DANIEL JOHN KELLEY

This coming Monday I’m off to see Il Trovatore at the Met, and am very excited about it. Trovatore is one of my favorites, because it’s all about pure ludicrous opera singing. The story doesn’t make much sense, but the characters are bigger than life and so are their feelings and so is the music expressing those feelings.

At the center of the opera is the Trovatore- or Troubador- himself, named Manrico. Anyone who knows me knows I love ludicrous tenor singing, and Manrico is epitome of this. It requires a huge-voiced, full-blooded, pig-headed tenor that wants nothing more than to thunder to the skies. And there’s no moment in the opera- or in opera, in fact- where this is more needed than Manrico’s big Act III aria “Di Quella Pira”. Plot-wise, it’s about Manrico singing that he will rescue his mother, who is a gypsy who has been kidnapped and is about to be burnt to death on a giant pyre. But mostly, the aria is about the tenor showing how awesome he is.

I was going to post a bunch of videos of really great versions of this aria- which can be easily found on Youtube, but instead I decided to post a video that gets at the idea of what this aria and this opera is:

No, that’s not a young Ricardo Montalban, that’s Franco Bonisolli! He was a tenor in the 60s-80s known for having a ridiculous temperament. In fact, from what I’ve read, Domingo got his start leaping into openings that Bonisolli would suddenly drop out of. Bonisolli is a good, if not great tenor- but what makes him perfect for this post is that his renditions of “Di Quella Pira” represent a hilariously exaggerated version of what is so very awesome about this aria. Unlike many opera singers, Bonisolli was not afraid to look insane- which granted him the monicker “Il Pazzo” or “The Madman.” Here he is singing the aria in all his full voiced, tuxedo wearing, face making ridiculousness, arm waving ridiculousness. My favorite part is how he argues with the conductor several times to do an encore, and then eventually does it. Check it out: