— Teatro Nuovo

Boucheron: Sonetto

The sonnet has been such an important part of poetry, at least from the Sicilian School of the 13th century down to Rainer Maria Rilke and Robert Frost in the 20th and beyond, that at first glance we might be surprised how small a role it played in the flowering of the “art song” in the 19th. But composing music for a sonnet isn’t easy. First of all, its nature is to go from somewhere to somewhere else, both in thought and in metrical structure, whereas the default setting for music - especially for Italian vocal music - is to return whence it came.

The most celebrated Italian sonnets are those of Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374), whose Canzioniere (originally entitled in Latin Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, meaning fragments composed in the vernacular) comprises 366 poems of unrequited love for Laura (probably Laura de Noves, though she has never been firmly identified). Three hundred seventeen of the poems are in sonnet form, and even today most Italians know at least one or two of them by memory. The book’s dividing point is the death of Laura; Petrarch’s outpouring of verse continued in her memory. Our sonnet is from the second part.

Renaissance and early Baroque composers set several items from the Canzoniere in madrigal form, in which there is nearly infinite freedom to repeat text, and in which text is neither delivered nor heard in the straightforward sense that would soon come to be demanded by the solo vocal repertory. Once recitative, aria, and Lied had been established, few composers tried Petrarch. Haydn made one attempt, pressing the well-known “Solo e pensoso” somewhat awkwardly into the slow-fast model then current for opera arias. Schubert, a composer comfortable with musical sprawl, addressed three sonnets in youthful settings that fall just short of coherence. Liszt, who was not just comfortable with sprawl but uncomfortable without it, set three others at the height of his powers; these are the only Petrarch settings frequently heard in performance today.

Raimondo Boucheron (1800-1876) was a Torinese composer best remembered as an academic. He published two influential books, Philosophy of Music and The Science of Harmony Explained in its Relation To Human Nature, contributed numerous articles to the Gazzetta musicale di Milano, and produced various practical exercises in counterpoint and composition. Verdi tapped him to compose the 'Confutatis' and 'Oro Supplex' of the Requiem Mass for Rossini that he organized in 1868-69.

In the context described above, Boucheron’s achievement in “Che fai? Che pensi?” is impressive: using the dramatic gestures and melodic vocabulary of Bel Canto opera, but foregoing any element of reprise, he follows concisely the progression of Petrarch’s logic, with no repetition of text until the very end. One difficulty is finding the four-bar phrase shapes that music generally requires within or around the long lines of the classic endecasillabo (eleven-syllable verse). Boucheron discovers these where he can without forcing the declamation, and where he cannot, handles the exceptions with elegant naturalness. A sonnet will never yield a “song” or an “aria” in the conventional sense, but Boucheron’s piece joins the small group that allow Italian music to commune with one of the peaks of Italian verse.

We give the text here in the somewhat modernized Italian that Boucheron used:

Che fai? Che pensi? Che pur dietro guardi
nel tempo, che tornar non pote omai?
Anima sconsolata, che pur vai
giungendo legne al foco ove tu ardi?

Le soävi parole e i dolci sguardi
ch’ad un ad un descritti e dipinti hai
son levati da terra; ed è, ben sai,
qui ricercarli, intempestivo, e tardi.

Deh, non rinnovellar quel che n’ancide;
non seguir più pensier vago, fallace,
ma saldo e certo, che a buon fin ne guide.

Cerchiamo il ciel, se nulla qui ne piace;
ché mal per noi quella beltà si vide,
se viva e morta ne dovea tor pace.

What are you doing, what are you thinking,
to look back on time gone by?
Disconsolate soul, why do you pile
more wood on the fire that is burning you?

The fair words and sweet glances
that you once described and painted
have been taken from the world; you know
that it is too late to look for them here.

Pray do not renew that which destroys you;
do not follow a false and tempting thought,
but a solid one that guides us to good:

Let us seek Heaven, if naught below can
please; because that beauty does us ill,
if both in life and death it robs us of peace.

Bel Canto Collection

Boucheron: Sonetto