The source for Il trovatore is the Spanish play El Trovador by Antonio García Gutierrez, a great admirer and literary follower of Victor Hugo. Gutierrez wrote the play in 1836, and on the heels of negative reaction to first readings of the work he decided to enlist in the army. But during the time that he was away the actor Antonio Guzmán read it and committed himself to producing the work at a public theatre. Once it was seen on stage it was appreciated as a great play and compared to the works of Calderón and even Shakespeare. Like many 19th century Romantic dramas, the play is a sprawling melodrama that demands that the audience understand and appreciate rich historical detail. In an interesting biographical note, the playwright had to go AWOL from the army in order to see Guzmán’s production of El Trovador. He was greatly embarrassed to be called to the stage after the successful performance, dressed in his army uniform and being in a place where he shouldn’t have been! (Gutierrez is also the source for Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra.)
El Trovador is a play only a Spaniard could have written. It is filled with strange and bizarre occurrences, not least of which is the story of the gypsy Azucena who, 20 years prior to the curtain going up, threw her own son into a bonfire thinking that it was the son of the villain Count di Luna. Manrique (Manrico in the opera), Eleonora (Leonora in the opera) and the Count are rather stock characters, a standard hero, heroine and antagonist. But their situations and actions set them apart from standard characters: Manrique and the Count are brothers unknown to each other, Azucena plays them against each other for revenge for her baby’s (and her mother’s) death, and Eleonora, a noble woman of high moral standards, loves Manrique so much that as the drama develops she becomes more and more immersed in a life of sin. After she takes the veil in a convent she renounces her religious vows, follows her lover, and in the end commits suicide by poison.
Verdi’s librettist for Il trovatore was Salvatore Cammarano, who had also written the libretti for Alzira, La battaglia di Legnano and Luisa Miller for the composer, as well as Lucia di Lammermoor for Donizetti. It was this librettist’s chore to take the original Spanish play and make it conform to operatic structure. But Cammarano’s most challenging duty was to create a libretto that would be acceptable to the Neapolitan and, eventually, the Roman censors (Leonora’s leaving the convent to join her lover and then committing suicide would never have been acceptable to the strict censors in Naples or Rome!) Cammarano also had to be willing to accede to the wishes of a composer known for making extraordinary demands on his librettists.
Cammarano’s language for opera is ‘high’ Italian and he was particularly concerned about how various words and phrases would sound. As a librettist for composers like Donizetti, Pacini and Mercadante, he was well attuned to the bel canto style of musical sensitivity to text and so we can assume that he worked very closely with Verdi in coming up with the definitive text of Il trovatore. Although Verdi pushed him to come up with unusual forms and to experiment with operatic structure in the way that Rigoletto stretched traditional operatic formulas, Cammarano eventually came up with a work that emphasized those same traditional structures: the cavatina, the cabaletta, and the standard ensembles. So despite the fact that Rigoletto (1850) and La traviata (1853) experiment with standard opera forms, Il trovatore (1853) is a more conventional piece that follows the traditions of mid-19th century Italian opera.
The libretto of this opera is often condemned as being the height of operatic silliness. One of the reasons for this is that Cammarano, in editing the El Trovador for singing on the opera stage, had to leave out much of the political detail that provided background for the play (a civil war in fifteenth century Spain). But the libretto is perfectly understandable if read carefully and is certainly no more outlandish than some of the involved stories found in today’s soap operas and telenovelas.
Cammarano died while finishing the libretto for Il trovatore, and it was left to the Neapolitan Leone Emanuele Bardare to complete. Verdi felt the loss of Cammarano deeply, as evidenced by this note to a friend in July, 1852: “I was thunderstruck by the sad news of Cammarano. I can’t describe the depth of my sorrow. I read of his death not in a letter from a friend but in a stupid theatrical journal. You loved him as much as I did, and will understand the feelings I cannot find words for. Poor Cammarano. What a loss.” Verdi paid Cammarano’s widow a generous fee after the poet’s death, and ensured with his publisher that Cammarano’s name would be the only one credited in the published score.