Born on October 9 or 10, 1813, Le Roncole, Italy; died on January 27, 1901, in Milan
Overture to La forza del destino
Composed: 1869
Estimated length: 8 minutes
First performance: February 27, 1869, with Eugenio Terziani conducting the orchestra of La Scala in Milan.
First Nashville Symphony performance: October 24, 1960, with Willis Page conducting at War Memorial Auditorium.
In 1861, at the top of his game and celebrity, Giuseppe Verdi was already contemplating retirement but could not resist taking up the commission by the Imperial Theater of St. Petersburg to write a grand opera of his choice. Eventually, he settled on a decades-old, hyper-Romantic play by the Spanish poet and playwright Ángel de Saavedra, Duke of Rivas, from which his longtime librettist Francesco Maria Piave crafted the text for his grand opera, La forza del destino (“The Power of Fate”), weaving in a little material from the German writer Friedrich Schiller.
Set in the mid-18th century, the intensely dramatic story centers around the consequences of the ill-fated love between Leonora, daughter of an influential and wealthy family in Seville, and the mixed-race Don Alvaro. Their relationship is opposed by Leonora’s father, whose accidental death occurs when he tries to prevent their elopement. The lovers become separated, while Leonora’s brother Carlo vows to avenge his father’s death. Carlos relentlessly pursues Alvaro across a panoramic landscape of brutal warfare, eventually leading to a monastery retreat. Identities are confused along the way, and the unwavering obsession of Carlos dead ends in a tragic outcome for this cursed family.
Forza underwent a complicated revision process as Verdi introduced his grand opera to Western Europe and the New World over the following years. For its 1869 production in Milan, which included new libretto material, he replaced a brief prelude with the substantial overture that begins our program.
WHAT TO LISTEN FOR
It’s not surprising that the overture to the final revised version of Forza has become so well-known outside the opera house. Verdi distills the drama’s essence into this tensely gripping score. To convey the idea of “Fate”, he opens with three weighty, ominous chords on a single note (for brass and bassoons), which are then repeated. (Instead of the shift down in the “Fate” theme at the start of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Verdi keeps to one note here, hammering home the sense of no way out.) The repeated notes are filled in with an agitated string figure more closely associated with Leonora. Verdi ingeniously juxtaposes the unyielding tenacity of these ideas against several other themes—including a yearningly incandescent melody that crests like a wave (representing Leonora’s plea for spiritual peace). The story seems to tell itself in Verdi’s heated, forward-rushing music.
Scored for piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, two harps and strings
− Thomas May is the Nashville Symphony's program annotator.
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