Ponchielli, Amilcare

Preface

Ponchielli, Amilcare – Recitativo and Danza delle ore from ‘La Gioconda’

(b. Paderno Fasolaro near Cremona, 21 August 1834 – d. Milan, 16 January 1886)

(1875-80)

Recitativo (380)
Danza delle ore:
Le ore dell’aurora. Andante poco mosso (p. 384) – Sortono le ore del giorno (p. 387) –
Danza delle ore del giorno. Moderato (p. 389) – Sortono le ore della sera (p. 394) –
Sortono le ore della notte (p. 397) –Andante poco mosso (p. 401) –
Allegro vivacissimo (p. 408)

Preface
Even Giuseppe Verdi felt that Amilcare Ponchielli was the most gifted composer of Italy’s younger generation. A military bandmaster in Piacenza and Cremona, Ponchielli left behind seventy-five original works and 218 arrangements for wind band. But the success of his revised opera I promessi sposi (after Manzoni) in 1872 brought him to the fore as a composer of opera. In 1874 he and Antonio Ghislanzoni (1824-1893), the librettist of Verdi’s Aida, created the gloomy Lithuanian opera I lituani. Then he brought off what was incontestably his most resounding feat: La Gioconda, a dramma lirica on a libretto by Arrigo Boïto (1842-1918), who based it on Victor Hugo’s drama Angelo, tyran de Padoue (1835), using the pseudonym Tobia Gorria as a thin disguise for his true identity. The première, given in Milan’s La Scala on 18 October 1876, was a stunning success. Nevertheless, by 1880 Ponchielli had subjected the work to five decisive revisions, each of which was tried out and further augmented in the performance that followed. For example, the opera’s musical climax, the Act III finale with the Danza delle ore, was revised in 1879 for a performance at the Politeama Genovese, Genoa, on 27 November of that year. The success of the final version on 12 February 1880, again at La Scala, completely eclipsed that of the first, and over the next few years La Gioconda began its worldwide triumphal progress, proving to be a veritable goldmine for the publisher Ricordi. To the present day it has held its place in the repertoires of the world’s great opera houses. In the few years remaining to him, Ponchielli was unable, in everything he attempted, to match the popularity of this opera and has gone down in history as a prime example of a “one-work composer.” …

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