La Leyenda Negra.(Spanish landscape in Verdi's Il Trovatore)

JOHN YOHALEM on Verdi's fascination with Spanish landscapes

Today Spain calls up images of bullfights, castanets and a certain self-indulgence in matters of the heart. The audience for whom Verdi created Il Trovatore in 1853 associated Spain with more sinister themes -- the "black legend" of a conservative, xenophobic and superstitious Spain ruled by a morbid Inquisition, and by codes of conduct the rest of Europe had long regarded as absurd or extreme.

The opening-night audience for Il Trovatore was unfamiliar with the play that was the opera's source, Antonio Garcia Gutierrez's El Trovador, which had never been performed in Italy. But when they looked at their programs and discovered the piece was set in medieval Aragon, they were ready for certain themes treated in certain ways. The extreme passions of the love triangle corresponded with their notions of fiery Spanish temperament. They might look forward to moonlit passion in Moorish gardens, and Verdi provided the troubadour's serenade to fill the bill. The Moors themselves are not to be found in the opera, but Gypsies are, and the lurid tales the soldiers tell about them remind us of Spanish racial attitudes, the obsession with "purity of blood."

Such expectations may be simplistic, but a canny dramatist would be foolish not to capitalize on them. Verdi made use of what was familiar in startling ways. It is a measure of his genius that so many of his innovations have become cliches in their own right, so that we easily forget how original his dramatic choices once were.

From his correspondence with the librettist, Salvatore Cammarano, we know what attracted Verdi to Il Trovatore, what struck him as most theatrical and original: the "novelty and strangeness" of Azucena, a Gypsy torn between love for her supposed son and a deeply Spanish desire for family vengeance; the devout Leonora's flight from a convent with her lover, Manrico; the troubadour's song heard over the Miserere and accompanied by Leonora's interjections. ("Eleonora has no part in the hymn for the dead and the canzone of the Troubadour, and this seems to me one of the best places for an aria," he protested, when Cammarano at first overlooked it.)

Verdi did not actually set foot in Spain until 1863, ten years after composing Trovatore, when he went to Madrid to prepare the local premiere of La Forza del Destino, which he'd also based on a Spanish Romantic classic. He spent two months touring the country and took away with him impressions of the Escorial and the rhythms of flamenco guitar, both of which he put to good use in Don Carlo.

But Spain had a reputation ready to be used. La leyenda negra, the "black legend" of a country under the thumb of the Inquisition, grew out of propaganda created in the era of Charles V and Philip II. Their Spain was the greatest power in Europe. Its unprecedented centralization of royal authority (backed by treasure from the New World) crushed religious and political dissent in its own territories -- including most of Italy and the Low Countries -- and threatened the liberties of France, Germany and all the newly Protestant nations. Philip played into the hands of hostile sentiment by setting a sort of iron curtain around the peninsula, regulating all contact and forbidding his subjects even to study abroad. Spain's very freedom from the religious wars and civil unrest tearing apart the rest of the continent came to seem sinister -- "the peace of the tomb!" as the liberal Marquis of Posa calls it in Verdi's Don Carlo.