Complexity and Simplicity

Looking at the score of "I Gioielli della Madonna" one is struck by the enormous complexity to it at times. From the opening bars, it is chaos unleashed. Street vendors in Naples are shouting out their wares for sale, children are passing, choruses of townsfolk are commenting, Greek-chorus-like in the manner that all opening choruses act, a piper is piping, mandolins erratically enter and disappear. Truly it is a musical collage that fits together roughly with great effectiveness. If you can read music, take a look at the score, here (click on the bottom snippet to launch), and see what I mean.

And yet if you look at it, it's not the Schoenberg or Boulez manner of being complex. The meter is steady; the rhythms fit together well; it has 'windows' of visibility in it so that the layers can be heard. Very skillfully done. Then it all thins out when soloists come in, and lo and behold, there is a theme we hear! A theme that comes back again and again during the opera, which binds it all together. A simple, falling theme the kind of which has been known and loved since the days of Mozart.

Many of the canzones in the opera are ultra-simplistic: little waltzes, stornellos, serenades, many of which might have stepped from an operetta or an opéra-comique. Jostled side by side, it makes for an even more terrifying story. So much horror beside such common, quotidian melodies. It makes one very uncomfortable.

The ending, during which Gennaro commits suicide on stage with a knife he finds among scattered detritus on the floor, is accompanied by a celeste--the sunbeams falling on the jewels, on the Madonna. Enough to make you shudder.

I Gioielli will be performed by Teatro Grattacielo this month, on May 24th at the Rose Theater. You should go see it - there's only one performance, and it hasn't been performed in NY since 1926.