Conventions of Prayer

Conventions of Prayer in Some 19th-Century Operas
Author(s): Rodney Stenning Edgecombe

Source: The Musical Times, Vol. 146, No. 1893 (Winter, 2005), pp. 45-60
Published by: Musical Times Publications Ltd.
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RODNEY
STENNING
EDGECOMBE
Conventions of prayerin some 19th-century

operas
THIS ESSAY,I propose to look at the way in which liturgical forms have
been accommodated on the lyric stage of the i9th century, and also at
the musical and textual conventions that have developed in tandem
with them. I shall base my typology of these forms on classical rather than
Christian models so as to admit some neo-classical preghiereinto my study,
and also to addressthose pagan forms of prayer that persisted on the stage of
theprimo ottocento.One must bear in mind that there is often only a nominal
difference between classical and Christianprayer,given the fact that both are
predicated on archetypal human postures, and also given the fact that the
primitive church made wholesale adaptationsof Roman liturgical practices.
Those practices were categorised in terms roughly similar to their
Catholic avatars, even though, to an extent more marked than in their successors, they were differentiatedby degrees of intimacy and gravitas. Preces
related chiefly to private entreaty,whether with a deity or a powerful person.
(We will recognise in this a recurrentsituation of theprimoottocento,namely,
a heroine in extremisappealing either to a deity or to a tyrannical baritone.)
Precationes,on the other hand, associated as they were with ceremonies of the
comitia, emerged from the public adaptation of preces, the sort of pious
communal prayer that operatic composers invoke to image a society at peace
with itself, as at the start of Linda di Chamounixor Cavalleriarusticana.
Deprecationes,by contrast, were more tendentious and purposeful - prayers
designed to ward off evil and, to that extent, a verbal form of apotropaic
sacrifice. (These have an operatic history that stretches as far back at least
as Gluck's Iphignie en Taurideand as far forward as Verdi's Otello.) And if
they succeeded, they led, naturally enough, to festivals of thanksgiving or
gratulationes,of which we find a private example inLaforga deldestino('Sono
giunta! Grazie, o Dio') as well as such grateful tributes to Isis in Act II, scene
2 of Aida. The standard Christian vehicle for public gratulation was the Te
Deum, which figures inpropriapersona(so to speak) at the start of Lajuive.
took form as solemn public prayers offered up by the people,
Obsecrationes
who invoked the gods as witness to the covenant, while obtestationesreferred
to even more solemn versions of the same enterprise, such as Sinon's treacherous invocation of 'eternal fires' when the Trojans undo his fetters in the
Aeneid. The operatic locus classicusfor this kind of prayer is doubtless the
'Conjuration of the nobles' in Meyerbeer's Huguenots, while a 'chamber'
IN
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Conventions of prayer in some zith-century operas
version of an obstestatiocan also be found in Act 2 duet between hero and

villain from Verdi's Otello, 'Si pel ciel'. There is little (if anything) to
distinguish Roman intercessory prayers - supplicia - from preces and
precationes,but the closely related activities of blessing and cursing - both
specialised intercessory prayers - figured as benedictionesand exsecrationes
respectively. Benedictio,despite its being a late Latin term, would cover all
those invocations of divine protection and advancement that must have
existed at the very birth of the Republic, as witness the blessing that Aeneas
calls down on himself in Book 8 of Virgil's poem:
O FatherTiber,with thy hallowedflood,
Taketo your careAeneasandat length
Fromperilsfend him.'
That happens to be a private version of an utterance that could just as easily

adapt itself to public occasions and to social groups instead of individuals.
So, while the Marquisof Calatravaadministers a 'chamber'blessing to Leonora at the start of La forja del destino, Tchaikovsky's Joan of Arc encompasses the entire French nation in her hymn 'Tsar vishnikh sil' in Act i
of OrleanskayaDyeva.
The same distinction of scale holds true with regard to the exsecratio.
Horace's Tenth Epode representsa private kind of cursing, advanced half in
jest:
Under evil omen the ship sets sail, bearing unsavoury Mevius. With fearful waves, O
Auster, remember to lash both her sides! Let lowering Eurus scatter sheet and broken oars
on upturned sea! Let Aquilo arise in all the fury with which he rends the quivering oaks on
lofty mountain-tops!2
while his Sixteenth Epode, a solemn reflection on civil war, visits its execration on a whole segment of the populace: 'Let the weak and hopeless
remnant rest on their ill-fated couches!'3
Both those utterances can be heard echoing through the libretti of Scribe,
as when Nelusko recalls the Schadenfreude of Epode o10
in the Adamastor
ballade of L'Africaine,and as when, in Les Huguenots,Saint Bris calls down a
curse upon the enemies of state and church:
I. Virgil: Thepoems
of Virgil, trans. James
Rhoades (London: Oxford
University Press, 1921),
p.I8I.
2. Horace: Odes and
epodes, trans. CE Bennett
(London: William
Heinemann, 1968),
P-3933. ibid., p.41i.
Eh bien!du Dieu qui nous protege

le glaive menagantest sur eux suspendu:
des huguenotsla racesacrilege
aurades ajourd'huipourjamaisdisparu!
In this blessing of the daggers from Les Huguenots, the maledictio and
benedictiocome face to face to form a queasy compound. Meyerbeer and the
anti-clerical Scribe, located outside the Church, are able to bring a coldly
disengaged eye to its repeated failures of charity. For the exsecratioyielded
easily enough to the comminatio,or 'Christian' malediction, an adaptation
of which ceremony can be found earlier versions of the Book of Common

Prayer. Its preface regretfully records the fact that it had fallen into disuse in
the modern era:
Insteadwhereof, (until the said disciplinemay be restored again, which is much to be
wished,) it is thought good, that at this time (in presence of you all) should be read the
general sentences of GOD's cursing against impenitent sinners, gathered out of the seven
and twentieth Chapter of Deuteronomy [.]4
Thus does the avowedly 'tolerant' Church of England continue 'a form of
anathemaagainst sins of various kinds, which was to be read out solemnly in
church twice or thrice in the year, with tolling of bells and extinction of lights
at the pronouncement of the sentence of cursing.'5 No great distance between the vindictive relish of public denunciation and such operatic scenes as
the self-cursing of Paolo in the 1881 revision of Simon Boccanegra,nor indeed between that and the public curse that Alberich sets upon the ring in Das
Rheingold, and (in rather more private circumstances) on love itself. Even
that very specialised kind of Roman curse, the defixio that dedicated 'the
victim to the deities of the underworld',6 figures vestigially, in the coda to
Don Giovanni, where the soi-disant 'virtuous' consign the libertine to
'Proserpina e Pluton'.
Sermons, while they are not properly prayers, have sufficient relevance to
qualify for admission to an essay of this nature. Although they have no
analogue in the cultusof ancient Rome, I would imagine that the orationesin
the Senate often took the form of secular sermons (as indeed the etymon for
sermon', the Latin word for 'discourse', attests). Falstaff's discourse on
honour is a kind of mock-sermon, and it has the kind of cumulative design
and swelling climax that Verdi lavishes on the (comparatively) conventional
sermon in Stiffelio. And there exists a whole class of hortatory ariastypified
by Zaccaria's 'D'Egitto 1a sui lidi' in Nabucco. Even the final scene of Don
Giovannican be read a statuesque sermon-cum-litany with secular, defiant
4. John Henry Blunt, ed.:

The annotated Book of
CommonPrayer, being
an historical, ritual, and
theological commentary
on the devotional system
of the Churchof England
(London: Rivingtons,
I89o), p.49.
responses
5. George Harford,Morley
Stevenson& J. W. Tyrer,
edd.: The Prayer Book
dictionary (London: Isaac
Pitman, 1912), p.222.
6. Ugo Enrico Paoli: Rome:

its people, life and customs,
trans. RD Macnaghten
(London: Longmans,
1963), p.285.
to the versicles
of repentance,
and an enacted parable of
judgement to top it all.

Even if the sermon finds no echo in the ritual nature of pagan religion, its
other liturgical forms quickly found their way into the cultus and liturgy of
the early church, and thence into Europeanculture in general, and its operatic
stages in particular. Even so, Christianity brought its own characteristic
emphases to the enterprise of prayer, for the drama of the individual's
salvation tended, if not to marginalise public supplication, then at least to inflect it with private emotion - a tendency carried further still when some
Protestant sects dispensed with religious formalism altogether. So much,
then, for the general landscape. Now let us 'try these truthswith closer eyes,/
And trace them through the prospect as it lies'.
As we try to bring taxonomic order to the various modes of prayer and the
musical procedures they have evoked from composers, we need first of all to
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Conventionsof prayerin some zgth-centuryoperas

establish two oppositional axes - privacy and publicity - to plot the
differentiaeof the forms, for there can be no escaping the major generic
divide between preces of private emotion, and the more social kinds of
prayer representing national or civic aspiration. In operatic terms, this
translates into a distinction between meditatively prayerful arias and
ensemble prayers. As Byron reminds us in Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice,
'Some sacrifices ask'd a single victim,/Great expiations had a hecatomb',7a
distinction in scale that finds its operatic analogue, for example, in Maria
Stuarda's solo 'O nube che lieve' (her loneliness and desolation privately
revealed by the prayer she utters to a passing cloud), which contrasts with a
grand concertato ('Deh! Tu di un'umile preghiera') that registers the impact
of her pending death through the use of the chorus. For, like its counterpart
in Greek tragedy, the chorus of the primo ottocentofunctions as a stylised
social voice, and opens out, as it were in concentric circles, many moments
of otherwise personal anguish or joy. In some instances ('Casta diva', for
example), this outward amplification is made in an explicitly liturgical way.
Such Christian prayer forms as the litany, with its chain of versicle and
response, or - to put it differently - of priestly propositions and congregational assent, might well lie behind these choral developments. Indeed one of
the oldest musical utterances (the sursumcordaembedded in the heart of the
Tridentine Mass) turned on just this play between an initiating solo voice and
a collective assent. And if priests had this mediatorial function in times of
peace, this office will amplify its importance in times of crisis. The operatic
deprecatio,therefore, often comes packaged with a priestly intercessor.
RISORGIMENTO composers such as Verdi were quick to realise that
collective prayer could be fashioned into a vehicle for nationalist
sentiment, and that the deprecatio, because it acknowledged an
imminent threat to fatherlandor city or nation, also turned on the sense of a
people united by crisis. As the Bastardremindsus at the end of Shakespeare's
KingJohn, a nation linked up in resistantunity is invulnerable to oppression:
Come the threecornersof the world in arms
And we shallshock them!Nought shallmakeus rue
If Englandto itself do restbut true!(Act 5, scene 7, lines 112-18)
7. Charles Gordon, Lord

Byron: Thepoetical works
of Lord Byron reprinted
from the original editions,
with life, explanatory notes,
& c. (London: Frederick
Warne, no date), p.359.
One finds such an advent from a corner of the world at the start of Nabucco,
and although the Hebrews' responsive 'shock' is long in coming, it does
eventually arrivein form of Zaccaria'sprophecy. (Zaccaria,we should recall,
has the priestly/prophetic office on which the sursumcordabases itself).
However the Jews' choric defiance makes itself felt only in the 'profezia' of
Act 3, where, at Zaccaria'sprompting, they rejoice in the fact that 'niuna
pietra ove sorse l'altera/Babilonia allo stranio dira'.

Act I of Nabuccostrikesa different note - a note of desperate entreaty that

Verdi canalises through its standardvehicular prayer, viz., the deprecatio.We
get a sense of the anxieties attendant upon the form from Julian Budden's
commentary:
Verdi's Gli arredi festivi gid cadano infranti has the character of a storm chorus with
rushingscales,shriekingwind andbrass,andanabundanceof diminishedsevenths.(Its [...]

parentwould seem to be the opening scene of Bellini'sIlPirata [1827]- where, incidentally,thereis also a hermitto soothe the people!).
8. JulianBudden:
The operasof Verdi,
3 vols (London:Cassell,
1973-81), vol.i, p.98.
9. RobertGraves:
The Greekmyths,
2 vols (1955;rev.andrpt.
Harmondsworth:Penguin,
i960), vol.i, p.43.
Io. JohnRosselli:Thelife
of Bellini (Cambridge:
CambridgeUniversity
Press, 1996), p.i35-36.
The stormy characteristicsthat Budden detects here are, of course, as old as

religion itself. The invasive Hellene gods stormed over the autocthonous
penisular ones in more ways than one- 'They ranked Zeus and Poseidon as
immortals; picturing both as armed with a thunderbolt'9 - and the tribal
Yahweh also had his judgemental light show: 'Hear attentively the noise of
his voice and the sound that goeth out of his mouth. He directeth it under the
whole heaven, and his lightning unto the ends of the earth' (Job 37, vv.2-3).
If storms are thus viewed as images of divine wrath and power, placation
must be the best way to handle them. Hence the deprecatiothatbegins Gluck's
Iphige'nieen Tauride('Grands Dieux! soyez-nous secourables!') and the ensemble near the start of Devienne's Les Visitandines,where the storm that
has raged for most of the overture spills into the body of the opera proper,
prompting the nuns to cry (in the 'thy-will-be-done-but-please-don't-do-it'
way typical of deprecatoryprayer) 'Grand Dieu, votre bont6 se lasse/Que
votre volonte se fasse,/Mais epargnez notre couvent'. An inversion of this
storm-of-judgement motif can be observed in the prayer for Admete's salvation in Alceste, where, against the entreaties of the High Priest, the demisemiquaver flurries of lightning now represent a begged-for e'claircissement
- a 'rayon clatant' that will pierce the 'voile affreux' - and signify that the
deprecatiohas secured its end. But whatever the changes rung on the Sturm
und Drang vocabulary, this particular prayer form is often musically
continuous with its cause. Thus Verdi renders Nabucco's advance on the
temple with traditional storm effects precisely because Solera calls him a
'Ministro dell'ira del Nume sdegnato'.
To appreciate the intensity associated with such quasi-political deprecationesas 'Gli arredi',we can invoke the blander public prayer at the start of
Ipuritani. As John Rosselli points out, Bellini's librettist had tried to feed
some revolutionary content into the opera, but the composer did all he could
to neutralise his nationalism:
He proposeda hymn to liberty,to follow the opening chorus.Bellinipointedout thatyou
could not have two martialchorusesin a row, spoke of moving the hymn to a laterscene,
and in the end, when he needed to give the two basses more to do, turned it into the cabaletta
to the duet 'II rival salvar tu di';'0
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In fact, we can witness Bellini's express separationof prayer from social crisis
in the way he handles the opening chorale. Three strokes of a bell (perhaps
a Trinitariangesture) alternate with a sedate 3/4, a minuet in all but name.
This assimilation of antique dance to prayer would seem to serve a dual
purpose, suggesting both otherness and temporal distance. Mendelssohn's St
Paul likewise contains a minuet preghiera for Lystrans who mistake the
apostles for gods. He projects their obeisances through the prolonged dip of
a major second (the interval that Verdi also used in Mistress Quickly's
'Reverenza') to evoke the courtliness (and obsolescence) of the ancienregime
- and of course an ancien regime about to be eclipsed by a new religion.
Against the wheedling, facile grace of the minuet, he sets a Lutheranchorale.
No graceful dips and courtesies in its deportment, but rather the unbending
austerity of the primitive church.
Mendelssohn's conscription of a danse antiqueto image historical relegation seems in turn to have influenced the presentation of the heathen
prayer in Johann Joseph Abert's Ekkehard,where the pagan rituals of the
Heidenstein register in a minuet startlingly at odds with the values of the
Waldfrau,and the principles of blood sacrifice she embraces ('Nun segne mit
Blut/den neuen Tag der Sonnenwende'). By rendering the prayers of the
Wotan-worshippers through an obsolete dance, Abert attempts, like
Mendelssohn before him, to convey the idea of a religion about to go under.
Although its attenuated lyric grace works against any sense of barbarism,
that is a price he seems prepared to pay for the sake of a subtler thematic
point. Furthermore, since the scene in question replicates the prayer contest
between Elijah and the pagan prophets in Mendelssohn's other oratorio,
where a gigue-like invocation to Baal gives way to a ferocious allegro prophecy of violence ('Is not his word like a fire?'), Abert renders his pagan occlusion by ending the scene with a march, that vector of Christianmilitancy
that would lead Gounod to represent even the crucifixion (of all things) as a
'Marchto Calvary' (Redemption).
Meyerbeerprovides an interesting take on this conventional opposition of
pagan grace and dour Christian militarismin the third act of Les Huguenots,
which contains a melomachia(melodic battle) between the Marianlitany - a
gracious 9/8 melody that also, like the prayer from St Paul, incorporates a
genuflecting major second - and the iconoclastic Huguenot chorus. The
alienation and continuity of these theological worlds registers in the way the
litany floats toward their shared tonic centre (Br) from the realm of the
flattened submediant, image of its removed-but-cognate relationship with
the rataplanmarch. Clearly each is made for the other, and when (as so often
is the case with melodies and counter-melodies that receive a separate, sequential exposition) they come together, we have a sense of their congruence
that, here at least, carries some ideological weight. Meyerbeer detachedly

II.
ibid., p.138.
12. William Blake:

The completepoems, ed.
WH Stevenson (I97I; rpt.
London: Longman, 1989),
p.IIo.
surveys Christian factionalism, and perceives the common denominator

between its warring sects.
But let us return to the minuet prayer in Ipuritani. At its first statement,
Bellini's chorale moves decorously and stolidly between primary triads, but,
after another bell-struck interlude, it comes back on vi, and then steers a path
through a voluptuous dominant ninth and the secondary dominants of V and
ii. John Rosselli has written of the entire scene that the 'opening horn calls,
spaced out in changing measures, the rapt offstage prayer, the brilliant
martial chorus all evoke a climate of austerity and war'," and yet, unlike
Mendelssohn and Abert after him, Bellini recoils from the bleak, foursquare
tunes associated with early Protestantism ('feste Burgen' in every sense of
that phrase). The austerity that Rosselli detects here is entirely relative, for,
having once made an emblematicgesture in the direction of Puritanrestraint,
the composer allows himself more ample harmonic resources than the
stripped-down, demelismated idiom of Calvinist worship would ordinarily
allow. The same holds true of the evanescent triplets at the end of the scena
(which Bizet would rememberwhen he came to depict the smoke of the cigarette girls in Carmen).Bellini clearly had a mental image of circling incense
fumes - fumes that in real Puritanical nostrils would have registered as
stench. Also, by having Elvira's voice ride the ensemble with a descant even
before her entry, Bellini projects an innocent piety (inviting his audience to
correlate her with the sexless purity of such descants as that of the Allegri
'Miserere'). The suave nature of this chorale shows that Bellini avoided the
urgency and crisis more usually associated with Risorgimentoprayers, and
chose, through this sereneprecatio,to render a sect at its devotions and not a
nation in danger.
Nothing, therefore, could be further removed from his idyll than the
chorus at the start of Nabucco.Here we have a nation in turmoil, and projecting the Babylonian invasion as a divine judgement aligned (through its
musical idiom) with the more conventional vectors of thunder and lightning.
Since, according to William Blake, 'Damn braces. Bless relaxes'," we could
connect the deprecatio(which wards off evil) and theprecatio (which invites
good) with two other favoured modes of operatic prayer, viz., malediction
and benediction. After all, deprecatiois nothing more than a human response
to divine malediction, and will manifest those musical symptoms of Angst
and disruption- diminished sevenths and the like - that make for the tension
and torsion of Blake's bracing 'damn'. These two forms draw alongside each
other in Cherubini'sMedee when the sorceress asks Jove to mark the cruelty
of the king - a veiled malediction - while Creon and chorus seek to reverse
the thrust of her entreaty in a massed deprecatio,its chromatic cresting and
subsidence imaging a prayer at once raised and pulled back from heaven:
'Disperdi, o Giove tu, il presaggio suo feral'.
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13. WS Gilbert: The Savoy

operas, being the complete
text of the Gilbertand
Sullivan operas as originally
produced in theyears
z185-z 896 (London:
Macmillan, 1962), p.29.
In contrast with the above examples from Gluck and Devienne, who had
made the entreaty music continuous with a 'representation'of the deprecated
terror, 'Gli arredi' simply records the crisis. When it subsides, the Levites
issue liturgical instructions to 'temple virgins', who duly oblige. This
technique of incorporating liturgical rubrics into the actual act of prayer is
not unique to Solera, though it is seldom as formally demarcated and antiphonised as it is here. After all, many psalms and prophecies begin with
imperatives that they themselves obey, as when Isaiah sends a teller of good
tidings to Zion, and then ventriloquises the words to be uttered there. No
surprise, therefore, in the fact that the Levites (custodians of the temple
cultus) should, as it were, consult their instruction manuals and then assign
the deprecatioto virgins who have more to do with Spontini'sLa Vestalethan
with any recognisable Jewish practice. Such rubric choruses and arias form
a distinct sub-category in the literature of operatic prayer, as witness the
epithalamionfrom Lohengrin, which describes the rituals of the wedding
chamber ('Dufteneder Raum, sur Liebe geschmiickt,/nehm' euch nun auf,
dem Glanze entriickt'), and that in TheMikado,with its directives for nuptial
hair-dressing: 'Braid the raven hair -/Weave the supple tress- '.i3
However, as is not the case with these later 'rubric' choruses, concerned
though they might be with niceties of ritual, Verdi's Levites speak a recognisable liturgical dialect - that of the Lutheranchorale, which the composer
has already adumbrated in the proem to the overture. Possibly designed to
evoke an image of the non-Catholic 'other', it does homage to a tradition
very different from that of Palestrina - but it does homage none the less.
Which brings us to another important fact about choric prayer in the primo
ottocento,viz., that it is almost invariably couched in some sort of pastiche
idiom. We see this, for example, in the anabaptist chant from Le prophite,
which attracted Liszt just as powerfully as the authentic medieval materials
that figure in his compositions. For when it comes to communal prayer, at
least, composers for the Grand Operatic stage are more likely to craft
ecclesiastical pastiche, driven to this by the dictates of dramaticdecorum. If
you are representing the church as a sociological force, you will want its
representativesto speak something akin to its authentic voice, ratherthan to
modify it ad hoc. Verdi took care, for example, when writing the 'Miserere'
in Il trovatore,to play the monks' chant 'straight', its measured ecclesiastical
gait designed to offset the anguished convulsions of Leonora's line on the
one hand, and the heroic sangfroid of Manrico'swaltz on the other, an effect
that would hardly have been possible in the context of a monastic polka or a
valsetto such as the demons utter in Giovannad'Arco.
No such constraints apply to individual efforts of prayer, however. For
now, instead of the external - and, as it were, 'correct' idiom we find in many
choric supplications- the composer will now aim for inwardnessand ardour

14. Alexander Pope: The

poems of Alexander Pope:
a one-volume edition of
the Twickenhamtext with
selected annotations, ed.
John Butt (London:
Methuen, i965), p.593.
15. Budden: The operas of
Verdi,vol.I, p.Io3.
and even a touch of emotional de'shabille.Gounod might have delighted in

chaste horizontality of the music in St Peter's, and yet, when he wrote for the
unbuttoned ethos of the salon, he turned out religiose dance music, casting
his 'Nazareth', for example, as a 6/4 waltz. By the same token, while Meyerbeer might have aimed for an historically plausible sound for his Anabaptists
in the act of baptism, he suffered no 'historical' inhibitions when writing
prayers for the solo voice. And in this he was hardly breaking ground. In
18th-century oratorios, many 'prayerful' arias derived from contemporary
dance forms, as when Handel set a credal affirmation ('I know that my
redeemer liveth') as a minuet.
Hence, in the very opera that contains a studiously reproductive Anabaptist chant, Meyerbeer has Fides pray for her son ('Comme un clair') in
what might be termed either a peristaltic gigue or a rollicking barcarole. She
aspires, perhaps, to sublime lightning strikes in herfioriture,but she actually
sounds rather jaunty. And no crime in that. A whole withered grove of
Anglican chants and settings owes its desiccation to its distance from the
stage. Untroubled by that horror of vigorous melody that seems to have
beset the school of Stainer and Stanford, Meyerbeer occasionally wrote
preghierethat, centred on 'Light quirksof Musick,broken and uneven', made
'the soul dance upon a Jig to Heaven'.4 But sooner that than a stillborn,
sterile idiom that resolutely turns its back upon the cheerfulness of
popolaresco,and the enjoyable obviousness of the stage. Les Huguenotsmight
err a touch too far from the prissy niceties of Anglican church music when
Marcel is granted his vision of bliss to the strains of a polka, but it's worth
remarking how raptly prayerful some of Meyerbeer's secular moments can
be, not least Raoul's first-act aria, 'Plus blanche que la blanche hermine',
with its viola d'amore obbligato. Both Scribe's text, and the reverentially
hesitant melody that Meyerbeer crafted for it, project Valentine as a kind of
Virgin Mary ('Vierge immortelle'), an assimilationby no means foreign - as
the librettistwould have known - to courtly love and to the Petrarchismthat
followed on its heels. Verdi would remember this 'chamber' aria as something well suited topreghieraidiom when he wrote 'Tu sul labbro' in Nabucco.
There, too, solo stringed instruments enwreathe a sparely declaimed line. It
is at moments like these that Meyerbeer's notionally 'French' influence reinseminates the Italian idiom that went into its fashioning, for in the background of both pieces (as Julian Budden suggests'5) is the cello proem of the
GuillaumeTell overture.
I would argue an additional line of influence, however, since Meyerbeer
had a German precedent for this kind of instrumental 'close-up', given
Mendelssohn's revival of the Matthius-Passion in 1829. Bach's cantatasand
passions are stocked with long, mulling reflections, reflections that spring
directly from the intimate God-colloquies urged by Protestantism. These
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Conventionsof prayerin some z9th-centuryoperas

arias frequently centre on a solo instrument, set apart in plaintive isolation
from the body of the orchestra- the oboe d'amore in 'Ich will dir mine Herze
schenken', say, or the oboe in 'Ich will bei meinem Jesu wachen', both from
the Matthius-Passion. Such orchestral spotlighting is less marked in the
Italian tradition of the aiione sacra, even though we find a solo clarinet
ritornello, for example, in the Maddalena's 'Potea quel pianto' (from the
Passione di Gesu Cristoby Paisiello). And although there are operatic precedents for instrumentally spotlit ritornelli in operatic prayers - one thinks,
for example of the oboe that ushers in Alceste's 'Grands dieux, du destin' in
Gluck's opera- they lack the obsessive isolation and intimacy that marktheir
sacred counterparts.
Even so, while Meyerbeer and Verdi were capable of highly dignified
'chamber'prayers, they still pushed the envelope in the other direction. We
have noted Marcel's jolly glimpse of heaven and Fides's gigue-prayer.
Neither goes quite as far in the direction of populism, however, as Rossini's
second StabatMater.More than anybody else, perhaps, he should be credited
(or debited- it's all a matterof perspective) with lifting musicalprayerout of
the statuesquehymnic mode of Gluck and Cherubini, and setting it down on
the dance floor. The 'Pro peccatis' is a jaunty mazurka,and the 'Sanctamater,
istud agas' a polka, both of them dances with irreverently buoyant rhythms.
Unbelievers might chuckle in amazementat these festivities at the foot of the
Cross (most especially the loose-shouldered swagger of 'Juxtacrucem tecum
stare'), but the devout probably feel discomfiture. None the less, it was
possible to make less mischievously blatantraidson the ballroom if one chose
one's forms with greater caution. The waltz was waiting, demurely enough,
for such an invitation into the world of prayer. For just as the minuet elided
by slow degrees and a quickening of spirit into the dances of Lanner and
Strausspe're,so likewise the minuet-prayer girded its cassocks and kicked up
its heels. Pius X's Motu propriotried to shut them out of the chancel, and
succeeded for a while. But, like the Arethuse, the demotic church idiom
simply went underground to resurface, decades later, in the folk masses and
chancel guitars of postconciliar Rome.
As a dance form, the waltz proved more amenable to the kind of deportment expected of prayer - a gliding motion beyond the reach of the brash
polka bounce. Indeed, we ought not to forget that the 'Lacrymosa' of
Mozart's Requiem trenches on waltz form by breaking its compound metre
into triune segments, each with a heavy first beat, and that Beethoven himself
followed this prototypic valse triste with an effect of sombre dancing, the
waltz of semitonal 'commas' that emerges from the triplets of the 'Eroica'
march. Unlike the mazurka (leaving aside Chopin's, some of which sound
more like valses lents), the waltz can be made to swoon and surge by reconfigurations of its beat, and to that extent, can trace the aspiring graph of

I6. Richard Osborne:

Rossini (London: JM Dent,
i986), p.2 i.
prayer, as Mozart had realized in the Requiem. Indeed, when we place his
waltzing 'Lacrymosa' beside the prayer from Rossini's Mose in Egitto, the
latter seems quite staid in its 2/4 deportment even despite its liquefying
ostinato of sextuplets - staid enough, I am sure, to gladden the heart of the
sniffiest pope.
While many operatic prayers for chorus observe the conventions of actual
church music to the extent that the (public) deprecatiobecomes all but synonymous with pastiche, no such historical inhibitions govern the composition
of (private)precationes.It was in these that the waltz made its home. Rossini
trenched on irreverence in his 'sinful old age' by offering a populist Stabat
Mater and an oxymoronic 'solemn masslette' as two further 'p6ch6s de
viellesse', but these post-dated his stage career. So the task of 'popularising'
the language of operatic prayer fell to his successors, and it is Verdi who
showed himself ready to slough pseudo-chorales and factitious plainchants
for private intercession. And not only then, for such choric prayers as 'Va
pensiero' (Nabucco) and 'O Signor dal tetto natio' (I lombardialla prima
crociata)both come close (through their parenthetically inserted compound
metres) to matching the poignant swing of Mozart's 'Lacrymosa'.
We have already noted that in the prayer from Mose in Egitto, Rossini had
created a tension between his 2/4 time signature and the triple pulse of the
accompaniment, and while Richard Osborne might be right to call the
melody 'a remarkablysimple one',"6its double dottings evoke a tentativeness
distinct from the beat-bound melodic confidence of the German chorale.
One can note, however, that this device simply heightens the line of a figure
in the High Priest's adjurationin Alceste, from which it appears to have been
derived. The descending scale that (in Gluck, but not in Rossini) balances
that 'ledged' ascent would seem to offer itself as an image of divine dependability, or so, at least, the cognate Motive of Vertragand Vertragsschut{
in Der
Ring desNibelungenwould suggest. Another interesting point of comparison
for Rossini's prayer is provided by the barcarole- also in G minor, and with
an extremely similar contour - from his own Otello.A certain irony springs
from the fact that the text of this aria, far from representing the soul in
colloquy a tribal god, actually originates in the despair of Dante's Inferno.
Even so, the rhythmic hesitancies of the Mose prayer are to some extent
effaced by the equable arpeggios that soothe and encourage the voices as they
climb and fall. Because of that very equability, however, the foursquare cut
of the melody might be softened, but it is never compromised. Verdi goes a
step further in Nabucco,and, in Zaccaria'smelodic sermon ('D'Egitto l1 sui
lidi'), superimposes triplets on each beat of his 'official' common metre. This
imparts an incipient waltz momentum to the utterance, and whereas the
ostinato of the prayer from Mose had slowly rippled, Zaccaria'spulses with
aspirantenergy, an energy compounded by the triplets that Verdi inserts into
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Conventionsof prayerin some zgth-centuryoperas

the melody itself with an effect of pulpit-thumping vehemence. Such vehemence is foreign to the prayer idiom of the i8th century, of course, but the
challenging subliminal energy of an accompanimentthat fails to squarewith
its squarish melody has its origins in Gluck. The locus classicus,needless to
say, is Orestes's gratulatio, 'Le calme rentre dans mon coeur!', with its palpitant semiquaver figure on the dominant. History records a contemporary
orchestra'sbafflement over this discrepancy: 'Gluck urged them on. There
had been no mistake. "He's lying!" Gluck explained. "He killed his mother!
Keep playing!" 'i7Verdi'sZaccariaisn't lying, of course, but he is a man both
dignified and passionate, and, because the underlying 12/8 Gestalt(actually
a segmented 6/8) keeps reshaping our linear grasp of the official 4/4, that
passion half-prevails over dignity, and the waltz comes close to sweeping the
chorale off its feet.
Zaccaria's 'liturgical' music, while it might not have been cutting edge,
none the less consolidated two importantresourcesthat had become available
both to deprecationes(public prayers) and precationes(private ones) in the
primo ottocento:(a) the greater rhythmic freedom attested by the near-waltz
of his sermon, and (b) as in the isolated cello texture of the 'Tu sul labbro",
a sense of intimacy and inwardness that might ultimately lead back, through
Meyerbeer,to the baroque choral heritage.
Theprecatiocan (given the range of its Latin meanings) encompass almost
any aria delivered in a posture of supplication, whether overtly spiritual or
frankly erotic. We see the extent of this overlap between erosand agape in II
trovatorewhen Leonora rejoices to find that her own name has displaced the
deity's in the scheme of things:
Versidipreceedumile
Quald'uomchepregaIddio:
In quellaripeteasiun nome
Il nome mio!
17. Ethan Mordden: Opera

anecdotes (New York:
Oxford University Press,
1985), p.25.
More and more frequently, as the century unfolds, theprecatiowill image its
intimacy in a prelusive solo, chiefly for woodwind or stringed instrument,
which 'warms up' the vocal line for the singer at the same time as it projects
his or her solitary encounter with godhead. We find this even in arias that
approximate rather realise liturgical forms, so that an oboe plaintively informs us of Gilda's innocence as she begins her crypto-confessional in 'Tutte
le feste' and Neris's aria in Cherubini's Mede'e('Solo un pianto'), with its
faithful bassoon obbligato, is nothing if not a Bach-like mulling on an
undeclared biblical text ('for whither thou goest, I will go; and where though
lodgest, I will lodge', Ruth i, v.i6).
But more often precationes avail themselves of openly liturgical procedures: invocation, petition and an optional resolution. The circumstances

and motive of the person at prayer will determine the nature of the first,
which invariablytakes the form of a vocative phrase and an adjectival clause
specifying the godly power or attributemost relevant to the entreaty in hand.
So it is that, in Norma, Romani has his priestess observe, at the point of
honorific ascription, that Irminsul silvers the ancient oaks: 'Casta Diva che
inargenti/Queste sacre antiche piante'. That this is a metaphor for the
imposition of chastity upon disruptive emotion is borne out by the second
strophe, for here we find the imperative that lies at the heart of all prayer,
which is nothing if not a shopping list of petitions in various degrees of
laudatory disguise: 'Tempra, o Diva,/tempra tu de' cori ardenti,/tempra
ancora lo zelo audace'. Bellini's solo flute and the solo voice into which it
elides representthe luminous isolation of the priestess who intercedes for her
people, confirming a tradition as old as all hieratic systems of worship, as the
invocation of Ftha in Verdi'sAida attests:
Possente, possente Ftha,
Del mondospiritoanimator,
ah, noi t'invochiamo.
18.JeanRacine:Oeuvres,
ed. PaulMesnard,8 vols
(Paris: Hachette, 1865),
vol.3, p.I69.
After buttering up the deity with this acknowledgement of cosmic power, the
Egyptians immediately beg that she curtail the scope of her power and focus
on their country alone.
On other occasions, a discrepancybetween the invocation and the context
of the prayer can issue in irony. In Mercadante'sElena da Feltre, an offstage
marriage hymn salutes a deity all powerful and all regulating even as chaos
invades the life of the heroine, who has been doubly wronged by the wedding
in question: 'O tue che i mondi innumeri/d'un cenno e festi e reggi'. Only in
a melodrammasemiserio such as Linda di Chamounix, where we catch a
glimpse of old-fashioned 'poetic justice', do such invocations of providence
('O tu che regoli gli umani eventi') seem less than cynical. In one interesting
instance indeed, the discrepancybetween divine being and doing becomes all
too clear when the vocative elements of a prayer bypass and overwrite each
other. For although the recitative that ushers in Agamemnon's first aria in
Iphigdnieen Aulide addresses itself to 'Diane impitoyable', the air proper
invokes a 'Brillant auteur de la lumiere' and a 'Dieu bienfaisant' - 'Dieu',
observe, and not 'Deesse'. One senses that he has gone over the head of the
spiteful lesser deity and appealed to a god more absolute even than Zeus.
Although Racine's Iphigenie offers nothing comparable (apart from the
crypto-monotheism of Agamemnon's address to 'Juste ciel"'8), Gluck's
librettist seems to borrowed from the spirit of another utterance by the
playwright (the 'Cantique' set by Faure), and half modelled his invocation
on 'Jour 6ternel de la terre et de cieux'.
If the vocative element represents the effort to tune the 'frequency' of a
prayer and guarantee its reception by the right ears, frequency of an alTHE MUSICAL
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Conventionsof prayerin some zth-century operas

together different sort - iterativeness - has often played a significant part in
Catholic supplication. 'Casta Diva' is unusual in being a strophic prayer, a
fact that gives it added liturgical weight and gravitas. Because, as Richard
Wilbur has suggested, ceremony is a known route to the unknown, we can
be sure that the strophic repetition of a melody will create just such a route
through the thickets of human uncertainty and confusion. But most private
prayers in the operatic literature, while they are versified, tend not repeat
themselves, and thus forego the hieratic conviction of Norma's effort. Unless, of course, they figure as cabalettas and thus receive a statutory ripeto.
This is certainly the case in Beatricedi Tenda,for there Romani conceived the
cabaletta-finale as a Nunc dimittis.
To explain that reference to the Song of Simeon, we must recall that
prayersare as much defined by their content as by their outer shells. One subdivision of theprecatiocan be likened to the Nunc Dimittis because it pleads
for death- not, as in the case of Simeon, because it has found fulfilment, but
rather, as in the case of Elijah, because it wishes to escape an unhappy life.
While this might simply be a rhetorical gesture on the part of the Countess
in Le noi{e di Figaro, Leonora's entreaty in Lafora deldestino ('Oh Dio. Dio,
fa ch'io muoia') takes on an urgency foreign to the serenely balanced
alternatives of 'O mi rendi il mio tesoro/O mi lascia almen mori'. Yet
another prayer type, in effect a free-standing invocation (though, like all its
congeners, it has an intercessory tail), is the cletic (or invitational) prayer.
This summons a deity to transform or bless or otherwise make better, and is
splendidly exemplified by Amneris's aria in Aida Act 2, scene i. Her voluptuously sprawling, open-lapped cletic ('Ah! vieni, vieni, amor mio') is
generically identical (however strange that might seem!) with the governessy
tones of Cherubini's Glauce in Me'dee:'O amore, vieni a me'. Because those
twin deities of the Liebestod,Amore and Morte, are so often the commutable
subjectsof summons, the boundary between the cletic and the Nunc Dimittis
quite often seems blurred.
OPERA,less formulary than its Italian counterpart, sometimes
modifies the outlines we have been drawing. For example, the prayer
in final act of Schumann's Genovevais a free-flowing scena, less
parcelled and directed than the belcantoprecatio.We can ascribe this is to the
for there the strophic prayer of its chorale is
work's Durchkomponiertheit,
'framed' as a liturgical utterance (as in other historical operas of the time) an utterance distinct from the mobility of private thought and response. But
in Genoveva's last-act prayer the surrounding lyricised recitative is so close
to the phatically conceived supplication proper that the vocative ('O heil'ge
Junfrau,blick auf mich') gets left behind, stranded in the lead-up. Even so,
the scena, free and loose on the surface, has a deep structure akin to the da
GERMAN

capoarias of the Baroque, and even the spontaneities of its text receive some
delineation from litanic repetition: 'Durch Triibsal fiihrst Du ein zur
Seligkeit'.
Sermons of the traditionally discursive kind will not play well on the lyric
stage, though Wagner is ready enough to sermonise through Kinig Markeor
Hans Sachs or Wotan. When they do figure, however, composers find other
ways to depict their instructiveness than by playing them straight. Because
the Roman churchhas always impartedits doctrine through acts of repetition
(as in the catechism), the Gestaltof the repeat-after-me formulary can be felt
even in the Gloria of Haydn's Nelson Mass. The sermon in the (Protestant)
context of Stiffelio evolves from just this sort of cumulative repetition, and
so too does a comparable scene - Blake-like in its affecting simplicity - in
Kienzl's Der Evangelimann.In the latter opera, which breathes the same air
of semi-Protestant Catholicism as Schubert's GermanMass, the composer
has placed the bitter experience of Matthiasagainst the uncomprehending innocence of the boys he instructs. The idiom isfaux-naif, but we get a glimpse
of the Evangelimann's anguish in the chromatic slope that subtends the
chorale-like setting of 'Selig sind, die Verfolgung leiden'. And for Blakean
innocence, what better than a naive seesaw of imperfect and plagal cadences
to support the beatitude that is persecution's reward?
BY
way of a coda, we can glance briefly at the many parodic prayers
scattered through the 19th-century repertoire. Since the pregkiera

forms an integral part of this, it will come as no surprise that comic
opera, so often the vector of musical satire, occasionally mocked its
solemnities. As early as 1798, when Metastasio was fossilising, Mayr and
Rossi pilloried him in Che originali! Aristea, an impassioned metastasiasta,
and her lover, eager to please her, both declare their love in an obtestatio
witnessed by the Roman pantheon:
Ari. Ah, per rendermi il cor vieppiu securo,
Giuralo!
Car.A tutti i nostri Dei,
Car.e Ari. Lo giuro!
Giuro ch'ad altro mai la destra io porgerb.
As they abandon the quick phatic pulse of their recitative for the idiom of a
Baroque motet, the father arrives, and his muttered invective seems to apply
to the lovers' old-fashioned deportment: 'Asini, asinoni'. Rossini also had a
jab at prayer forms now and again, as when the Count Almaviva, disguised
as a priest, over-prolongs his benediction in II barbieredi Siviglia. Poor
Bartolo, the benedictee, far from feeling uplifted, comes close to anticipating
Aida's terrified interruption of her father's curse: 'Basta, basta, basta/Per
pieta'. And, not content with the depiction of nuns so garrulous that they
THE MUSICAL TIMES

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60o Conventions of prayer in some z9th-century operas
drown out the Angelus bell, Auber's Domino noiralso shows the interface of
gluttony and gratulatio in Gil Perez's 'Nous allons avoir, grace a Dieu,/bon
souper ainsi que bon feu', an item that Offenbach impudently added to a
concert of 'sacred music' he had to cobble up for an American Sunday concert.
Offenbach is obviously the composer best equipped to parody the
dignities of operaticprayer, not least the pagan sublimity ofpriere d la Gluck.
In La Belle He'lene,the heroine'sprecatio addresses the goddess in the idiom
of the demi-monde: 'Dis-mois, V6nus, quel plaisir trouves-tu/A faire ainsi
cascaderla vertue?' Far from hailing a 'Casta Diva' or 'Dieu bienfaisant', she
has a casual chat with a 'Friponne'. The curses so thickly strewn through the
Italian repertoire also caught Offenbach's satiric eye. Monsieur Choufleuri,
which parodies a bourgeois soire, is a pasquinade about transalpine opera,
and - just as importantly - of the works that had graced the stage of the
Theatre Italien in the I84os, haunt of the nobility that avoided the middleclass Opera. Musically satiric prayers are likely to connect with chipper
and demotic tunes, just as verbally satiric ones (like the Amen with which
Bardolfo and Pistola cap Dr Cajus's pious resolution in the first scene of
Falstaff) demand the ironising sound of churchiness. But then not all operatic prayers, as we have seen, are slow and solemn, and theprecesof desperate
sopranos before unyielding baritones can even speed along on the back of a
galop. No surprise, then, that 'O mio padre, mio padre' in Monsieur Choufleuri should charge along as swiftly as Leonora's 'Mira di acerbe lagrime'.
And it is fitting that we should end with that most racy of prayers from Il
trovatore.In Twelfthnight, Malvolio is reproached for believing that virtue
subsists in dreary self-abnegation but, as Feste points out, prayer has no
effect on the taste of condiments - 'and ginger shall be hot i' th' mouth too'
(Act 2, scene 3, line II6). The vivid, heady idiom of some ottocentomusic
proves how hot and gingery the otherworldlypreghierawould become over
time.
Rodney StenningEdgecombe,AssociateProfessorof English at the University
of Cape Town, haspublished ten booksand over 200 articleson topicsranging
from Shakespeareto z9th-centuryballet and opera.


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Conventions of Prayer in Some 19th-Century Operas

Author(s): Rodney Stenning Edgecombe

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