 
Giuseppe Verdi’s main work Don Carlo |
A drama about the world, family relationships and abstract ideas
Giuseppe Verdi’s main work Don Carlo
In his work entitled Verdi. Roman der Oper, 1924, Franz Werfel describes in free and beautifully lyric prose how Giuseppe Verdi, in his unsuccessful endeavour to compose an opera based on Shakespeare’s Lear, actually discovered his own true potential as a composer. But Verdi’s profound admiration for Shakespeare can easily lead us to overlook the importance which Friedrich Schiller’s plays had for the composer. At the watershed of his career, in 1867 – before his late period began – he composed Don Carlos in French for the Paris Opéra. The work is based very loosely on a drama by Schiller. It is Verdi’s most grandiose opera, and his most ambitious one as regards compositional technique. Comparable to anything produced by Wagner, it constitutes a complex music drama that reflects his view of the world in bright and sparkling hues.
Schiller, Shakespeare, Liszt
His very first encounters with Schiller led Verdi to break with the musical and dramatic tradition of Italian melodrama. His Giovanna d’Arco (The Maid of Orleans) is a mixture of Schiller and Shakespeare, with the love in Joan’s heart burning, as in Henry VI, for the French Emperor, Charles, and not for the English soldier, Lionel. The prelude to Luisa Miller (Intrigue and Love), with its atypical one-theme structure, is reminiscent of Franz Liszt’s symphonic programme poems. And in the opening scene of his Masnadieri (The Brigands) Verdi breaks with the traditional practice of introducing the act with a chorus.
Music Drama with a european dimension
Such details show us the positive effects which Schiller had on Verdi: his plays helped the composer to leave behind a tradition that had become too narrow and to break out into Europen-scale music drama. The culmination point was Don Carlos – though Verdi never actually heard it performed as he had originally conceived it. Even before it was premiered in Paris the original version was cut and patched, and the first Italian versions that followed were compromises. The biggest changes were made by Verdi himself in the version which appeared in Italian in Milan in 1884 under the title Don Carlo. Its original length was shortened by one quarter and the style of the work was spiced with more Italianità (the expanded Modena version of 1886 is a half-hearted return to the original when it is not sung in French).
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| Herbert Wernicke’s production of Don Carlos will be revived and premiered on 9 August 2001.. |
A drama of the world and of abstract ideas
This four-act Italian version, though trimmed of its pre-history, is a self-contained work. It is a world drama with abstract ideas: Verdi, true to Schiller, elevated the family tragedy onto this universal level. As compared with the play, where the ghost of the dead Emperor, Charles V, is mentioned only in passing as reportedly gliding through the rooms of the Escorial, Verdi introduces a new element: the transcendental. When in the main scene the Flemish heretics are being burned, a voice from heaven is heard giving them consolation. For Verdi, church and religion were by no means identical. And in the late versions, by giving the monks’ chant a cutting sound in the brass, he introduced a sharper tone to the finale which originally had a comforting atmosphere with the Emperor Charles V appearing as a ghost and saving the eponymous hero from the entente fatale of state and church. That was his bitter commentary on the hopelessness of the situation as depicted at the end of Schiller’s play.
Ulrich Schreiber