with this trio.  Here the two young women, in the company of their lovers’ “friend” wish their companions safe travels.  As usual, Mozart is capable of the most serene music.  The words of their song begin “May the wind be gentle,” and their genuine concern for the well-being of their deceitful lovers becomes a touching trio, something quite seriously expressive in the midst of the comedy.

Giuseppe Verdi
“Va, pensiero”
(Chorus of the Hebrews)
from Nabucco
Duration: 4:39

Verdi’s 1842 opera Nabucco is set in ancient Babylon and takes its name from the tyrannical king at the time of that ill-fated state (more accurately rendered in English as Nebuchadnezzar).  Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem has been destroyed; the Hebrews are enslaved in distant Babylon. “Va, pensiero,” a chorus from Act III of the opera, records the lamentations of these captive people.  The text begins “Go, my thoughts, back to my native land,” and continues with the singers’ memories of their homeland, “sweet and fragrant.”  The librettist chose Psalm 137 as template for his lyrics.  This chorus became so popular and so identified with Verdi that, it is said, citizens of Milan who had turned out for the funeral cortège of the composer in 1901 broke into a spontaneous chorus of “Va, pensiero.”

Giacomo Puccini
Te Deum (Act 1 Finale) from Tosca
Duration: 5:42

Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) is represented by two works on tonight’s program.  The first comes from his opera Tosca, whose premiere took place in 1900. It is Rome at the time of the Napoleonic wars. An opera singer, Floria Tosca, is in love with artist Cavaradossi, but she has also caught the eye of the sadistic and powerful police chief, Scarpia.  As Act I comes to a close Scarpia has followed Tosca into a church.  She leaves, and Scarpia orders his henchman Spoletta (whose suggestive name also means the fuse of a bomb) to follow her.  Then Scarpia launches into a deranged (but terribly musical) profession of his love for Tosca and his plans to murder Cavaradossi.  At the same time, the sounds of a church hymn, the Te Deum—replete with organ and church bells—fill the sanctuary.  It is a jarring juxtaposition, Scarpia blaming Tosca for making him hate god (his own words) while church-goers sing boisterous praise to their deity.  

Scott Joplin
Overture to Treemonisha
Duration: 7:30 

American composer and pianist Scott Joplin (1868-1917) was the much-acclaimed “King of Ragtime.”  But his compositional skills extended far beyond piano rags.  You may be surprised with the sound of this overture to his third and last work for the stage, the opera Treemonisha, written in 1911.  Its title comes from the name of its central character, a foundling discovered under a tree in Texas.  Since her adoptive mother’s name was Monisha, the child became known as Treemonisha.  Both librettist and composer, Joplin wanted his opera to depict the painful sloughing of old-world attitudes (in this case, African) among newly-freed Blacks as they tried to find a place in mainstream American society.  Sadly, Joplin was not able to produce Treemonisha in his lifetime.  It took sixty years for the work to gain an audience, but now it has become a popular work in opera repertoire.

George Bizet
“Les voici! voici la quadrille!”
from Carmen
Act IV, No. 26
Duration: 4:16

The meteoric career of Georges Bizet may have climaxed with the composition of the opera Carmen in the final year of the French composer’s sadly short life.  The story line is by now pretty well-known:  a wild local woman Carmen catches the eye of a soldier, Don José, who falls madly in love with her.  She rebuffs him whenever possible but cannot be oblivious to his attentions.  (Sadly, he dumps his true girlfriend, Micaëla, for Carmen, who is a worker in a cigarette factory.)  Later in the opera, a rival enters, a husky and arrogant bullfighter replete with regalia and retinue.  The final scene of the opera is the bullfight, and as Escamillo the toreador enters the town with his colorful followers (marching in groups of four, hence the title) the townspeople burst into song—“Look at them, look at the quadrille.”  The bullfighters strut into the stadium, Escamillo leading the way.  The bullfight is exciting (not for the bull, as usual, and not for Carmen either).  Outside the throbbing stadium she is accosted by a seethingly jealous Don José and stabbed to death.  

Gaetano Donizetti
“Quel guardo il cavaliere”
from Don Pasquale
Duration: 6:05

This delightful cavatina (“short song,” Italian) comes from Act I of Don Pasquale, a comic opera by Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848).  A young impoverished widow, Norina, is part of a plot where she plans to disguise herself as a nun to win the affections of aging, unappealing Don Pasquale.  When the scene opens she is at her home, reading a novel about romance.  The words “Quel guardo il cavaliere” describe a woman’s “glance that pierced the knight’s heart.”  Norina muses about her own ability to get a man to fall for her, and her aria, full of coloratura sparkle, shows that she too knows “the charms and the easy arts used to seduce a heart.”  She also knows how to enthrall listeners with fantastic vocal phrasing and treacherous leaps to stratospheric pitches.  

Giacomo Puccini
“Nessun dorma” from Turandot
Duration: 3:00

Puccini’s final opera Turandot premiered in 1926 at La Scala.  The work was unfinished at Puccini’s death, and Franco Alfano, who had worked with Puccini, prepared the opera for performance.  The story takes place in the mythic past of China, at the time ruled by a psychotic Princess Turandot.  Unmarried, she entertains suitors, all of whom must answer three questions correctly in order to win her hand.  Sadly, none are up to the task and thereupon enjoy the popular spectator sport of public beheading.  Enter Calàf, a visiting prince of Tatary, who succeeds in answering all the riddles, much to the surprise of the cold prima donna.  Sensing her emotional reluctance to marry, he offers her a way out:  if she can discover his name before morning, he will submit to the typical end for ill-fated suitors.  In an astonishing act of public spirit, Turandot announces to her kingdom “Nessun dorma”—“no one shall sleep tonight”—that is, until the name of the mysterious visitor can be discovered.  If no name is produced, the people shall die.  But in this aria that Pavarotti made world famous in the 1990s, Calàf short-circuits the narrative, appearing in the royal court and announcing to the princess that his name is “Love.”  This pronouncement thaws the heart of the Princess and spares the lives of the hapless citizenry.  The high point of the aria—also the highest tenor note—occurs on the words “vincerò” (“I will win”).  The opera gives proof that great music trumps bad drama.

Leonard Bernstein
“Make Our Garden Grow”
from Candide
Duration: 5:43

This rousing chorus concludes Leonard Bernstein’s 1956 comic opera Candide, which brought Voltaire’s famous satire to the musical stage—and the world’s attention.  Bernstein (1918-90) teamed up with librettist Lillian Hellman to set Voltaire’s story of a bumbling but honest man, Candide, who has somehow survived all imaginable ills in his lifetime and who manages to conclude that the best life is that which is least mired in dogma, politics, or fantasy.  Bernstein’s work itself is a satiric stab at political life in the United States of the day—with its powerful House Un-American Activities Committee busy at blacklisting prominent artists, among others.  In the course of the musical, Candide finds and marries Cunégonde, the woman he has been chasing—literally and figuratively.  This final chorus brings all surviving characters back on stage, where they exclaim:  “We’re neither pure, nor wise, nor good / We’ll do the best we know. . . .And make our garden grow.”  While not, perhaps, a pitch for reconsideration of economic and environmental policies, the chorus points out the primary importance of compassionate human interaction in a green world that surrounds and sustains them.