Giuseppe Verdi (1813 – 1901)

Overture to "The Force of Destiny"

"In Italy … the word ‘overture’ is used to describe a certain kind of noise which theatre orchestras produce before the rise of the curtain, and to which no-one pays any attention". Writing in 1831, the disappointed Hector Berlioz had recently arrived in Rome on a French government scholarship, and had expected that the homeland of opera would have as great a tradition in instrumental music. Instead, he found audiences who would happily chat and joke through an entire opera, let alone its overture. His Italian contemporary Verdi can have had fewer illusions. The son of a village shopkeeper from near Cremona, he’d built his career the hard way, failing to get into Milan Conservatoire and watching his first two operas fail in provincial theatres before the triumph of "Nabucco" in 1842 finally made his name. He’d learnt his lessons well, perfecting a style of opera that sought at every moment to grip and involve its audience. A practical man of the theatre, he knew better than to stretch his audience’s limited attention span with elaborate overtures. So it was that one of the two greatest opera composers of the nineteenth century, author of over 20 operas, left hardly a single overture of such musical stature as to enter the concert repertoire. When he wrote overtures at all they tended to be unsophisticated pot-pourris in a desultory sonata-form – "Aida" is one of the best-known of all operas, yet who remembers its overture? Many of Verdi’s finest operas have no overture at all, merely a brief prelude setting the mood - and, tellingly, these are amongst the most memorable of his operatic introductions; the haunting prelude to "La Traviata", for example. With the rare exception of "Nabucco", Verdi’s overtures have, largely deservedly, remained confined to the opera house.

The overture to "The Force of Destiny" is the magnificent exception that proves this rule. Verdi wrote the opera in 1862 as a commission for St. Petersburg. He was at the height of his success in Italy and was enjoying his role as a member of Italy’s first parliament. He was paid 22,000 roubles – four times the going rate – for "The Force of Destiny" and perhaps became a little too complacent – his luggage for the trip to Russia included 120 bottles of Bordeaux and 20 bottles of champagne! When the opera then failed he seems to have been stung back to his creative best, and determined to show what he could really achieve. He had the libretto rewritten and tightened the musical structure; he also wrote for it the grandest and most powerful overture to any of his operas. The result was a success. Despite having one of the most incomprehensible and mannered plots in all Italian opera – a sprawling concoction of disguises, fortune tellers, and vows of revenge – "The Force of Destiny" has held its place in the international repertoire thanks to the power and melody of Verdi’s music. The overture is played frequently in concert halls and was even a popular brass-band showpiece in Victorian times. It is a broad, fully-worked sonata-form movement, containing some of Verdi’s most difficult and brilliant orchestral writing, and some of his most indelible melodies. Three arresting brass chords open the piece – in the opera they symbolise a vow of vengeance. The strings give out the nervous, insistent, "Destiny" motif, which recurs throughout the overture and the opera at critical moments, re-appearing as an ominous undercurrent under the long, lamenting melody – one of Verdi’s best-known – which forms the bulk of the overture’s introduction. The Destiny motif surges to overwhelm it and the clarinet launches the main Allegro of the overture. There follows an energetic, intense movement, vigorously worked out in a strict fugato development section, yet always grippingly dramatic. At times the menacing Destiny motif rises again; but the music broadens to a grandiose climax on a melody from Act II of the opera – a prayer for peace. So Verdi portrays in purely instrumental music the whole drama of love, death and revenge – proof that even without singers, props and scenery he remained a consummate dramatist. It’s hard to imagine even the most jaded Italian audience talking through this overture.

R. G. Bratby


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