BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
Catch up on your Verdi this August 14 when the Tasmanian Youth Orchestra brings prestigious baritone Warwick Fyfe to the state. Together, they’ll present music from six of Verdi’s masterpieces (yep, six) and will sneak in some works from Mozart and Wagner, too.
Warwick is a Helpmann/Green Room/Leopold Julian Kronenberg Foundation Award-winning singer who has toured pretty much everywhere. The world simply can’t get enough of him, which is why he was also awarded a 2015 Churchill Fellowship to study Wagnerian vocal technique in Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States.
But even though he’s advanced his own career with great success, Warwick is an advocate of music education and keen for any chance to give back to the next generation. That’s why we’re getting him to teach us five things about Verdi before he sings the masterworks in Hobart – accompanied by the finest young musicians in the state. Expect: La Traviata, Nabucco, Rigoletto, Otello, Sicilian Vespers, and Falstaff.
1. Rival…or admirer?
Even though they were the greatest composers of their respective countries in that era, Verdi and Wagner were, in a sense, rivals and certainly separated an aesthetic ideological divide. Verdi secretly admired Wagner and was spotted at Bologna train station attempting to be inconspicuous, having attended a performance of Wagner’s Lohengrin.
2. Musical references (maybe)
The tune to which Rigoletto sings Della vendetta alfin giunge l’istante towards the end of the opera is the same as that which constitutes the main theme, describing the outline of a mountainous landscape, in Richard Strauss’s Alpensinfonie. Mind you, when I pointed this out to an expert at the Strauss Institut in the Bavarian Alps, he was reluctant to accept it was a quotation, preferring to see it as a ‘trope’ – in other words, a chance resemblance.
3. He loved Shakespeare
One of the most famous passages in Otello, lago’s Credo, has no correlation with anything in the Shakespearean original, Othello. Verdi adored Shakespeare and kept his works by his bedside. He had plans for an opera based on King Lear but it never happened.
4. His comedy flopped because of a tragedy
Another of Verdi’s Shakespearean operas is his final masterpiece Falstaff, the plot for which is drawn from several of the Bard’s plays. It is a glorious comedy and a musical jewel box! His other comedy Un Giorno di Regno comes from the other end of his career, being only his second opera. It was a flop, which is perhaps not surprising when one considers that his wife and children had just died when he produced it!
5. He gave refunds
After the premiere of Aida, Verdi received a letter of complaint from a punter who’d travelled a long way at the cost of great effort to see it and then hadn’t enjoyed it at all. The unhappy correspondent demanded reimbursement – and Verdi coughed up! – only deducting one of the items on the ‘invoice’: an execrable meal at a train station, for which he did not feel he could reasonably be held responsible.
Under the baton of Jamie Allen, the Tasmanian Youth Orchestra will present Viva Verdi! with special guest Warwick Fyfe at 2pm, August 14 in the Hobart Town Hall. Tickets from tyo.org.au.
This story also appeared in the August issue of Warp Magazine.
Images supplied. TYO image credit Michelle Kilpatrick.
