Verdi’s Dramatic Use of Tonality, Topics, and Recurring Themes

Abstract

This chapter examines recurring musical themes, tonality, and musical topics in Verdi’s La traviata (1853) and Don Carlos (1867). It argues that both operas draw upon cultural codes to establish oppositions that propel their dramatic and musical narratives. In Don Carlos, the dramatic opposition of reality versus ideality unfolds within Elisabeth’s aria at the beginning of the final act. This is supplemented and reinforced with recurring themes that, while work-specific, gain much of their meaning as conventionalized musical topics. In La traviata, the dramatic opposition of love versus death unfolds as a foreground musical opposition contained within a single recurring theme, but also as a larger-scale tonal opposition that arises between the first and last acts of the opera. The goal of this chapter is to demonstrate the applicability of contextually based analytical models to Verdi’s operas, while also providing further evidence in support of his compositional and dramatic techniques.

Here for the Hearing

“…works cited Atkinson, Brooks. 1950 Lawton (1982), Stephen Huebner (2004), Edward Latham (2008), and David Easley (2020. In musicals, the association of characters with particular keys or harmonic patterns has been explored by Trudi Wright (2020), Nathan Blustein (this volume), and Michael Buchler (this volume), and the association of characters with particular musical styles has been considered by Paul Laird (2011), Nina Penner (2020), and Elizabeth Sallinger (2016.…”