Last week I went to my very first Live in HD Summer Encore (finally, after several unsuccessful tries). The performance being broadcasted was the performance of Giuseppe Verdi's Il Trovatore from October 3rd, 2015, which I have already written about. After seeing this a second time, I decided to focus on the main theme of this operatic staple.
If there is one word that sums up Il Trovatore, it's passion. Wild, unbridled, searing passion. The opera is full of tempestuous emotions; pride, anger, love, hate, desperation, anguish. There is not a peaceful moment in Il Trovatore, only lulls in the storm.
All four of the main characters are ruled by emotions that eventually lead to their mutual downfalls. They are so focused on their own desires that they rush into situations without thinking everything through and suffer the consequences. Manrico is in love with Leanora, but the young Count di Luna is love with her as well, and when you have two men in love with the same women, you all too often get trouble. While it may seem that di Luna is the more evil of the two, in truth they are both rash young men who are ruled by their hormones. Both men severely reproach Leanora when it appears she does not love them. When she decides to become a nun when she believes false reports of Manrico's death, they both run off to stop her. And when di Luna captures Manrico's adopted mother, the Gypsy Azucena, Manrico impulsively rushes off to rescue her and is captured.
Making things even more nerve-racking is that Manrico is the long-lost younger brother for whom the Count has searched for twenty years. But the two men don't recognize each other, and neither is willing to lay aside his pride and talk things over peacefully. This ruins them both in the end.
Leanora is so wildly in love for Manrico that she will do anything for his sake, whether it makes sense or not. She begs the Count to punish her after confusing for Manrico in the darkness. When she hears rumors of Manrico's death, she tries to enter a convent. But when her lover shows up alive, she immediately rushes off with him get married. When Manrico is captured and condemned to die after his impetuous rescue attempt, Leanora makes a false promise of love to di Luna in order to secure Manrico's freedom, then commits suicide rather than live without her beloved.
And meanwhile Azucena is desirous of revenge after di Luna's father had her mother burnt at the stake for trying to hurt the old Count's younger son, and it has left her more than a little unhinged. She lives only for vengeance and even though she has raised Manrico as her own son, she does not truly care for him, only herself and her own anguish. Azucena herself kidnapped him in hopes of killing him to avenge her mother, but adopted him after she accidentally killed her own baby son. And she has been manipulating him in hopes that he will die to satisfy her wrath. I would even go so far as to say that she deliberately lets herself be captured by di Luna's soldiers so that Manrico would come and rescue her, only to be captured and sent to death row.
At the opera's end, Azucena practically tricks di Luna into his killing his own brother and Leanora lies dead after poisoning herself. The result of all that passion and untamed emotion is destruction, destitution, and ultimately grief. One can't help but feel for the Count di Luna as he looks at where all his passion and anger have led him, his family, and the woman he loved. And the mad gypsy's evil laughter is the last thing we hear as the curtain falls.
