Violanta

SYNOPSIS

The story takes place against the backdrop of a Venetian carnival in the 15th century; the house of Simone Trovai, military commander of the Venetian Republic, is full of flowers, garlands and cheerful staff.  Meanwhile, Trovai calls his soldiers to order and asks his maids to search for his wife Violanta who he believes is attending the carnival.  However, rather than join the celebrations, she instead intends to find her arch enemy, Alfonso - the King of Naples’s son who previously abducted Violanta’s sister leading ultimately to her suicide - who has come to the city for the festival.  Violanta appears in a doorway, she flirts with the detested Alfonso as he moors his boat in front of the house. Violanta has hatched a plan: when she sings the carnival song, her husband will appear from his chamber and kill the abductor. But things turn out quite differently. Alfonso falls in love with Violanta and is willing to die for his past deeds, he speaks with great sincerity, profoundly moving Violanta with his honest protestations of love which awaken a passion in Violanta that she has never experienced in her loveless marriage with Simone. Violanta cannot bring herself to sing the carnival song which would reveal the presence of Alfonso, proclaims her love for him and pleads with her husband to spare him.  When Simone draws his dagger to stab his foe, she falls into the arms of her husband and dies.

COMMENTARY

After completing Der Ring des Polykrates, Korngold planned a second single-act opera which was to be a tragedy. Hans Müller-Einigen, a friend of his father Julius Korngold, provided the composer with the libretto based on a Renaissance drama. The artistic director of the Hoftheater in Munich was among the private audience of the first performance and subsequently arranged the first public performance of the opera in 1916. On a superficial level, the opera displays similarities with Italian post-Romantic operatic works such as Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana. The action in Violanta involves extreme passion and a brutal murder committed onstage taking place in a setting described in great detail with copious local colour. Korngold’s intoxicating work is however simultaneously a psychoanalytical opera in which the chief protagonist allows her previously suppressed passion to unfold. Violanta’s stifled emotions are depicted purely by the erotically charged music. Alfonso also has a dark secret which burdens his psyche: his mother died while giving birth to him. As a person constantly on the move, unable to form lasting relationships, he only finds true love with Violanta who can assuage his fear of death. Both Violanta and Alfonso free themselves from failing marriages and the constraints of class-oriented positions. Their mutual love, unleashed like a storm, is signal of freedom – even if it ultimately brings death.
The relationship between love and death is also expressed in the carnival song which can be heard throughout the entire work. It sounds exuberant when sung by the festive crowd, but threatening when performed by Violanta. What is more, is it not also a sign of the violence to come that is revealed right from the start? “Even the dead from their graves will dance today cheek to cheek…”