Masked balls

Abstract

In the course of his insightful analysis of Act II of Un ballo in maschera, Harold Powers recurs to two critics of earlier generations who hyperbolically describe how, to cite his more measured summary, ‘the drama has turned into music as the opera was being composed. The music is the drama for an audience habituated to its conventions, its style, its genres’. Powers first quotes Gabriele Baldini, who describes the libretto of Il trovatore as ‘a phantom libretto, which became completely engulfed by the music and, once the opera was finished, disappeared as an individual entity’, and then the earlier Bruno Barilli, in whose view ‘the grotesque libretto is only the causal element that provokes the explosion, after which it collapses, annihilated – a confused scattering of rhymes, syllables, babblings – to vanish forever without a trace’. Although Powers and other more recent scholars tend to pay operatic words greater respect, I begin with an invocation of views that might seem anathema to a scholar of texts for the inspiring idea that the text can be ‘annihilated’ as one moves to another level of the work. In what follows, I intend to annihilate both text and music in order to dissolve to a yet higher level of analysis and to recuperate a specific history in which Verdi's Un ballo in maschera, I maintain, participates.