RODNEY STENNING EDGECOMBE

Topoi and melodic morphology in the operas

of Donizetti
OR AS LONG AS there has been literature in the world, there have also
been genres, the institutions by which writers separate and formalise
the many expressive purposes they have in hand. And for as long as
there have been genres, there have been topoi. These components, halfstructural and half-thematic, mediate the materials that the different genres
have evolved to embody. Sometimes topoi are all but co-extensive with the
forms that house them, as when, say, the Anacreontic ode fuses its identity
with the carpe diem topos it vectors (as, incidentally, it does in Orsini's
ballata from Lucreiia Borgia (1833)). But, more often than not, genres grow
out of an aggregation of topoi, each relating to a specific aspect of the larger
design. For example, epics often centre on ideas of contest, contest takes
the form of battles, battles have ceremonious preludes, and from this chain
of requisites is born the topos of the arma capiendum, in which the epic
hero vests himself for battle. That constitutes only a small part of an epic's
compass, of course, but the pattern repeats itself with regard to all the other
elements in the form. It also repeats itself from epic to epic, so that topoi
help, in a sense, to lead the reader to a proper reading of the text in hand.
So central has the arma capiendum proved in shaping an epic design that it
figures in the Iliad, the Aeneid, the Thebaid, and even in such mock-heroic
take-offs as Pope's Rape of the lock.

In a vestigial form as a declaration of warlike purpose the arma

capiendum also survives into the primo ottocento, whether it be Tebaldo's '
serbata e questo acciaro' in / Capuleti e i Montecchi (1830) or Manrico's 'Di
quella pira' in Iltrovatore (1853). Indeed, we have a version of its antithetical
mode, the ab armis discendum at the very end of the century, when Otello cries
'Abbasso le spade' in Verdi's opera (1887). Thereby hangs a tale, for I would
argue that some kinds of music depend no less extensively on topoi than some
kinds of literature. Given their constitutive function in relation to genre,
and the fact that musical genres have, at certain periods, developed rigidly
prescriptive oudines, that prescriptiveness will embody itself in approved
musico-dramatic procedures - topoi - and composition will to some extent
depend on their reshuffling and re-inflection, the artists' originality measured
in small incremental steps rather in bold, revolutionary strides. One such
period is the primo ottocento, and topoi abound in the melodramme, opere
semiserie and opere buffe it spawned in such huge numbers.
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Plot and versification were, at this time, as predictable as the titles that
vectored them (first name; preposition; place name) so predictable, in
fact, that one wonders why Semiramide (1823) never graced the boards as
Semiramide di Babilonia or Norma (1831) diS Norma di Gallia. It goes without
saying, therefore, that topoi were integrally woven into these operas, topoi
that were in the first instance textual (deriving from the conventions of
the libretto), but also to a large extent musical, since text and setting were
interinvolved. As in the case of the Anacreontic ode, where defining topos
and genre are almost commutable, we have arias that are co-extensive with
their topoi, as witness the ballata from Lucreiia cited above, or the confessio
amantis, which subtends the countless love duets of the period. On other
occasions, topoi comprise sub-units that have conjoined into larger ones,
whole situations rather than responses ad hoc. (I shall call these smaller
constituents topia or 'little topoi', a word I have coined on the lines of
'biblion', the diminutive of 'biblos' - 'book'.) In musicological terms, a
topos will encompass both the text and the music, since the lyric conventions
of the primo ottocento developed in tandem with dramatic ones, themselves
a tissue of pre-established formulae. A lyric topos will therefore start as a
formulaic dramatic situation, forged from verbal formulae, for, as Julian
Budden has pointed out,
librettists were busy men and tended even more than composers to revert to their own
flxed procedures and turns of phrase. The language of Cammarano and his kind was
both stilted and monotonous. Bells are never bells but 'sacred bronzes'; midnight is
always 'the hour of the dead'. In a brilliant essay Luigi Dallapicola has compared these
circumlocutions to Homeric epithets, evidence of the essentially 'epic quality' of the
Italian nineteenth-century opera.'

1. Julian Budden: The operas

of Verdi, 3 vols (London,
197381), vol.1, p.2i.
2. Margaret Alexiou: The
rttual lament in Greek tradition
(Cambridge, 1974), p.99.
3. ibid., p.99.

But once a lyric topos has been identified by its dramaturgical purpose, we
must turn to its musical constituents and see what sort of melodic, harmonic
and rhythmical symbioses are thus brought into being. This might at first
blush seem a hopelessly mechanical kind of enterprise, but it's important to
put it into perspective. The verbal recycling that Dallapicola admired in the
libretti of the primo ottocento is not peculiar to Homeric epic, but extends
even into such emotive and heartfelt utterances as the threnody.
Writing about the history of Greek lament, Margaret Alexiou has observed that, thanks to its technique, 'the same ideas, formulaic structures
and phrases are re-used and adapted to suit the occasion, so that in the
event of sudden calamity, the popular poet has to hand a ready-made stock
of material'.^ She also remarks that 'these historical laments grew up by
a gradual process of accretion and refinement',' which, if we compress
the time scheme, could very well describe the sort of processes that drove
operatic composition in the primo ottocento, processes that, as in Greek
lament, didn't necessarily entail a loss of expressive power. Laments and

epics can move one deeply in spite of such verbal fixtures as the 'rosyfingered dawn' and 'wine-dark sea', partly because their fixture creates a
satisfying rhythm of expectancy, and partly because of their inherent beauty
and idoneity. The same could be said of the many lyrical topoi of the primo
ottocento, whose tried appropriateness often prevents them from seeming
perfunctory, however often we encounter them. Here familiarity breeds
respect and affection rather than the proverbial contempt.

HILE the libretti were laced, like epic and threnody, with standard
locutions and standard situations, and while the music that clothed
them was sometimes infected by the 'formularity' of these
formulae in turn, that music none the less served to ennoble and differentiate
the verbal clichs, creating an integral musico-dramatic package - a lyric
topos - as it did so. Granted, we have no Homeric epithets to delight us
in the primo ottocento - only immeasurably poorer, Cammaranesque ones
but those preformulated situations and phrases of Cammarano and his
cohorts evoked formular strategies from the composers who worked with
them, and together they took on a charge and trenchancy that can sometimes
bear comparison with the purely verbal craft of epic and lament. Instead
of impugning this music for its reliance on recipe, then, it might be more
profitable to systematise some of the ingredients, and notice the freshness
and novelty with which a resourceful composer such as Donizetti can inflect
them.
Not, of course, that Donizetti is unique in this regard. The climate
of the lyric stage at this time - a climate of conformity so rigorously
enforced by the tenets of Rossinismo that even an original musical mind
like Meyerbeer's was forced into slavish imitation - ensured that any one
topos from the hand of Rossi or Cammarano (or even Romani) would have
exacted comparable melodic responses from all the composers of the primo
ottocento. But while it would be impossible, in an article of this scope, to
explore this phenomenon across the board, we can throw some light on the
topic by restricting attention to Donizetti alone, if only because his prolific
output involved a degree of formulaic thinking, and thus caused him to rely
on lyric topoi (whether conscious or not) throughout his career. And even
here, after narrowing our scope, comprehensiveness will still be impossible,
and we shall be able to glance at only some of his many topoi, and at the
smaller units from which he fashioned them. A whole book could be written
on the topic.
In devising a tentative classification of these topical elements, I have
had to coin new terms and phrases, if only because, as Julian Budden has
pointed out, the taxonomy of popular operatic forms has lagged behind
other branches of music that haven't suffered the same kind of stigma, at
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least in academic circles: 'Nobody has defined the forms of Italian opera in
that way, though they are no less complex. Hence the present-day student
of the period will often find himself obliged to invent his own technical
terms for the purposes of classification.'''
But before I proceed to a more fine-grained analysis of the elements from
which topoi derive, let me first distinguish what I am attempting here from
other modes of melodic analysis that have been applied to the period. I am
not, for example, so much concerned with abstract musical patterns as with
the expressive purposes they are made to serve. That is the essence of a lyric
topos. Thus when Gustav Kobb finds the key to the primo ottocento in the
dotted note, he enters the arena of melodic morphology, but in terms far
broader than those of my investigation. He distinguishes 'Italian melody,
old style' from the melodic habits of verismo, observing that the former
derives 'much of its character from the dotted note, with the necessarily
marked acceleration of the next note, as, for example, in 'Ah! non giunge '
(La sonnamhula (1831)), and furthermore asserting that it 'is from its
prominence in the melodic phrase, the impetus imparted by it, and the sharp
reiterated rhythmic beat which it usually calls for, that Italian melody of
the last century, up to about 1870, derives much of its energy, swing, and
passion'.' There is general truth in this, even if a good deal of that 'energy,
swing, and passion' can be traced to other melodic habits than dotting, and
even if the dissolution of articular or membral melody into veristic arioso
parlante involved not so much the loss of this rhythmic motif (the opening
measures of La bohme (^1897) are nothing if not dotted and energetic) as
the loss of those constituent 'members' (and of the smaller components
articuli within them).

4. Budden: Operas, vol.i,

pp.12-13.
5. Gustave Kobb: The
complete opera book: the
stories of the operas, together
with leading airs and motives
in musical notation (London,
1922), p.6o8.
6. William Ashbrook:
Doni:^etti and his operas
(Cambridge, 1982), p.257.
7. ibid., p.257.

Much closer to my sort of enterprise is the way in which William

Ashbrook simultaneously establishes a melodic and dramatic tournure by
looking at the way Donizetti assembles melodic cells. He points out, for
example, that 'the second period [of the Seymour/Bolena duet in Anna
Bolena (1B30)] conveys passionate intensity by repeating three times a short
motivic idea, its urgency increased by the raised fourth (C sharp) and by
its syncopated rise to a more expansive phrase'.*^ One could add to that the
fact that the raised fourth, because it 'tries' repeatedly but unsuccessfully
to entrench the dominant through a leading-note chord (but with no effect
on the G major ostinato), also images a fluttering incapacity on Giovanna's
part, and furthermore observe that the nagging iteration of that semitonal
rise to D helps embody her wheedling nature. It goes without saying that
these devices take their meaning from the topos into which they have been
conscripted, and that while Ashbrook might claim that the duet in question
testifies to an effort at escaping 'from formal convention toward dramatic
truth',^ the dramatic truth of the primo ottocento is more often than not

vectored by almost inescapable forms and conventions. The Bolena duet

lodges, after all, in a larger topical matrix, one that, with a wry smile at my
own mock-classical pedantry - all standard literary topoi have Latin tags - 1
shall christen the contentio rivalium.
Examples of this topos can found in Rosmonda d'Inghilterra (1834), which
includes an encounter of the heroine and the queen, both in love with Enrico,
and Ugo come diParigi (1832), which imparts an additional complication to
the topos given the fact that Bianca and Adelia, both drawn to Ugo, are
sisters, and that the tension here stibsists in Adelia's zniema/distress over the
situation. I have named this clash of competitors - generally for the love of
another, but occasionally, as in Maria Stuarda (1835) or the confrontation
of Enrico and Edgardo toward the end of Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), for
power - after a medieval genre in which two competitors (say, a nightingale
and an owl) pit themselves against each other. It is a situation that will include
some or all of the following sub-phases - confession, indignation, entreaty
or deprecation, and resolution (either reconciliatory or threatening). These
sub-phases are the 'topia' I mentioned above, constitutive units capable of
standing alone, but often incorporated into larger topical contexts. In the
case of the contentio rivalium, such topia have been shuffled about to reflect
the different kinds of tension implicit in each of them.
For example, different conventions seem to obtain when the contenders
are male. Here the revelatory exchange tends to be more obviously confrontational, and even its resolution takes a militaristic turn, as when Enrico
and Edgardo first threaten each over a glowering motivic march, and then
resolve those threats with the promise of violence sung in conjunct vocal lines
- a marchier march altogether! Because Leonora in Rosmonda d'Inghilterra
is a mannish bully, Donizetti also rings changes on the contentio topos there.
By having her arraign her rival, he draws another topion (the accusatio) into
the ambit of the contentio. In the process, he has to make adjustments not
only to the contributory topia but also to elements that are smaller still, and
it is here that topical analysis reveals its interface with melodic morphology.
To project the deliberative and insistent nature of accusation, Donizetti will
sometimes fall back on a motif, perhaps, or an ostinato, or an intervallic
pattern that he finds particularly germane to the task in hand.
For example, inLucreiia Borgia, the friends of Gennaro arraign the heroine
in a common metre melody accompanied by groups of three quavers. This
has the effect of creating portentous pauses in the accompaniment, while,
at the same time, the three notes also take on the semblance of a gavel-like
rapping. Then again, because Donizetti seems to be carving a 6/8 Gestalt
out of a four-crotchet block, the pattern serves to poise the metre, as if in
judicial uncertainty of its real rhythmic allegiance. No surprise, then, that
Leonora should use an identical ostinato for her accusatio, a few months
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after Orsini and company had, in similar fashion, charged Lucrezia with her
crimes. And yet the roots of this 'melomorpheme ' (which is what I shall
call these lyric 'atoms' of the topos) go back much further than Donizetti's
middle phase. As early as the second revision of Zoraida di Granata (1822,
rev. 1824), he had sensed an aptness for judicial solemnity in this subparcelling of a metre, even if in Abenamet's aria-finale - the point where he
pronounces his 'will' for Zoraida - there are spaced groups oi four quavers.
There also are four-quaver bundles in Adelia (i 840) when Arnoldo demands
justice for his daughter from the Duke. From which we can deduce that
melomorphemes themselves occur as cognate forms and allotropes.
Different kinds of topical adjustment (at the level of melomorphemes)
can be witnessed in the further variants of the contentio rivalium. In the case
of the cxy^io-contentio from Ugo come diParigi, and also the vastly different,
combative encounter between Maria and Elisabetta in Maria Stuarda, one
finds different but comparable solutions to a common problem - that of
musically evoking an effort of will (whether for confession or entreaty),
the palpable screwing of courage to the sticking point. In the case of Ugo
the singer repeatedly has her line nudged forward by a dotted motif arising
from a point low down in the orchestra a sort of summons to secrets
(reluctantly yielded) from the nether depths. In Maria, on the other hand,
the singer has to gather her strength and compose herself for an unwelcome
act of abasement. Like Bianca, she is reluctant to speak, but instead of using
a recurrent motif to prod the singer into responding, Donizetti repeats a
single motif until it fuses and lifts off into melodic flight - a sort of 'giddyup' gesture that guarantees momentum. This 'anaphoraic energy', generated by the repetition of the phrase, has the effect of catapulting itself
forward by an accumulation of power: reculer pour mieux sauter. (One other
striking instance can be adduced from the Maria di Rohan overture (1843)
which, given its Viennese provenance, might yWi have owed something
to the Beethoven Bb Piano Sonata op.22, the first subject of whose first
movement has a similar sense of revving for take-off.)
Even from this brief glance at a single topos, we can see that it is broad
and flexible enough to accommodate a variety of different inflections and
modifications, and that these depend very largely on what melomorphemes
the composer chooses for his task. The situation might be comparable, but
the protagonists are not, and the prodding motif that registers Bianca's
reluctance to declare an illicit love, and the self-spurring melody that helps
Maria conquer her revulsion for the 'figlia impura di Bolena' have as many
differences as they have points of contact. The Stuart queen draws on the
topion of the causam agendum, where innocence pleads with tyranny as so
often it does in the primo ottocento, while Bianca invokes the altogether
different topion of confessio amantis the lover's outpouring to a confidante

that survives into middle-period Verdi ('Tutte le feste' in Rigoletto (1851)

and 'Tacea la notte ' in Iltrovatore (1853). Such weaving and counterweaving
of independent elements give proof of the complexity of topical analysis,
recalling as it does in its more primitive way the neural dance of the brain: 'a
dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern, but never an abiding one; a
shifting harmony of subpatterns'.^

T WILL BE APPARENT from this preliminary survey of a single topos and

its variant forms, that it comprises a hierarchy of levels, levels that move
down from the matrical topos to its component topia to the melodic and
rhythmic components that go into their making - the melomorphemes.
But before we go into greater detail about those, let's adduce two further
significant topoi - from among many others - in the operas of Donizetti.
One that I'll call the irruptio amantis alieni is widely used for its dramatic
potential, for here a lover braves a hostile environment to make contact with
his beloved, or, in some cases, to arraign her (at which point the accusatio
topion comes into play). Examples can be found in Lucia di Lammermoor,
Parisina (1833) and Imelda de' Lamberta^i (1830). In these instances there
is nearly always a ruminative ensemble followed by a headlong stretta,
which takes form as a quickstep or a galop. Then again, countless libretti
of the period confront us with the image/situation of the waiting lover
from Rossini's Semiramide ('Bell' raggio') to Verdi's Violetta ('Ah, forse
lui'), though in the latter instance Verdi and Piave have already modified the
topos by making the abstraction ('amore '), rather than the agent ('amante '),
the subject of expectation. Again, in my pedantic way, I shall give it a Latin
tag, the expectatio amantis.

8. Sir Charles Sherrington,

quoted in Richard Dawkins:
Climbing mount improbable
(Harmondsworth,
p.294.

In the first act of Lucia, Lucia is awaiting a visit from Edgardo while,
at a corresponding point of Linda di Chamounix (1842), the heroine waits
for Carlo. Since for both women reunion with the beloved is heaven on
earth, Cammarano and Rossi present him as a source of radiance - 'luce
a' giorni miei' on the one hand and 'luce di quest'anima'. And, given
the similarity of these locutions, it is hardly surprising that they should
predispose Donizetti to think in terms of an intermittent dazzle of notes - a
dazzle that registers ideas both of rapture and claircissement. The 'radiant'
fioritura in each instance functions as a melomorpheme, the element that
supplies a common denominator for the otherwise dissimilar arias 'O luce
di quest'anima' and 'Quando rpita in estasi'. Although the first is a galop,
and the second a march with an Alberti bass, they both have a fibrillation
at the end of each melodic member - Lucia's trills and Linda's gruppetti
gestures of emotional excitement (like a quiver in the voice). Modifying this
excitement, however (after all, the women in question are also containing
their happiness while they anticipate it), are gestures (likewise shared) of
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confidence and repose. This Donizetti achieves through a different kind of
musical resource, a sustained note and shorter one which provides resolution
of sorts - the prolonged leading-note resolving on to the submediant when
Lucia utters the word 'ardore,' and the flattened submediant octave leap
from a minim to a quaver when Linda invokes the idea of union ('unita').
In both there is tension: the thwarting of the F|}'s pull to the tonic, and
the chromatic remoteness of the Ab, which is soon 'corrected' by a perfect
cadence. Donizetti heightens both this tension and its resolution by having
his melody linger upon the 'alien' or inessential note, and resolve it within
the context. I shall call this melomorpheme the 'piega' or fold, for Donizetti
often invokes this to signify ideas of completion and certitude. Or rather
he uses it in cabalettas, the function of which is more often than not to
mark some sort of anagnorisis or, at least, the provisional resolution of a
crisis. Some cabalettas fail to do this textually but, ironically enough, still
carry melomorphemes of clarification. Imelda de' Lamberta^i provides the
curious instance of a piega (here a dwelt-on appoggiatura) in the service of
an altogether irresolute text ('Ma il Ciel non ode').
o MUCH, then, for some of the many topoi to which Donizetti recurs
again and again. We need now to take a closer look at the elements
out of which he fashions his topia and topoi. 'Melomorphemes', as I
have pointed out, are musical devices - motivic elements, or characteristic
intervals, or particular rhythmic inflections - that have been conscripted to
'mean' as well as 'be'. A prolonged appoggiatura has its own dynamic of
resolution but, harnessed to a text about resolution, it acquires an extramusical, or (rather) a para-musical, significance, very different from the
exigencies of a 'programme '. The 'piega', a melomorpheme often projecting
closure, might take form as an appoggiatura in many instances, but it is not
identical with that or any other musical device. A melody whose members
are demarcated with a fifth-tonic or fourth-tonic interval - diagrammatising
cadential contours as they do would serve just as aptly for the enunciation
of purpose in a standard cabaletta. A lyric topos such as the expectatio
amantis will accordingly often, but not always, combine tensile and frilly
melomorphemes - the 'piega' and some sort of fioritura to embody the
image/situation of love expectant.

Melomorphemes can also have a distinctive rhythmic character as well as

characteristic intervals or types of ornament. These I shall call clausulae,
a term familiar to students of classical prose. Because this often resolves
into formal metrical units, a whole science has sprung up to assist in their
description: the science of colometry, which identifies the foot-combinations
from which those units - 'clausulae' - derive. For example, RGM Nisbet
has remarked that Cicero's 'rhythm is most pronounced in the clausulae.

i.e. in the phrases which occur at the ends of cola (the major divisions of a
sentence). These clausulae tend to conform to a limited number of metrical
patterns.'^ Another classicist, Thomas Habinek, notes, furthermore, that 'the
ancient rhetoricians were content to use the same word, kolon or membrum,
to refer to either the rhythmical or rhetorical units','" which shows how
indivisibly rhythmic and semantic features interface in the clausulae.
Given the fact that music is nonverbal rhetoric, one could easily show
how melodic membra that carry specific texts often break down into
mappable components or motifs. When these take on a formulary contour,
we have the beginnings of 'clausular' system, though (given the manifold
relations that pitch factors into the scheme) the options are not as easily
mapped as their literary equivalents. That is why I would sooner invoke
the term 'melomorpheme ' to characterise vertical relationships across the
stave (e.g. appoggiature) as well as the lateral rhythmical pattern of the
bar, which, if they were registered in monotones, would sometimes bear
comparison with clausulae. And, of course, there is yet another component
to bear in mind, viz., harmony. Diatonic harmony, after all, is extremely
formular in the way it establishes tonal identity through primary triads,
and will furthermore permit only two ways of ending a melody (from the
dominant to the tonic or plagally, or the favoured strategy of Rossini the
cast-iron staircase of I V / V / I ) , and only two kinds of cadential markers
midstream (imperfect and interrupted). In that respect, the primo ottocento
has harmonic 'clausulae ' even less negotiable than those of classical prose.
Indeed a musical theorist of the i6th century, Jean le Munerat, stressed the
primacy of musical above verbal language precisely because the curtailment
of choices issued in a more logical apparatus of sounds.

9. M. Tullius Cicero: InL.

Calpurmum Pisonem oratio,
ed. RGM Nisbet (Oxford,
1961), p.xvii.
10. Thomas N. Habinek:
The colometry of Latin prose
(Berkeley, 1985), p.ii.

Since there is little room for manoeuvre in the case of cadences, which
are, in function at least, the closest thing music has to clausulae, there is
little point in taking them into account in a study of melodic morphology.
The most complex Beethoven sonata and the most routine cavatina of the
primo ottocento will both end on the tonic, however exquisitely prolonged
its deferment. Much more interesting, because they have many more permutations, are the kinds of representation implicit in the combination
of rhythm and pitch. Only four or five decades before Donizetti began
writing, associationist philosophers had investigated the way in which
expressive values attach themselves in an analogous (rather than mimetic)
way to abstract aesthetic notions like line and movement. Such semi-iconic
suggestiveness is the life-blood of melomorphemes a suggestiveness not
to be confused with programme music's equivalent of mimesis. Archibald
Alison, in his Essay on the nature and principles of taste (1790), insisted that
analogies could be drawn between

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the Sensation of gradual Ascent, and the Emotion of Ambition,between the Sensation of
gradual Descent, and the Emotion of Decay, between the lively Sensation of Sunshine,
and the cheerful Emotion of Joy, - between the painful Sensation of Darkness, and the
dispiriting Emotion of Sorrow. In the same manner, there are analogies between Silence
and Tranquillity, between the lustre of Morning, and the gaiety of Hope, - between
softness of Colouring, and gentleness of Character, - between slenderness of Form, and
delicacy of Mind."

This sort of correspondence by analogue (as opposed to a merely imitative

impulse) is predicated on our internal capacity to establish connections
between distinct but comparable states of mind and body, something to
which Lord Kames, a contemporary of Alison, had also drawn attention:
We have, said Lord Kames, an inherent rather than an empathie 'sense of order and
arrangement': 'Thinking upon a body in motion, we follow its natural course. The mind
falls with a heavy body, descends with a river, and ascends with flame and smoke.' Thus
with the serpentine or winding line: slow motion in gentle curves has associations of
'Volition and Ease '; in following the curving of the line with the eye, and hence, Archibald
Alison seems to have implied, by a kind of joining in with its motion, we attribute these
same associations to the line itself, and we designate it beautiful."

Combining these associationist principles with Roman colometry and

with linguistic morphology, we can devise a way of systematising the
smaller elements - elements existing at a lower level of abstraction than the
topia mentioned above that go to make up such broad lyric topoi as the
contentio rivalium or the expectatio amantis. We saw, in the latter, how the
little bursts of decoration at the end of each melodic member conveyed the
happiness momentarily escaping the control of decorum. However, there
are many other emotions that have to be reined in, but which can escape
in valvular 'releases' at the end of phrases. Verdi could give these a harddriven contour (as in 'Di quella pira') to create effects of irresistible energy,
while on other occasions Germont's cabaletta in La traviata (1852), for
example those terminal fioriture will take on a softer turn (passing notes
as opposed to Manrico's forceful, monomaniac auxiliaries).

11. Quoted in Walter Jackson

Bate: From classic to romantic:
premises of taste in eighteenthcentury England {^i^^(ji', rpt.

New York, 1961), p.152.

12. ibid.,pp.i46-47.

That is the tail end of a convention that began in a comparatively mindless way when Rossini wrote decorations into his melodies that he knew,
had he failed to map them, would have been superimposed by the singer.
In the hands of Donizetti, however, the flutters and flurries at the end of
each melodic member become expressive devices. One thinks, for example,
of Enrico's 'Cruda funesta smania' in act i oi Lucia di Lammermoor, where
note-bunches hang on such crucial words as 'petto' and 'sospetto' (both
at terminal nodes of the melody) to suggest that uncontrolled emotion is
breaking into an otherwise measured tune. No less striking is Elisabetta's
aria in Maria Stuarda, 'Ah! quando all'ara', where languorous triplets
punctuate each period in an image of thoughtful amplification. Indeed, it
would be possible to construct a typology of the fioriture (largely defined

by Rossini) that Donizetti took over and modified more and more as he
evolved as a composer. When emotion is suffocated and volcanic, as in
the case of 'Cruda, funesta smania', the decorative element takes form as
some expansion or other of the gruppetto. We could call it the 'scoppio',
since it seems always to burst out of the containing line. Elisabetta's phrase
ends, on the other hand, given their reflective, capsular quality, would invite
some such name as 'indugio'. The generic 'scoppio' and 'indugio' could
also be subdivided in turn. When, in 'Com' bello, Lucrezia gives rotary
play to all the notes of a minor third at 'Gioie sogna', following the pattern
with a falling sixth, and its repeat with a rising appoggiatura (a 'piega', in
other words), the figure recalls the serial movement of a fringe in the wind,
and could thus be termed the 'indugio fronzolato'. In the same opera, the
scoppio colonises a whole aria, and, no longer a gruppetto manqu, issues
in the indignation of the heroine's final tirade, as runs both straight and
'cambiate'.
When melomorphemes are exclusively concerned with rhythmic pattern,
they become musical clausulae. Let's take one very obvious example by way
of illustration. Throughout the operas of Donizetti, from Zoraida di Granata
at the one extreme to Maria di Rohan at the other, we find a characteristic
clausula with many different local inflections, but with a general purpose that
we could call 'decisive interjection'. A typical example would be the moment
in Lucia di Lammermoor when Lucia tells Enrico that she has plighted her
troth to another ('Ad altri giurai mia f'). Using the language of colometry,
we could describe this gesture as a pyrrhic-molossus (which is to say, light
syllable, light syllable / / stressed syllable, stressed, stressed), though it as
often takes form as an anapaest-spondee (the spondee comprising one stress
fewer than the molossus). As a clausula it is by no means unique to Donizetti,
its history extending back as far as the i8th century at least, where we find
a prototype of sorts in the third movement of Vivaldi's 'Summer' Concerto
{The four seasons). There it clearly figures as a thunder motif, anticipating
to some extent the implication of astonishment (from Latin 'tonare', to
'thunder') that often seems to be intimated by its use in the primo ottocento.
This clausula had furthermore become native and endued to the bolero, a
vigorous and emphatic dance, and, in Donizetti's hands, can often be read
as a segment of bolero rhythm without its down beat, though sometimes, in
the example irom Lucia above, this beat does occur at the first statement. No
surprise, therefore, that it should figure at heated moments of the drama,
when passions are roused, or insights about to crystallise. Perhaps, for this
reason, we ought to christen it the 'figura di tuono'.
In addition to tracking the dispositions of stress, colometry has also {de
facto) been concerned with the definition of the syntactic elements to which
the stress pattern attaches itself. The terminology is rather vague and subject
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to debate, but there can be no doubting that classical rhetoric acknowledged
the existence of self-sufficient, free-standing syntactic elements that were at
the same time too cursory to have a clausular rhythm and fluency. Habinek
points out that when Cicero
describes the passage below as an example of speaking incisim, he means, in modern terms,
that while the expressions are independent sentences, they are too short to be described
as clauses:
Domus tibi deerat.^ At habebas. Pecunia superabat.'' At egebas.''

One can find an analogue for this in the melodic structure of Donizetti's
operas. Often he will achieve an effect of succinctness by having his character utter 'incisim' melodic fragments over a sustained tune in the orchestra,
which, far from being the 'big guitar' - the scornful description most usually
applied to his orchestral habits - windows the character's inner being (the
emotional flux contained there) that only occasionally surfaces at those
moments when the voice reinforces the tune.
UT I BELIEVE it is possible (on occasion) to find even closer integrations of clausula and text than the loose associations mentioned
above. Leonore's 'Ich habe Mut' from Fidelio (1805), for example, is
rhythmically close to 'Be not afraid' from Mendelssohn's Elijah (1846) and
'Thus saith the Lord, I am the Lord' in the same composer's St Paul (1836)
Two of these three examples are linked by their assertions of courage, but
that is only the surface implication of the clausula. What unites all of them
is the act of assertion or the idea of assertiveness that the trochee-iamb
(stress, light syllable / / light syllable, stress) has foursquare, chiastic shape
- seemingly impregnable and dauntless. The English soldiers in Donizetti's
L'assedio di Calais (1836) assert their courage after Aurelio's escape with
precisely the same clausula ('Fuggi, codardo') and so do the retainers in
an apocryphal chorus from Maria de Rudeni (1838) - 'Fu vista in arme'. It
also figures, more as defiant gesture of resilience, in the 'Lodi al gran Dio'
chorus m Marino Faliero (1835).

We have already noted the fact that Donizetti's favoured pyrrhicmolossus pattern owed some of its force to the bolero rhythm by which it
was nurtured, if not actually brought to birth. With this in mind it might be
worth pausing to consider a typology of ostinato figures, since these played
a part in the evolution of melodic formulae. We could call the standard
arpeggiated version the 'fruscio d'acqua', a soothing murmur associated
with moments of reassurance and consolidation, as for example in 'Tornami
a dir' in Don Pasquale (1843), where three falling quavers fit effortlessly into
the prolonged beat of the compound metre in a way that recalls the rising
13. Habinek: Colometry,-.2-j. triplets inserted into the simple duple of Beethoven's 'Moonlight' Sonata.

Donizetti also created tension by driving the rhythm through each beat of
a bar - the 'ostinato spinto' - a relentlessness evident at such moments as
Lucrezia's warning that the Duke is her fourth husband! At the opposite
end of the scale is the broken kind of ostinato borrowed from Rossini's
astonishment ensembles (pre-eminently 'Fredda e immobile' in II barbiere
di Siviglia (1816)). The voice parts tend in these instances to be largely a
cappella and the orchestra interjects minimalist strokes after each phrase,
for all the world like an aural ellipsis sign.
Moving from bass to treble stave, we should also be aware that Donizetti
seems to have formulated several melodic options - too broad to fall under
the definition of clausulae, but distinctive nevertheless, to accord with the
stock options his libretti frequently placed before him. For example, there
is a recognisably 'dialogic' structure comprising two contrasted melodies.
Sometimes this is adversarial as when, in Rosmonda d'Inghilterra., Donizetti
follows a crusty first member (Clifford) with a sinuous antiphon of entreaty
(Enrico). The act I duet between Enrico and Giovanna in Anna Bolena is no
less oppositional, its percussive, rapping motifs building up a stepped march
that represents Enrico's peremptory character, which Giovanna answers in
her more sinuous, wheedling way. Equally classifiable is the explorative
melody associated with moments of uncertainty. It will tend to show a
winding, upward momentum such as we find in the duet between Enrico
and Lucia, 'Ti rimprovera tacendo'. Then there are the propulsive tunes,
not infrequently associated with a kind of melodic epiieu.xis or geminatio,
the rhetorical terms for repeated words or phrases. In many cabalettas, the
melody comprises two repeated members (a Gestalt, as it were, for dwelling
on a topic), and then a descending skein of fioriture (stylized laugh of
triumph at its clarification). The cabaletta to Anna Bolena's first act aria
offers a case in point, and a variant version can be seen in Percy's cabaletta
in the same opera, where the epizeuxis (of a descending contour) is followed
by an ascending colon, signifying his expectation of love to come. For other
effects of propulsion, we could note how often a triplet gusset will follow
iterative, long-note sentences in order to concertina in some resistant energy.
The stretta ('Vieni, vieni') in act i of Parisina illustrates this.
Finally, we must bear in mind the importance of dance forms to the idiom
of the primo ottocento, and the way in which certain kinds of movement
create 'associationist' vehicles of feeling. In Verdi this alignment of dance
and mood is evident in his early and middle periods, but the habit goes back
to the primo ottocento and beyond that to the Baroque period, as witness the
sarabande 's use for moments of grieving meditation - 'Lascia ch'io pianga'
in Handel's Rinaldo (1711) - or the gavotte's for light-hearted rejoicing 'Freely I to Heav'n resign' in the same composer s Jephtha (1751). Donizetti
is especially fond of the Lndler for tender, inward moments - the even
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distribution of its three stresses distinguishing it from the accented vigour
of such waltzes as that employed for the vaudeville-finale of Don Pasquale.
Maria Stuarda's 'O nube che Heve' provides a typical instance of the
Donizettian Lndler, its tentativeness further enhanced by its melodic sidling from the dominant. Parisina's 'Ah! tu sai,' and its matching moment
in the economy of that opera, Ugo's 'Io l'amai,' likewise show how the
composer conscripts this dance for effects of gentle innocence. In this he was
clearly influenced by its pastoral character, as Verdi realised when, following
Donizetti's lead, he used it for 'Ai nostri monti' in // trovatore and 'Parigi, o
cara' inZa traviata. The 'topical' function of the Donizettian march, waltz,
barcarole, galop and polka would likewise reward investigation.
Defending the value of genre criticism, Graham Hough has drawn
attention to the way in which broad taxonomical issues eventually resolve
into smaller issues of form, and how description and nomenclature combine
to form a topographical map of any one genre:
In abstraction the theory of kinds is no more than a system of classification. It is given
content and positive value by filling each of its pigeon-holes with adequate description
and adequate theory. And much has been, by collaboration, largely unplanned, of
generations of scholars and critics. Some portions of this Linnean scheme have been very
adequately filled out [...]. Other areas remain relatively empty. It is possible to feel that
the morphology of lyric poetry is still very incomplete; we have lacked until recently an
adequate theory of comedy; and prose fiction as a whole was simply left out of the old
classification.'""

Generic nomenclature necessarily involves a naming of kinds: for example,

the ode, and, beyond that, the sub-kinds - dirge, elegy, threnody and
epinicion. But taxonomy ought also to include a 'naming of parts' to swap
the telescope for the microscope, and search further into the constitution
of these identifiable structures, classifying the topoi that comprise them,
the topia from which they derive, and the melomorphemes that constitute
their 'molecular' bedrock. Having for many decades lacked the intellectual
respectability of classical opera and Wagnerian Tonkunst, the primo ottocento has, until recently, suffered a Cinderella fate akin to that of the 'prose
fiction' which, as Hough points out, neo-classical genre theory failed even
to take into account. I hope this article has sketched out one possible way of
Itcn'tici^m {London, i^6(,\ reclaiming these operas from the scorn of 'good taste ', and of showing how
p.84.
complex and detailed their formulaic structures can often prove to be.

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