Stiffelio

Opera in 3 acts by Giuseppe Verdi (1813 – 1901)

Libretto by Francesco Maria Piave based on the French play Le pasteur, ou L'évangile et le foyer by Émile Souvestre and Eugène Bourgeois, which had been translated into Italian by Gaetano Vestri as Stifellius.

First performed in Trieste on 16 November 1850.

This is a chance to hear an opera that Verdi he said he hoped would not be forgotten, an opera that Julian Budden declared worthy to stand beside the popular Rigoletto, Il trovatore and La traviata, the works that followed it, as the great achievements of Verdi's high noon. Those operas have long been repertory pieces; Stiffelio has been a discovery of our day. Verdi's sixteenth opera, it had its premiere in Trieste in 1850. He'd chosen unconventional subject matter: the marital plight of a Protestant pastor whose wife Lina has been unfaithful, and who finds it impossible to forgive her--until in the final scene, as he mounts the pulpit to preach, the Bible falls open at John 8, Christ and the woman taken in adultery: ‘He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone.' Stiffelio recites the text, and in a swelling C major cadence the congregation repeats his conclusion: ‘She is forgiven; God has said so.'

A married priest! A religious service on the operatic stage! The censor could not allow it. So Stiffelio became a ‘sectarian'. Lina's desperate plea ‘Ministro, confessatemi' was changed to ‘Rodolfo, ascoltatemi'. The church became a meeting-hall. Stiffelio 's text was replaced by generalities about forgiving one's enemies. For the few revivals elsewhere, Ricordi provided a new libretto, Guglielmo Wellingrode, its protagonist a 15 th -century German statesman minister. Then in 1857 Verdi himself refashioned Stiffelio as Aroldo— his new hero a Saxon knight, the setting ‘about 1200', three acts in a castle ‘near Kent' and the fourth on the banks of Loch Lomond. There was good new music in Aroldo, but Stiffelio is the better drama. Verdi ‘cannibalized' his 1850 score, and Stiffelio was lost until a copy-score turned up in the Naples Conservatory and made possible the first modern revival, in Parma in 1968.

It's an adventurous, ambitious work, one of the only two operas in which Verdi used a contemporary setting (the other being La traviata). For the first time he began a work not with the traditional coro d'introduzione, but with a bass arioso promising a drama of unusual profundity and power. The promise is fulfilled. Only one aria, sung by Lina's old-school aristocratic father, is in conventional form. Stiffelio, one of five roles that Verdi composed for Gaetano Fraschini, is a tenor hero realized with an urgency and insight unmatched before Otello.

© Andrew Porter


Close this window...