Sunday Classics: Remembering Margaret Price, Part 8 -- Verdi's Élisabeth de Valois and (yes, again) Desdemona

VERDI: Don Carlos (in Italian): Act V,
Aria, Élisabeth de Valois, "Tu che le vanità"

Scene: The monastery of San Yuste

ÉLISABETH enters slowly, lost in thought. She approaches the tomb of Charles V and kneels.

ÉLISABETH: You who knew
the vanities of the world
and enjoy in the tomb
profound repose,
if they still weep in heaven,
weep for my sorrow,
and bear my tears
to the throne of the Lord.

Carlos will come here. Yes!
Let him leave and forget forever.
To Posa I swore
to watch over his days.
Let him follow his destiny;
glory will trace it.
For me, my day
has already reached its evening.

France, noble land,
so dear to my verdant years!
Fontainebleau! Toward you
my thoughts spread their wings.
There God heard my vow
to love for eternity,
and that eternity lasted
only a single day.

Amid you, lovely gardens
of this Iberian land,
if Carlo should ever
tarry in the evening,
may the turf, the brooks,
the fountains, the woods,
the blossoms sing of our
love in harmony.

Farewell! Farewell, bright golden dreams,
lost illusion!
The knot is cut,
the light is snuffed out.
Farewell! Farewell again, verdant years!

Yielding to cruel pain,
the heart has just one desire:
the peace of the tomb!

You who knew &c.

Ah, lay my tears
at the feet of the Lord.

Margaret Price (s), Élisabeth de Valois; Orchestra of the Teatro alla Scala, Claudio Abbado, cond. Live performance, 1978

by Ken

This week we're going to take care of some unfinished business in our series commemorating the Welsh soprano Margaret Price, focusing on some of her Verdi roles, which played an increasing part in her repertory over time, with impressive if not necessarily entirely convincing results.

Tonight we're going to revisit her Desdemona in Otello, but we start with two excerpts from the last act of Don Carlos, from a famous La Scala production conducted by Claudio Abbado, with Plácido Domingo in the title role, starting with the queen''s bleak monologue sung in the standard Italian translation as "Tu che le vanità," which we've already heard sung beautifully -- in fact, very different kinds of beautifully -- by Eleanor Steber (at the Met in 1955) and Maria Callas (the 1958 EMI studio recording of the aria) in a March 2010 Sunday Classics post, "In Verdi's Don Carlos, all paths lead back to the tomb of Charles V."

That post focused on the locale: the tomb of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in the monastery of San Yuste, where he died in 1558, having retired there after mysteriously abdicating the throne in 1556. Earlier in that post we heard Charles's grandson and namesake Prince Carlos make his way to the tomb following the collapse of his dream of marrying Elisabeth, the daughter of the French king, Henri II, after it was decided that the princess would instead marry Carlos's father, the Spanish king, Philip II. And as I indicated in that series of post, I found it hard not to think of a scene before a crypt -- in fact that of yet an earlier forebear, the Emperor Charlemagne -- in Verdi's much earlier opera Ernani. That was the day when, in one of Verdi's great scenes, a licentious young king beset by conspiracies retreated to the tomb of his own ancestor and dug deep inside himself to find what he was made as he awaited word of his election as Holy Roman Emperor. At those two tombs, Charlemagne's and Charles V's, Verdi set some of his most haunted and haunting soul-searching.

Both Élisabeth and Carlos have struggled to accept their unexpected roles as stepmother and stepson. Following the murder of their friend Rodrigo, the duke of Posa, a casualty of the Flemish struggle for liberation from the tyranny of Spain, on orders of King Philip (strong-armed by the ancient Grand Inquisitor), Élisabeth tries, while waiting to say a final good-bye to Carlos, to find something to hold onto.


FOR CARLOS AND ÉLISABETH'S FINAL MEETING PLUS MORE OF
PRICE'S DESDEMONA (BOTH WITH PLÁCIDO DOMINGO), CLICK HERE

REMEMBERING MARGARET PRICE: the series so far

Career beginnings (plus the Act I Love Duet from Verdi's Otello)
Part 1: From Handel's Messiah to Wagner's Tristan, emerging in Mozart
Part 2: The Countess in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro (plus "Or sai chi l'onore" from Don Giovanni)
Part 3: Fiordiligi in Mozart's Così fan tutte
[Plus postscript: more of "Soave sia il vento" in the later post Sunday, Bloody Sunday and the depths of Mozart's humanity]
Part 4: Pamina in Mozart's Magic Flute
Part 5: Agathe in Weber's Der Freischütz
Part 6: Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos
Part 7: Verdi's Otello with Price and others as Desdemona
Part 8: Elisabeth in Verdi's Don Carlos and more of Price as Desdemona (tonight)
Part 9: Verdi's A Masked Ball with Price and others as Amelia (coming tomorrow)
Still to come: Price the song-singer

#