Music history from an interdisciplinary and cultural perspective: Giuseppe Verdi’s trovatore in primary school
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Silvia Cancedda [1]
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[1] Istituto Comprensivo di Pianoro, Bologna
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- Localización: Music education and didactic materials / coord. por Rosa María Vicente Álvarez, Carol Gillanders, Jesús Rodríguez Rodríguez, Guilherme Romanelli, Jessica Pitt, 2020, ISBN 978-84-122480-2-9, págs. 321-338
- Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
Thanks to its interdisciplinary nature, opera makes an excellent didactic resource, as it operates in different disciplinary domains, especially historical and linguistic subjects. Despite this interdisciplinary nature, we should never lose sight of the central role of Music as a discipline. Opera, however, is also a ‘school of feelings’, since it provides a safe environment in which to experiment with passions and conflicts, of which children are not always entirely aware, and therefore to help them recognize, and simultaneously distance themselves, from these situations. The didactic application described in this paper, which was carried out in a few primary school classes, was inspired by Lorenzo Bianconi’s essay Il Trovatore di Verdi e Cammarano da García Gutiérrez (Bianconi 2016), in which the author examines the passage from the 1836 play El Trovator by A. García Gutiérrez to Verdi and Cammarano’s opera, created in Rome in 1853. The leading themes of the opera, superstition, prejudice and revenge, also provide the main topics, on which the didactic work focuses. The musical representation of the tragic story of Azucena, the gypsy woman, allows children to experience, through a twofold process of identification and distancing, the power that these feelings exert on humans, and the tragic consequences they can lead to. Finally, working with Verdi’s opera not only allows the exploration of opera as a genre, the bare bones of an opera, its voices, structures and poetic text, but also gives children the opportunity to ‘create history’, by opening a window on two cultures, Italian and Spanish, and on a particular period of their development, albeit in very general terms
