Opera is fundamentally about singing, communicating story through song. Historically, composers (and critics) have found a range of ways in which employing music qua music enhances operatic expression – hence the longevity of Orpheus as ur-operatic narrative, as a story about a singer and the power of song (indeed, of music itself), in which the musical impact of song resonates simultaneously within the story and in the opera house.Footnote ¹ Indeed, in this context singing’s enactment as performance for an audience on stage can challenge the very boundaries of the stage, breaking the fourth wall by reaching out directly to communicate to the audience as they become one with the intended fictive audience, bypassing the story even while continuing to function within it.

In general, Verdi criticism has not dwelt on Orphic moments of singing about song. Yet Il trovatore – as one of Verdi’s operas with an undeniably broad influence across the nineteenth century and beyond – is first and foremost an opera about a singer, the power of song and remembered voices.Footnote ² Crucially, I believe that Trovatore’s focus on singing helps to highlight a transition, a historic evolution in operatic style that expands ways to exploit the vocal utterance – the aria, ‘song’ – as a powerful emotional sign, a marker of a new kind of theatrical ‘realism’ (that has nothing to do with ‘realistic’ narrative content), in which the singer and the singing is what is ‘real’ – that is, capable of direct impact within the opera house, helping audiences to connect what is unfolding on stage with their own experience. Not coincidentally, Trovatore plays a double role: as an opera about singing, it also became one of the nineteenth century’s quintessential repertory operas. And it is the growing emphasis on repeated operatic performance that further helped to establish our experience of singers as both individuals and simultaneously embodiments of a vocal type. Arguably, the focus not just on self-conscious song (music as music), but also on the self-conscious awareness of singers (as both individual and type) allowed the Orphic concept of operatic singing to move beyond narrative, to become situated in the institution of the opera house itself. Let me explain.

Histories of singers have tracked, somewhat mournfully, ways in which bygone eras took the individuality of voice for granted: composers such as Verdi wrote only for particular singers; finalised the score only in collaboration during rehearsals; and even in relation to existing repertoire, opera houses still employed composers to alter the vocal parts to suit individual voices. This emphasis on the individuality of voice (and thorough mining of Verdi’s letters has emphasised just how seriously he took the individual qualities of the voices for which he wrote) would seem to contradict the ways in which the fairly rigid vocal types (the Fach system still in practice today) was coming into force in the mid-nineteenth century, and being made stronger by the (largely economics-driven) turn to repertory opera. In Verdi’s popular trilogy, for instance, whereas our histories have tended to emphasise the emergence of new vocal characters (vocally and dramatically) that defied conventions – Rigoletto, Azucena, even Violetta – ironically most of the characters in these popular operas actually serve to lock in dramatic/vocal stereotypes, as in Trovatore’s soprano/tenor/baritone love triangle. Thus, the seeming conundrum: that the complete individuality of voices is taken for granted even while we can observe an increasing emphasis on linking roles to increasingly strictly defined vocal types. What I am suggesting here, then, is that in the context of an opera such as Trovatore, the collision between voice and character as singer (within the story) and as vocal type (outside the story) helped exploit a sort of hyper-awareness of voice as voice. In other words, the explicit focus on singing about singing linked simultaneously to dramatic character as singer/vocal type, thereby allowing a focus on voice type to create the same kind of slippage of significance between vocality and voice both internal and external to the story as occurs in Orphic singing qua singing. In Trovatore, in addition to marking singer and voice within the story, the vocal role is also enacted both within the operatic work and simultaneously on the audience as a sign of signification that reaches beyond the fourth wall, so that awareness of voice is simultaneously individual and specific (to a particular singer’s voice and body, to a particular moment of performance) and abstracted (as an instance, increasingly, of a vocal ‘type’, which can sharpen the spectators’ own awareness of the voice, in the moment, as an instance of a type, and in relation to personal memories of voices previously heard in the role).Footnote ³ Thus, the role of the vocal type actually works to make the notion of voice qua voice and music qua music part of opera itself. And this creation of a musical hyper-awareness allows the spectator to create from past and present experience multiple levels of emotional engagement, to become an active participant in the creation of the experience.Footnote ⁴

In my formulation, this transition represents a historic transformation in the history of opera, from Orpheus (stories that connect us to the idea that the musical moment is about music) to Opera (so that voice, through operatic singers as types, evokes the power of music to link operatic narrative and discourse directly to the audience). Just as the notion of the singer singing a song – the Orpheus story – allows us to understand the role of music in the story and to foster at the same time our response to the music outside of the story, so now the operatic aria collapses the distance between the abstraction of the vocal type and actual, physical experience of individual voices, allowing us to experience the particular singer/operatic aria and narrative simultaneously as about music and singing itself.

Leonora’s Act I aria, ‘Tacea la notte’, offers a case in point. Within the story, it is a song about the memory of song, specifically Leonora’s memory of the troubadour’s serenade. For the spectator, the aria simultaneously enacts our own memory of songs, both through the musical conventions invoked by text and musical form (i.e., of other sopranos singing similar ‘lonely soprano’ arias) and through the familiarity of the aria itself (personal memories of other prima donnas singing ‘Tacea la notte’). The aria thereby telescopes various forms of vocal memory for the spectator (and all the emotional engagement that entails) into an aria that is also, within the story, about the power of the memory of voice. At the same time, in live performance, our memories interact powerfully with our experience of a particular singer’s voice and body in the moment. So, as Leonora performs her memory of Manrico’s voice through her singing, we remember other voices, our own memories of (operatic/soprano) voices are invoked; and it is at the moment in which the words highlight Leonora’s memory of Manrico’s voice (at the end of the first stanza: ‘Dolci s’udiro e flebili / Gli accordi d’un liuto, / E versi melanconici / Un Trovator cantò’) that the vocality of the moment is itself most powerfully unleashed–and, arguably, the spectator’s own present experience and past memories also engage. At this moment voice is the story; the retreat into pure vocality is simultaneously the point of the story; it is both the evocation of the past and the engagement with the present. And if it explicitly focuses our awareness on listening to voice, it also establishes Leonora as having a kind of ultimate ‘voice-over’: the actual, embodied voice in front of us simultaneously invoking the acousmêtre – the disembodied/absent voice.

Strikingly, as the musical material that follows Leonora’s aria demonstrates, in Trovatore it is not only these instances in which song is explicitly invoked that the experience of the vocal type (as invoking our memories of voices) is activated. Immediately following Leonora’s aria, Manrico enacts the disembodied, offstage voice in his Serenade; but that enactment is arguably less complex than Leonora’s evocation of voice and the memory of voice, because it does not build up as many simultaneous layers of vocal experience. On the other hand, though, his vocal appearance ushers in a dramatic engagement between the operatic characters as a confrontation, fundamentally, between vocal types.Footnote ⁵ In this sense, then, the Act I trio is interesting for the way in which it can be understood as an extension of Leonora’s evocation of remembered voice: because only through understanding the vocal types, in the trio, do we understand the nature of the dramatic confrontation (the soprano and tenor together, the baritone as interlocutor/disrupter). Here, without any explicit reference to music or voice within the story, the vocal types set up the context for relating to voice as voice – simultaneously in the story and for the audience.

Crucially, in the final act, the same set of relationships and unfolding of vocal realities is repeated almost exactly: Leonora’s evocation of an aria about singing an aria (as Roger Parker has put it) precedes Manrico’s offstage voice; the dramatic engagement of characters as vocal types then ensues. Trovatore, I think, sets up a transition from Orpheus to Opera in such compelling ways because it continually and in a variety of ways enacts experiences of voices as types while simultaneously being an opera about voice and remembered voices.Footnote ⁶ Most crucially, it explicitly establishes an aspect of the experience of opera that we tend to take for granted today, against broad swathes of repertoire: namely the way that operatic moments, operatic arias, can escalate levels of experience, both within the operatic story and without, enacting powerfully on the individual spectator in ways that defy the reaches of the narrative itself.