Puccini Wagner Rossini

A nice overview, which perhaps can serve as an introduction for you, can be found here

http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/la-magia-nel-teatro-romantico-0/html/01dcf69c-82b2-11df-acc7-002185ce6064_4.html

It seems like a great topic to me, I am interested too

The theme of Magic seems to me to pervade the scenes during the most musically evolved moments of the drama. Certainly in Wagner.

So from a layman's perspective

First consideration: strange choice of works, if one wants to talk about magic. I would be curious to know if it is a university exam, who the professor is and the university.

Let's get into specifics, even if briefly.

There is no magic in "La Cenerentola" and no magic in "Turandot"... the role of the fairy in Rossini's Cenerentola is, as is well known, taken from Alidoro, who is a philosopher or, rather, the master-counselor to Don Ramiro. Although it is an opera buffa, La Cenerentola is very close to semi-seria opera, of which the most blatant example is La Gazza Ladra, which will also be performed in 1817 but in May (Cenerentola in January). Despite being an opera with a very happy ending (goodness triumphs...), inside there are some "bourgeois" considerations and magic cannot be admitted (besides, I do not know of any Rossini operas in which there is magic...). Before the great Romantic era, magic is present mainly in serious operas, as a topos for sorcerous arias or for scenographic machines. Despite this, there is a small moment in the opera where something "unjustified" happens... in the second act, as usual, there is a storm, and because of this storm Don Ramiro's carriage stops right in front of Don Magnifico's house. Who caused this storm? I would say more fate than the hypothetical magic of Alidoro...

"Turandot" and magic... nowhere to be found. Nothing explicit, at least. There is the scene where Calaf hears the voices of the severed heads, but it could very well all be in his head. We might think that Princess Turandot's charm is otherworldly, perhaps a consequence of a sort of curse cast upon foreign princes, but these are all useless conjectures. From what I know, even the original novella by Carlo Gozzi from which the plot is taken does not speak of magic... therefore, an entirely incomprehensible choice.

"Lohengrin" is the only one of these works in which there is endless magic. More or less we can divide "Christian" magic from "pagan" magic; after all, Lohengrin is taken from the medieval German novel "Parzival" by Wolfram von Eschenbach... Lohengrin does not administer magic but is under the influence of a greater enchantment, that of Monsalvat, the homeland of the Grail knights, which does not allow him to reveal his own identity. Ortrud, on the other hand, is a true witch, who even transformed Elsa's brother into a swan. Any webpage will reveal to you the various Leitmotive dedicated to magic in this work; anyway, Wagner's entire creative trajectory is full of magical themes.

thallo wrote:

Before the great Romantic era, magic is present mainly in opera seria, as a topos for sorcerous arias or for scenic machines. Despite this, there is a small moment in the opera where something "unjustified" happens...

As far as Turandot is concerned, isn't the subject inspired by Carlo Gozzi's eighteenth-century fairy tale? Aren't there exactly "magical" moments there where something "unjustified" happens?

thallo wrote:

From what I know, not even the original novella by Carlo Gozzi from which the plot is taken speaks of magic... therefore, a completely incomprehensible choice.

I have "re-quoted" myself. On Wikipedia, I found the plot of Gozzi's Turandot and there don't seem to be any magical elements. That being said, if we are talking about Puccini's Turandot, there is no doubt: no magic.

Moreover, I have also thought about potential other connections between the three works and I cannot find any... Puccini loved Wagner, and in Turandot there are citations from Tristan und Isolde, which, by the way, is one of Wagner's most "magical" operas. I really don't understand why choosing Lohengrin to talk about magic, unless they want to show the "archaic" sides of magic in Wagner. Ortrud is a character very close to Kaspar from Weber's "Freischütz", a pagan magic, precisely, not the typical medieval mystical magic...

The same dismay regarding La Cenerentola. No connection with Puccini, let alone with Wagner. We are talking, moreover, about one of the symbols of the Rossini-renaissance, an opera practically never performed until the mid-1900s...

I agree 100% with every word of Thallo!

thallo wrote:

First consideration: strange choice of works, if one wants to talk about magic. I would be curious to know if it is a university exam, who the professor is and the university.

I have the same curiosity

Thank you all for the answers.

It is a conservatory exam "analysis of forms". I don't know for what reason the professor chose these three works, perhaps because they are all inspired by fairy tales.

Thanks a lot again

Alessandra wrote:

It is a conservatory exam called "analysis of forms". I don't know for what reason the professor chose these three works, perhaps because they are all inspired by fairy tales.

Most likely, the fairy tales have nothing to do with it. If the exam is "Analysis of Forms," I would have another explanation and, consequently, a suggestion on the work to be done. The work itself is not a form, but the arias and scenes that constitute it have modified their formal structure over time. Those chosen by your teacher are three works that could be emblematic (even if I would have chosen different ones): Rossini presents the classic construction of scenes that we will observe until almost all of Verdi, while both Puccini and Wagner, in the two chosen works, begin to clearly detach from this pattern, with results that perhaps it is worth highlighting. I therefore suggest you minimize the discussion of the plots, as that is not what matters (and besides, given the type of exam, it was to be expected) and perhaps perform an analysis of three significant scenes, one for each work, to see how they are treated from a formal point of view.

Agreed with Carlos, in an ideal world. But I always fear that conservatory professors might suddenly decide that the plot of an opera is its most fundamental thing... music history professors have been doing this for decades, alas...