Programs · Episode

CATALANI: La Wally

Program: At the Opera
Aired: Saturday, April 13, 2024 @ 6:00 pm
Hosted by Lisa Simeone

As Verdi’s career was winding down, and Puccini’s was achieving full flight, Alfredo Catalani tried to take Italian opera in a different direction, combining Italian passion and lyricism with a German Romantic style of drama. One result was La Wally, which was by far his greatest success. In 1981, the opera took a lead role in the acclaimed film Diva, which starred the late American soprano Wilhelminia Fernandez. The film, and Fernandez, also made a hit out of the opera’s beautiful, signature aria, “Ebben? Ne andrò lontana.” On At the Opera, we’ll hear the opera’s title role sung by Eva Marton and Renata Tebaldi.

MORE ABOUT THE OPERA:

When Puccini composed La Boheme — "The Bohemians" — he was writing about more than just a handful of scruffy artists in an attic apartment.  He was also exploring a sort of artistic ethos then influential in France — a movement which also had a fascinating counterpart in Italy.

The Italian version of the artists known as Bohemians in France were called the Scapigliatura, a term derived from a word meaning "the disheveled ones."  Like the proverbial "struggling young artists" depicted in Puccini's opera, the Scapigliatura were progressives who resisted, and even resented, the status quo. 

They promoted the intermingling of the arts — painting, literature, poetry and music — and they chafed at traditional, Italian artistic conventions.  As a result, they had a rebellious affinity, at least for a time, for the works of Richard Wagner, and sometimes even scoffed at the musical world of Verdi, thinking it old-fashioned.

The Scapigliatura also leaned towards direct, highly-realistic forms of artistic expression — a preference that had a profound influence on Italian opera, helping to inspire the verismo style we so often associate with Puccini.  And while there were few if any successful operas written by "official" members of the Scapigliatura, there was one by a composer who clearly sympathized with the movement:  La Wally, by Alfredo Catalani.

Catalani was just 39 when he died in 1893, and he wrote only five operas.  Yet his music does give us a fascinating look at the complicated artistic world in which he worked.  While Italian opera was moving from the established world of Verdi to the intense realism of Puccini, it was also evolving away from the "set-piece" form of opera that went all the way back to Baroque opera seria, and toward the fluid, through-composed style of Wagner.  La Wally reflects those tendencies both in its structure, and its musical style. 

An interesting side note to Catalani's brief career is that while he wrote less than a half-dozen operas, he did work with two of the most distinguished librettists of his time.  The libretto for La Wally was written by Luigi Illica, who also worked with Puccini on La Boheme, Tosca and Madame Butterfly.  Catalani's first opera, La falce, used a libretto by Arrigo Boito, who later collaborated with Verdi on Otello and Falstaff.  As it happens, Boito was perhaps the most prominent member of Italy's Scapigliatura movement.

Also, while you may think you haven't heard La Wally before, you most likely have heard at least part of it.  The title character's beautiful Act One aria ”Ebben? Ne andrò lontana” has one of the most familiar, and frequently-heard melodies in all of opera.  The aria also played a leading role in a well-known movie — the 1981 film Diva — which helped make a star of the late American soprano Wilhelminia Fernandez.

At the Opera presents La Wally in recordings featuring Eva Marton and Renata Tebaldi singing the title role.

FEATURED RECORDINGS:

Fausto Cleva, conductor; National Opera Orchestra of Monte Carlo

CAST: Renata Tebaldi (Wally); Mario del Monaco (Hagenbach); Piero Cappuccilli (Gellner); Justino Diaz (Stromminger); Lydia Marimpietri (Walter)
(DECCA 475 8667)

Pinchas Steinberg, conductor; Munich Radio Orchestra

CAST: Eva Marton (Wally); Francisco Araiza (Hagenbach); Alan Titus (Gellner); Francesco Ellero d’Artegna (Stromminger); Julie Kaufmann (Walter)
(BMG 69073)

Pictured: Alfredo Catalani by Unknown photographer – Sergio Anelli Collection, Public Domain.

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