Ponchielli, Amilcare

Amilcare Ponchielli – La Gioconda, dramma lirico in four acts (1875-1880)

(b. Paderno, 31 August 1834 – d. Milan, 16 January 1886)

Libretto by Arrigo Boïto after Victor Hugo’s play Angelo, tyran de Padoue

Preface

Asked in 1876 for his thoughts on Italy’s next generation of opera composers, Giuseppe Verdi was at no loss for an answer: “The one who can do the best is Ponchielli; but, alas! he is no longer young.” Verdi’s opinion has withstood the test of time: modern historians now regard Ponchielli as the leading figure in Italian opera (apart, of course, from the inimitable Bear of Busseto himself) between Verdi’s mid-career masterpieces and late nineteenth-century verismo. But no less telling was Verdi’s “alas!”: Ponchielli was indeed no longer young. Shy, kindly, with little of that urge toward self-promotion so essential to success in the theater, Ponchielli spent the largest part of his career as a provincial bandmaster in Piacenza and Cremona – hence his curiously large body of seventy-five compositions and 218 arrangements for wind band. But by the 1870s, following Verdi’s lapse into silence after Aïda (1871) and the success of his own revived Il promessi sposi (1872), Ponchielli was chosen by the great Milanese publishing house of Ricordi to be groomed as the new hope of Italian opera. He was soon brought together with Antonio Ghislanzoni (the celebrated librettist of Aïda) to write an opera on a remote northern European subject. The result, I lituani (“The Lithuanians,” 1874), proved to be an impressive but gloomy and demanding succès d’estime. Chastened by the muted response of the public, Ponchielli retreated into a conservative posture more native to his character:
“I believe that where the Italian public is concerned it’s vital not to make too much of the drama, otherwise you land yourself in rhythms that don’t arrest the attention, and you have to exploit the orchestra, and finally you need the kind of artist whom we don’t have today …

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