Ernani

Operatic drama lirico in 4 Acts by Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901)

First performed on 9th March 1844

Ernani was Verdi's fifth opera and was first produced in Venice in 1844. It was an immediate success. It is based on Victor Hugo's play Hernani and is set in Spain in 1519. The librettist was the young Venetian poet Francesco Maria Piave who was later to be the librettist for Macbeth , Rigoletto and La Traviata. If some of the humour and irony of the original is lost, Piave and Verdi together succeeded in achieving something very much greater. The plot concerns the love for Elvira of three men - Ernani (an outlawed nobleman), Silva (a grandee) and Don Carlos (King of Spain). Ernani appears to have won Elvira. But with their wedding about to take place he is obliged by a strict honour code to yield his life to Silva. He stabs himself in Elvira's arms.

The opera abounds in gloriously beautiful and singable melodies, but perhaps the most memorable feature is Verdi's earliest use of a primitive form of Leitmotiv, a device he has been mistakenly accused of having stolen from Wagner. The music associated with Ernani's hunting horn appears briefly in the prelude and with increasing effectiveness in Acts 2 and 4. If a comparison is to be made, it is surely not so much with Wagner as with the famous trumpet call from Beethoven's Fidelio .

The characters in Ernani have been derided as being unsubtle and one-dimensional, but they were sufficient to encourage Verdi to depict them in his most vivid musical colours, with an undoubted advance on the vocal characteristics of his earlier operas. The theatrical effectiveness of the score is what matters: it had an overwhelming effect on its audiences in Verdi's day, and in particular on one of the opera's most distinguished admirers. This was none other than George Bernard Shaw, who was captivated by what he called the “fierce noon-day sun” of the score, by Verdi's characterization of the King as “Concise, elegant, and touching”, and above all by the cumulative effect of Act 3. “Finely done!” said G.B.S., and superior to “all the Mephistopheleses and Toreadors that ever swaggered!”

It is not without interest that the plot of Ernani closely follows Shaw's generic definition of an opera plot as being about a tenor and a soprano who want to make love, but are prevented from doing so by a baritone. The inclusion of a bass in this work gives Verdi the ability to stretch this formula to dramatic effect.

Based on a programme note by Ian Martin for COG's 1990 performance of the opera