Bert Bailey wrote:
>I'd have to side with John Deacon here. While it may be a perfect
>translation, it's a damned unpoetic utterance. There's only so much
>that can be done with that matter-of-fact English to bring out any poetic
>'juice' that the meaning requires. Unlike it, the Italian "Ella giammai
>m'amo...", much like the Spanish "Ella jamas me amo..." lend themselves
>perfectly to being wailed with anguish.
Except that in my recording (Raimondi/Giulini) Raimondi doesn't wail; he
sings the words in a mood of weary resignation...very effectively.
>Even the rhythms in French can make for highly dramatic enunciation, and
>the phrase lends itself beautifully to exploding on that final, punctuating
>"PA."
Except that he doesn't do any exploding on my CD of excerpts from the
French version (Raimondi/Abaddo). Including the muted final "e" of "elle"
he sings the same five syllables of "Elle ne m'aime pas" with the same
unforced dignity that he employs in the Italian text.
>That English phrase is a clunker -- or, at best, an accurate
>description of her feelings.
Reading this after I had already replied to another post disagreeing w/ me
on this, let me elaborate a bit more. In the original 5-Act opera as it
was first performed in French, the king's young bride-to-be had thought she
would be given in marriage, not to the king, but to his son, as part of a
peace settlement, an arrangement both she and the king's son had looked
forward to w/ eager anticipation. Upon learning the actual arrangement,
the young lovers yield to the demands of duty and the obligations of state
and the young princess weds, not the prince she loves, but his widowed
father, who knows nothing about any of this. The line of text we're
quibbling about is the one the king utters when he discovers that his wife
not only doesn't love him now, but never has. Perhaps, as Bert notes, the
full poignancy of this discovery can be conveyed in how the text is
"wailed" in Italian or the final "pas" of "elle ne m'aime pas" is exploded
by the singer. For me the words say it all much more eloquently than any
histrionic wailing or explosion. And so does the literal translation into
English, which we can take in almost instantaneously if we don't understand
the Italian, before letting the music convey to us, at greater, but ever
appropriate, length (the aria lasts for over ten wondrously stirring
minutes), the king's bitter disillusionment.
Walter Meyer
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