An Analytical Research On Different Singing Editions Of "UNA Furtiva Lagrima"

As the famous writer and music critic, Romain Rolland, reminded us, human beings could not have appreciated even half of the artistic thoughts during this century without operas. It was via operas that we could indeed understand that depth of the sense beauty of the time. The development of operas has played an important role in human history, especially in musical history, which, together with instrumental musical forms like symphonic music, contribute a lot to the glorious development road of world music.Influenced by the thoughts of freedom and equality during the Renaissance, operas, with their unique artistic charm, ascended on the stage of history in Italy, a holy land for classical music at the end of16th century. Mozart, Rossini, Donizetti and Verdi were musical giants rose in such historical background.Among them, the Italian composer and representative figure on operas, Donizetti, deserves our special focus. He is famous for his quick creating ability and productivity, with no less than70operas such as "L’Elisir d’Amore","Don Pasquale" and "Lucie de Lammermoor". He is also one of the representative composers of romantic operatic school and is known as the big three of Bel Canto, together with G-Rossini and V-Bellini."L’Elisir d’Amore"(1832) is one typical Italian Opera buffa by Donizetti and is one of his most beloved operas."Una Furtiva Lagrima" is an aria sang by Molino in the second act, which is also seen as the most famous section of "L’Elisir d’Amore". Tenors from different countries like to sing this aria for it is beautiful as well as challenging. It is not an exaggeration to say that most famous tenors in the world have performed this masterpiece in public since it was created over200years ago. Besides, many foreign scholars have kept on conducting researches on this charming comic opera and have gain a great deal of distinguished achievements.With the global communication and development of art and culture, operas were brought into China last century and since then they attracted great many eyes of appreciation as well as academic researches.Yet, as this thesis finds via searching several academic databases, the focus of most Chinese scholars stands on analysis of Donizetti’s music style or even the history studies on romantic operas, while research papers on "L’Elisir d’Amore" are still scarce, let alone systematic analysis on "Una Furtiva Lagrima". To make a response to the problem found and thus contributes to intensive studies of this splendid opera, this thesis unfolds an analytic research on it from different angles, namely, the composer, the creating background, the works, different singing editions and their inspirations, singing performances and historical assess. To make it more clear, this thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter contains research questions, object, methods and innovative points. The second chapter is mainly about the composer, Donizetti, the creating background of "Una Furtiva Lagrima" and its main content. The third chapter introduces some background of "Una Furtiva Lagrima", and then analyses in details on its melody, melodic, mode, tonality, musical form structure and texture of its accompany. The fourth chapter concentrates on some typical singing editions at home and abroad with its first three parts introducing their singers, significance and analyzing them in details, the last part what we can learn form them. The last chapter indicates the author’s own appreciation on "Una Furtiva Lagrima" on the basis of the previous chapters and then gives his evaluation on the work as well as its different singing editions and his prediction for its future development.