Tre giorni son che Nina

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Tre giorni son che Nina (common shortened alternative titles are Tre giorni or simply Nina ) is one of the most famous arias of the Neapolitan baroque opera . In contrast to most other pieces of this genre, the Tre giorni , which was probably composed around 1740, remaineda popular, often interpreted and arranged repertoire number in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The aria is often cited in a rather speculative way as a model for musically or lyrically similar works of very different composers, including Max Bruch's arrangement of the Jewish prayer song Kol Nidrei , op.47 , or Paul McCartney's pop ballads Yesterday and Michelle . The comparatively well-known Giovanni Battista Pergolesi is usually given as the composer of the aria on commercial sheet music editions by music publishers , although this attribution has been highly controversial for many decades.

text

The text associated with the aria since the mid-18th century reads as follows:

 Tre giorni son che Nina
 Aletto se n'esta.
 [Il sonno l'assassina
 Svegliatela, per pietà!]

 Pifferi, cimbali, timpani
 Svegliate mi Ninetta
 Acciò non dorma più!

 [E mentre il sior dottore
 A visitarla va,
 Ninetta, per amore,
 In letto te n'esta.]
 

 It's been three days since Nina
 lies down in bed.
 [Sleep brings her to death,
 For heaven's sake, wakes her up!]

 Whistles and cymbals and
 bangs , my little rabbit wakes up,
 So that she no longer sleeps!

 [And while the doctor
 comes to treat you,
 Ninetta, for my sake
 you stay in bed.]
 

The situation described - the deeply worried lover pleads for the recovery of his obviously seriously ill lover - is a topos of baroque poetry with which the public at the time was well acquainted. The ancient myth of Orpheus and Eurydice , which was particularly popular in baroque music theater, serves as a model . The general awareness of this " affect " also explains why the aria could be incorporated into numerous works of the Italian Baroque as set pieces. This approach was welcomed by the audience, but it turned out that in retrospect it was extremely difficult to identify the original composer.

Traditionally, as the text suggests, the aria is performed by a male voice, corresponding to the role of the “youthful lover”, usually a tenor . Recourse to elements of the various operas that use the aria, the singer is often portrayed as a painter whose model is the sick (or possibly already deceased) Nina.

A completely binding version of the text has not emerged. Some passages are often left out completely, while others are repeated. It is also common that the text is performed by singers who actually come from southern Italy (e.g. Enrico Caruso ) with a more or less strong dialectal influence, while interpreters who are not from the Mezzogiorno or from Italy at all use the words rather standard Pronounce Italian.

music

Since an original version cannot be proven, it is not possible to make reliable statements about the original key or the obligatory accompanying figures . The fact that the pace has to be slow is a result not only of the performance practice that has been passed down , but also of the emotional content of the text. Like a folk song (which the aria is actually often mistaken for), Tre giorni has been passed down almost exclusively as a melody. This fits in with the great popularity that the opera genre enjoyed in all, including the less educated and musically “sensitive” layers of the population of Naples. Similar to a folk song, there are numerous small deviations of a melodic and rhythmic nature in the traditional versions.

Audio file / audio sample The first bars of Tre giorni son che Nina . The piano accompaniment comes from an arrangement of the aria for violoncello by Gaston Borch around 1900. ? / i

The haunting simplicity of the melody was attractive to the singers of the 18th century not least because the music-making ideal of that time not only allowed the interpreter to improvise and virtuoso embellishment of the given material in the sense of bel canto , but actually required it.

The assignment to the style of the Neapolitan School , which was beyond question for contemporaries and was of considerable importance in the identification of the possible composer, cannot be made plausible on the basis of the melody alone. Obviously, the “externalities” of the interpretation mentioned above and lost today played the decisive role.

Conversely, it was precisely the relative stylistic independence of the aria that ensured its success far beyond the end of baroque music.

The authorship problem

Music publishers and promoters have long shied away from ascribing such a popular piece as Tre giorni to anonymous on printed music and program slips in a factually appropriate, but not commercially attractive, way . There are several pseudepigraphic ascriptions, all of which are based on argumentatively and musically-historically questionable assumptions.

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi

Idealized portrait of Pergolesi

The claimed authorship of Pergolesi lacks any scientifically comprehensible basis. There are no contemporary sources that relate the composer in any way to the aria.

The attribution is essentially based on two factors: On the one hand, this is the extraordinary fame of the premature deceased, which brought about the fact that his life and artistic achievements were soon idealized into the legendary transfigured state. As one of the very few musicians of the Italian Baroque, he remained a household name for later generations, so the attribution of Tre giorni can, under certain circumstances, be less a deliberate deception than a kind of naive makeshift or a practical effect of the “ Matthew principle “To be interpreted.

On the other hand, when discussing other possible authors, it is repeatedly pointed out that they themselves or their operas in question only became known when Tre giorni was already enjoying widespread use.

Vincenzo Llimitedio Ciampi

Vincenzo Lenzenio Ciampi (born April 2, 1719 in Piacenza , † March 30, 1762 in Venice ) was a very successful instrumentalist and composer in his time, who was known beyond the borders of Italy, primarily as a writer of operas, but also of Chamber music and other genres. Ciampi is primarily considered the original author of Tre giorni because his opera buffa I tre cicis bei ridicoli, written in 1749, sensibly integrates the aria into the dramaturgical and narrative sequence of the plot, which is not the case with the other stage works that use the piece can be said.

Doubts about Ciampi's authorship stem mainly from the fact that he himself (as his biographical data also suggests) is by no means part of the Neapolitan, but rather the Venetian school of composers.

Giovanni Paisiello

Paisiello on the harpsichord , with the score by Nina, o la pazza d'amore , painting by Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun , 1791

Giovanni Paisiello can also only be associated with the aria in the most superficial way. The biographical facts alone speak against his authorship, since the person born in 1740 must have written the piece at an early age, for which there are no indications (Paisiello only seriously took up his musical training as a teenager). Paisiello's opera Nina, o la pazza d'amore uses Tre giorni's melody as a quote because the protagonists have the same names, and it can also be assumed that in this way the composer lived up to certain expectations on the part of the audience.

Rinaldo di Capua

Rinaldo di Capua (* around 1705, † around 1780) was also a respected representative of Neapolitan opera in his time. Tre giorni seems to take up his Zingara from the 1750s in a similar way as later quoting Paisiello.

However, the detailed knowledge of Rinaldo's work is still too incomplete to permit more precise statements. At least, given the current state of knowledge, there seems to be nothing to suggest that Rinaldo is the actual composer of the aria.

Impact history

Enrico Caruso

First and foremost, Tre giorni remained in the repertoire as a masterpiece for tenors throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. In addition to Enrico Caruso , the countless interpreters also include Luciano Pavarotti , Alfredo Kraus and Plácido Domingo .

The musical character of the piece, i.e. the suggestive yet vague Italianità associated with it, as well as the sentimental content of the story told, also meant that the bourgeois salon music that emerged in the 19th century adopted the aria as a template for instrumental arrangements.

The simplicity of the original melody and its vocal character stimulated many arrangers; popular instruments were and are mainly the piano and the violoncello . The spectrum of the technical difficulty ranges from technically very simple sentences that are designed for schoolchildren to brilliant interpretations for virtuosos.

Tre giorni uses melodic means that have been taken up again and again in the further course of music history. These include, in particular, the concise sigh motif in the first bars and the equally striking fanfare motif (at the point in the text Pifferi, cimbali, timpani ). This fact has led to the aria being named in an associative way as a direct model for various later works. Such postulated “voting lines” rarely withstand critical scrutiny, but in Italy in particular in a more columnist context - such as CD booklets, magazine articles or radio moderations - attempts are made again and again for internationally particularly popular pieces of music to be originally plagiarized to "expose" Italian templates.

Remarks

  1. ↑ The classification of Tre giorni in the context of Pergolesi's opera Lo frate 'nnamorato is an afterthought that is based on nothing more than the role name of one of the protagonists (“Nina”).
  2. ↑ This tradition can be traced back at least to the 1920s, when the Ricordi publishing house managed to convince an American court that the hit Avalon (by Vincent Rose and Al Jolson ), which was extremely popular at the time, was a plagiarism of the Aria E lucevan le represent from Giacomo Puccini's Tosca actele.

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