Composers Datebook™ is a daily two-minute program designed to inform, engage, and entertain listeners with timely information about composers of the past and present. Each program notes significant or intriguing musical events involving composers of the past and present, with appropriate and accessible music related to each.
Quintessential Verdi
On today’s date in 1853, Giuseppe Verdi’s opera “Il Trovatore” (or “The Troubador”) had its premiere performance at the Teatro Apollo in Rome. It proved an immediate hit. True, some did complain at the time about its gloomy, complicated and downright confusing plot. But Verdi’s music setting had such great tunes and such energetic verve that “Il Trovatore” quickly became the most popular of all his operas in the 19th century. Its tunes were soon heard emanating from street corner barrel-organs, and, as a true sign of popularity, there were even comic parodies of its melodramatic blood and thunder story-line. Reviewing a New York production in 1862, the American composer and music critic William Fry had these observations: “Il Trovatore has a wonderful plot, beyond human comprehension... As to the music, there are some charming, popular, ingenious, artistic, great points; then, there are some others egregiously vulgar and rowdy. The Anvil Chorus, for example, is about equal to a scene of mending a sewer set to music.” And as for parodies, in the 1935 film, “A Night at the Opera,” “Il Trovatore” – and opera in general – receive a devastating send-up at the hands of the Marx Brothers.