Verdi Onstage in the United States: Le trouvere

Why—the question looms—when Il trovatore, as Verdi wrote it, in Italian, was so instantly popular, did he bother to revise it three years later, making small changes, adding a ballet, and re-presenting the opera in French as Le trouvère?

The triumph of Il trovatore, starting at its premiere in Rome on 19 January 1853, was extraordinary, approached only by Verdi's earlier opera Ernani (1843). Scholars report that Il trovatore, in its first three years, had at least 229 productions worldwide, most with many performances.¹ In Naples, for example, where the opera in its first three years had eleven stagings in six theaters, the performances totaled 190. So many that a Neapolitan, Pasquale Altavilla, composed a farce with music, Una famiglia entusiasmata per la bella musica del "Trovatore" [A family enraptured by the beautiful music of Il trovatore]. This too was popular and often revived.²

So why did Verdi prepare a French version of the opera? For reasons legal, financial, and artistic.

'His legal reasons are a thicket of claims and counterclaims over French copyright to his works. In the French courts he sometimes won, sometimes lost, but with Il trovatore he saw a chance to strengthen his position if he produced his own French version of the opera.

His financial reasons are allied to the suits. In the opera's first three years, Il trovatore had few performances in French-speaking countries—chiefly two productions in Paris, both in Italian, both overseen by Verdi. A large market awaited the opera in France, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, and overseas—if sung in French. That was the circuit's custom.

His artistic reason was to ensure a good production for the opera. He recently had suffered defeats with two bad Paris stagings of Luisa Miller, in Italian and in a French translation, and with productions of Rigoletto and La traviata based on pirated scores. If he controlled the French translation of Trovatore and made the necessary revisions, he could better protect the opera. For all these reasons, therefore, he prepared Le trouvère.

It had its premiere at the Théátre Impérial de l'Opéra in Paris on 12 January 1857, and in its first twenty years it was repeated there every season from 1857 to 1865, from 1868 to 1870, and from 1872 to 1873; by 1876 it had totaled 223 Parisian performances.³ It played wherever there were French-speaking communities in Europe, Africa, and North and South America, and on 29 September 1865 a French touring company brought it to Batavia (now Jakarta), capital of the Dutch East Indies.⁴ Thereafter its frequency of performance continued only slightly abated until World War I collapsed many of the French regional and touring companies, and by the close of World War II Trouvère had become a rarity. Yet for some seventy-five years it had shared the stage with Trovatore.

Besides a new French text, Verdi's most noticeable changes for Trouvère included the addition of a ballet (required of all operas produced at the Paris Opéra), the addition of a short arioso for Azucena in act 3, a large cut, of Leonora's closing aria to the "Miserere" scene ("Tu vedrai"), and a slight lengthening of the opera's final moment as Manrico (now Manrique) is led off to execution. For this new ending, Verdi brought back the monks' offstage "Miserere," sung to a tolling bell, through which onstage he interjected some cries by Azucena, Manrique, and the Comte de Luna. Though the heart of the addition runs only thirteen measures, it is conspicuous because its pace is slow (andante sostenuto) and because of the repeat of the "Miserere."⁵

Verdi never gave a reason for this change. Max Rudolf, an artistic administrator at the Metropolitan Opera and a distinguished conductor of the mid-twentieth century,⁶ in comparing the opera's two versions called this...