Music’s love affair with language is an intense one – or rather, it ought to be. The old adages about the perfect marriage between music and text – “the words must serve the music,” “prima la musica, poi le parole,” etc. – reek of a certain outdated marital attitude. The relationship, at its best, has never been master-and-servant. It is a dynamic bond. The words and the music must put pressure on one another – they must be a little wary of one another,
and each recognize the other’s power, before they embrace.
Tag Archive: Verdi
On the Music of Giuseppe Verdi
Published September 19th, 2016
Originally published in The Yale Review, 2013
The English composer Thomas Adès, in his book Full of Noises, confesses – after incisive appraisals of composers ranging from Mahler to Janáček to Britten – that Verdi ‘‘is very difficult for me.’’ At first, he seems merely dismissive: he mentions Verdi while discussing composers whose music just doesn’t work 99 percent of the time. But the 1 percent of Verdi’s music that does work evidently bothers him:
“For some reason this music [in this case Simon Boccanegra] won’t lie down and die . . . it still somehow has a kind of wriggling existence. . . . Everything about it is wrong. It could hardly be worse. Yet it has this strangely powerful effect if it’s done well. . . . I look at it in fascination, and I think: why is it that, despite everything, [Verdi] can make a single moment that is so incredibly strong? Because those moments are stronger than they would be if someone had planned it properly. These things suddenly leap out, like a knife out of the canvas.”