Two or Three (Other) Things I Know about Il Trovatore
Once again writing about Verdi and politics.
Previously on Two or Three Things I Know About…: Verdi’s Aida
Over on the London Review of Books Blog this week, I have a piece about the dancer Danni Perry’s pro-Palestinian moment at the Royal Opera House (and the subsequent response from the ROH). Over the last year, I’ve been pretty deep in Verdi-land, particularly around Nabucco and Rigoletto, so of course the Palestine flag was waved after a production of the same composer’s Il trovatore, and of course the discourse of keeping politics out of opera followed in its wake.
This is, as I wrote for the LRB, the intellectual equivalent of bringing cotton candy to a water fight — even in a work as seemingly non-political as Trovatore.
One thing I didn’t learn until after the LRB post went up was that the signing of the Balfour Declaration (which established British support for building “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine) was celebrated in a reception at the Royal Opera House. Two years later, Balfour told his successor George Curzon: “Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-old traditions, in present needs, in future hopes of far profounder importance than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”
That prioritization of age-old traditions of a “profounder importance” to some over the “desires” of others (and, really, capital-O Others), isn’t too far off from some of the operatic traditions at the heart of Trovatore.
I.
Explaining the plot of Trovatore — both its backstory and actual story — for a short opinion piece is excruciating enough. Bringing the historical basis of the source play into the mix would have been a step too far. However, the historical parallels lend further credit to Trovatore being read in a Risorgimento context. Or, more accurately, the historical parallels between this story, its original creation as a play in Spain, and the adaptation from this play into an opera a few decades later make the case.
King Martin of Aragon was dead, to begin with. His 1410 death (from, it bears mentioning, laughter) came a year after his son’s, Martin the Younger. Since Martin the Younger had no siblings and left no legitimate heirs, this created a power vacuum that half a dozen varyingly-distant relatives were eager to fill. Martin the Younger had no legitimate heirs, but he did have a son out of wedlock — Frederic. Martin the Elder had liked Frederic and even tried to legitimize him after the Younger died, but with no luck.
Going by a tradition (but not a law) of passing the crown via patrilineal lines, the most legitimate claim to the throne was therefore held by James II of Urgell, the Elder’s brother-in-law. The Elder had known this, and gave James several opportunities within his court. James eventually accepted the role of governor-general, and saw this as a sign that he was being groomed for leadership.
According to historians, however, James fumbled the bag. Moreover, he had competition from several other relatives, including Louis of Anjou (Martin’s great-nephew via his brother), and Ferdinand of Castile (Martin’s nephew via his sister). A council of Aragonese representatives convened in Caspe to elect the new king. Frederic’s illegitimacy made him a risky choice, and so he was offered a consolation title (the Count of Luna) in exchange for giving up his claim to the throne.
The deliberations then began to center around Louis of Anjou, Ferdinand of Castille, and James. James was confident in his claim, but during the interregnum years, his supporters assassinated the Archbishop of Zaragoza (a key ally to Louis of Anjou). This was on their part an attempt to quash dissent and consolidate power, but it had the opposite effect for James’s electability. The council ultimately gave the crown to Ferdinand, Martin the Elder’s closest relative (albeit through a sororal line).
All that was missing from this Conclave-esque drama was a cunty little vape. James responded to this decision by organizing a six-month revolt that dominated the latter half of 1413, ultimately stopping in the early weeks of 1414. On Ferdinand’s side, he had the backing of the Royalists and forces from Castile, Catalonia, Aragon, and Valencia, as well as that of his nephew, Frederic, now the Count of Luna. Still not a popular bet at home, James had to outsource his forces from the peripheries, including English and French troops from the neighboring Hundred Years’ War (linking this story to another Verdi work, Giovanna d’Arco).
This is where Trovatore begins, with the Count di Luna (Frederic) on one side of the war and his yet-to-be-revealed half-brother, Manrico, on the other side as an officer in Urgell’s army. This was an invention on the part of playwright Antonio García Gutiérrez, while writing El trovador. A supposedly Roma son, Manrico’s status as someone on the margins of society was, in Spanish Romantic tradition, a “symbol of freedom or revolt,” according to historian Donald Shaw (writing for a guide on Il trovatore copublished, aptly, by the Royal Opera House).
Freedom and revolt were very much part of the atmosphere for García Gutiérrez while writing El trovador in between two fraught eras of Spanish history: the Ominous Decade that returned the country to absolutist rule under Ferdinand VII and brought back the Spanish Inquisition, and the early years of the First Carlist War — another war of succession but also one that sought to restore a constitutional monarchy within the country.
“What Verdi seems to have seen in El trovador was a work which offered a libretto of remarkable power and originality,” writes Shaw. Yet it’s also a libretto that in many ways mirrors the works Verdi had been adapting earlier in his career: a historical drama that resonates in the current political moment. El trovador was an overnight success in Spain, and became an exemplar of the Spanish Romantic movement. It came at a time when many writers themselves were forced into exile during Ferdinand VII’s reign. In that time, per Shaw, they “had become aware that the old worldview was in crisis.” No longer could they believe in a world made by God in his own beneficent image. Napoleon’s ambition and Ferdinand’s authoritarianism forced out any room for rationalism or divine order.
This also explains the need for the over-the-top emotions and actions of the characters within Trovatore, the tendency in that age towards melodrama. García Gutiérrez’s versions of Leonora and Manrico are unable to outrun the abuses of power, abuses centered in Di Luna and whose controlling mechanisms are far beyond their control. However, he also makes his lovers more indulgently fraught: While in Il trovatore Manrico finds Leonora just before she’s about to take vows as a nun, in El trovador he finds her just after. Yet they still steal away, making their love an affront to a vengeful God. It seems inevitable that Di Luna, in this tangle of hormones and hegemony, would accidentally kill his own brother.
I don’t disagree with Verdi scholar Julian Budden’s early characterization of Il trovatore as “a high-flown, sprawling melodrama flamboyantly defiant of the Aristotelian unities, packed with all manner of fantastic and bizarre incident.” But I also get why that level of excess was so successful at a time where all a writer could do was construct a series of events that gave some shape to the contours and scale of their political anxiety and heartbreak. “The happenings of Il trovatore may be bizarre, but they are never unintelligible; and the situations themselves are always crystal clear,” Budden wrote of the opera about a decade later.
Drama often allows situations that are, in real life, complex and covered in context to crystallize into clarity. It doesn’t really matter to the audience of Il trovatore that Manrico is backing the wrong horse, or that Di Luna is defending someone who was a pretty decent king for the four brief years that he reigned (or that the real-life Frederic di Luna would later turn against Ferdinand I’s son, Alfonso V). The human cost at the center of it is what we’re focused on, and the idea that anyone could behave rationally in the world that Verdi, Trovatore librettist Salvadore Cammarano, and García Gutiérrez have created.
What this reminds me of most in the summer of 2025 is a video from South African influencer Candice King, originally shared last year. There are no shortage of videos of families, friends, and communities mourning their dead in Gaza; no shortage of videos showing them live through ongoing terror. Those emotions are palpable and haunting and inarguable. But I remember seeing King’s video for the first time (and, because of how the algorithm works, many times after that) and flinching a bit at how she shrieks about the footage of beheaded babies in Rafah. It can be read as performative or melodramatic — and has been by many who still refuse to accept that Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza. But King challenges this: “I’m not crazy. You’re crazy, because you’re not doing anything, and you think this is normal. Me right now, this is normal behavior.” That clarity, I believe, is what Budden points to in Trovatore.
II.
Luchino Visconti opens his 1954 film, Senso, with a Trovatore-spurred riot. At the Teatro la Fenice, in Austrian-occupied Venice, a performance is underway with the lovers’ duet between Leonora and Manrico interrupted by the news that Manrico’s mother-figure, Azucena, has been arrested by Di Luna. He jumps into action with the earworm aria “Di quella pira.”
A title card tells us we’re in the spring of 1866, the final months of the occupation, and the camera pans to an audience whose prime seats are dominated by Austrian soldiers. (Rewatching this scene now, I can’t help but think of the Israeli Opera’s free tickets for uniformed IDF soldiers promotion.)
As the men’s chorus joins in — their line to Manrico subtitled in English: “We stand ready to fight for you!” — a non-uniformed nobleman makes his way through the standing-room-only crowd. Red, white, and green pamphlets circulate up to the gods, where the uniforms thin out and everyday Italians are crowded. Women lift their hoop skirts to reveal patriotic bouquets smuggled into the theater with no one the wiser. Manrico’s call to arms becomes one for these audience-activists as well. A woman in the upper ring gives the first battle cry: “Foreigners out of Venice!” she cries, flinging a bouquet at an Austrian officer.
Predictably, all hell breaks loose. In this commotion, our heroine, an Italian countess whose cousin organized this action, meets an Austrian lieutenant, creating another politically star-crossed love affair that will dominate the rest of the story. Senso was based on a novella by Camillo Boito, brother to Verdi’s sometime-agitator, sometime-librettist Arrigo. This bit of historical fiction also has a distant basis in reality: According to musicologist Marcello Conati, when in 1859 Risorgimento leader Camillo Benso di Cavour received an ultimatum from Austria demanding the disarmament of Piedmont (making the foreign power into a legitimate aggressor amid diplomatic efforts), he flung open his window and began to sing “Di quella pira” at full volume.
III.
Rereading the Trovatore section in his biography of Verdi, I was struck by an image Julian Budden conjures of the opera’s other characters rotating around Azucena. As he points out, for a character who doesn’t appear onstage until Act II, we still hear her musical presence in the triple rhythm in Ferrando’s Act I aria, which gives us the first telling of the opera’s backstory. This story is about Azucena’s mother, but she inherits that rhythm in “Stride la vampa,” much like she inherits the cyclical oppression and generational trauma of her mother’s ethnic, social, and (let’s be honest here) gender status.
There is, throughout the score, a quality of insistence as described by Verdi’s contemporary Abramo Basevi, which Budden considers to be a consequence of the 3/4, 3/8, and 6/8 rhythms that originate with Azucena. Manrico elevates her musical language “into high heroism” with “Di quella pira.” The convulsions of arpeggio in the way Verdi musically sets the words “la vampa” in Azucena’s opening aria are ironed out into heroic certainty in the setting of the words “pira” and “foco.”
As Budden points out, Leonora picks up on some of this insistence as well in her most agitated moments, particularly at the end when she bargains with Di Luna to save Manrico in “Mira, di acerbe lagrime.”
I mentioned director Stephen Wadsworth’s thoughts on Trovatore in the LRB as well, and I think his read on Azucena takes this into consideration. The real origin of the story, as he sees is, is a “lynching” — a potent word to use for a Houston audience:
“Ferrando tells some of this tale in Verdi’s first scene, and his language brims with racial hatred; ditto that of his men. I’m shocked to read it unsoftened by the music… And it’s why Azucena was, always and only, played as a crazed, demented hag, though she’s the only character who holds all the cards. Might she in fact be a strong, sane, sentient woman who knows exactly what she’s doing?”
I would argue that Azucena spends most of Trovatore as a woman with crystal-clear vision because she is the only one of the characters to have fully spiralled out of control in the events preceding the opera’s beginning. As a mother herself, she goes through the horror of watching her mother unjustly killed. Committed to avenging her mother, she blacks out during the eventful moment and wakes up to find she’s killed the wrong child. How do you come back from that? How does that not sharpen your senses for the rest of your life?
Leonora mirrors that spiral in her own way, to a much different end. Manrico vacillates — at first allowing Di Luna to live after their first duel, out of an unknown impulse that is later spelled out, but also jumping to his mother’s defense without a moment’s hesitation in the scene leading up to “Di quella pira.” In those impulsive, insistent moments, these two characters know exactly what they’re doing.
Thank you for this. It was a wonderful visit with Il trovatore and Senso, two works I adore. Yes, it is nonsensical to ask politics to be kept out of Verdi, it misunderstands him entirely.