La Gioconda

“ Amilcare Ponchielli (1834-1886) owed much to both Verdi and Boito, and his best work, 'La Gioconda,' which was produced in 1876, bears unmistakable traces of the influence of 'Mefistofele' and 'Aida.' The libretto of 'La Gioconda' is founded upon a gloomy play by Victor Hugo, 'Angelo, Tyran de Padoue.' La Gioconda, a Venetian street singer, buys the safety of her lover Enzo from the spy Barnaba with her own hand, only to find that the former uses his new-found liberty to prosecute an intrigue with another woman. ”

“ Lest by thy gentle hand be hurled
The mortal bolt that leaves no scar.
'So prays upon his aching knee
Thy humble vassal, once the fear
Of Christendom, but now—woe's me!—
One whose wild prayers Love will not hear,
Who treads the earth and has no home—
Giulio Pandolfo, Duke of Rome.'
Hilda.
Gioconda, what a lover!
Gioconda.
So I think— His brain a dictionary, his blood mere ink.
Hilda.
Oh, but I mean how fine a lover! Would
That mine could pen a letter half so good!
Gioconda.
How does he write?
Hilda.
Write! Would you deign to call That 'writing'—this illiterate blotted scrawl? ”

“ Duse possesses the subtle hands of that painter's Lisa Gioconda, and as the motive of D'Annunzio's play springs from a pair of hands—its original title was The Tragedy of the Beautiful Hands—Signora Duse makes of her fingers ten eloquent signals.
The opportunity for theatric climax is rare in La Gioconda; but when it does come the effect is strong. A wife, whose love and devotion are slighted, dares to face her rival in the studio of the sculptor-husband. He has endeavoured desperately to wean himself from his passion for the model who posed as his masterpiece, a Sphinx. ”

“ In the first act the blind woman's prayer is set against a background composed of a gambling chorus and the wild whirl of the furlano, which ends abruptly with organ peals and a pious canticle—an effect repeated since in "Cavalleria Rusticana" and "Tosca." In the second act in the twinkling of an eye, Gioconda is transformed from a murderous devil into a protecting saint; in the third Laura's accents of mortal woe commingle with the sounds of a serenade in the distance, and the disclosure of a supposed murder is made at the climax of a ball ”

“ She tosses the pipe and stick off, left.
There! Did I play it well? You'd be my wife?
Hilda (sighing) .
My dear, you played old Harry to the life—
His gaucherie...
Gioconda.
His noble self-command...
Hilda.
The way he shifts his cane from hand to hand...
Gioconda.
A nervous trick that shows how much he feels...
Hilda.
All I know is—I'd have a man who kneels
And pours out passion in a style as rippling
As the best Swinburne—or at least as Kipling.
Gioconda. ”

“ Four years later Cleofonte Campanini came again to New York as conductor of his brother's company organized for the production of Verdi's "Otello."
On December 20th the one real novelty of Mr. Abbey's list had production. It was Ponchielli's "La Gioconda," with the following distribution of parts: La Gioconda, Mme. Nilsson; Laura Adorno, Mme. Fursch-Madi; La Cieca, Mme. Scalchi; Enzo Grimaldo, Signor Stagno; Barnaba, Signor Del Puente; Alvise Badiero, Signor Novara. Ponchielli's opera had been the principal novelty of the London season in the summer of 1883, where it was brought out by Mr. ”

“ The happiness of Enzo, who to elope with another man's wife cruelly breaks faith with a woman whose love for him is so strong that she gives her life to save his, is hardly a consummation that ought to be set down as justifying so many blotches and blains, pimples and pustules, on the face of human nature. Laura's treachery is to Gioconda as well as to her husband, and has no redeeming trait. In fact, the blind woman is the only character in the opera who has moral health, and she seems to have been brought in only that her sufferings might intensify the bloody character of Barnaba, the spy. ”

“ At Tortona I parted from the women, and hired the waggon which brought us the rest of the way. But I had done better, perhaps, to go with them to Milan, as Gioconda advised. For my money began to run low, and, save Milan, there was no large town on the road where I could sell another jewel. Yet here again Our Lady helped; for at Trecate I found the good priest, the brother of these Bavarelli, and he, having heard my tale, offered to travel to Milan and do my business. ”

“ HILDA. Gioconda, dear—good-bye!
(Standing in the middle of the stage, they take hands and kiss. Then they come to the front, left and right.)
So ends our fantasy—the slight design
Arisen and gone like sound in summer trees,
GIOCONDA. The burden such as every mind may seize—
That in all centuries life is goodly wine! ”

“ Mr. Hutton looked on in silence. The spectacle of Janet Spence evoked in him an unfailing curiosity. He was not romantic enough to imagine that every face masked an interior physiognomy of beauty or strangeness, that every woman's small talk was like a vapour hanging over mysterious gulfs. His wife, for example, and Doris; they were nothing more than what they seemed to be. But with Janet Spence it was somehow different. Here one could be sure that there was some kind of a queer face behind the Gioconda smile and the Roman eyebrows. ”

“ He comes! I'll take pearls as a last resort.
(Enter, left, GIOCONDA carrying a pipe and a walking-stick.)
GIOCONDA. Well, and how are you? In the pink, old sport?
HILDA. I'm glad to see you, Harry. Do sit down.
GIOCONDA. 'Some' heat to-day, what? Even here. In town
Perfectly awful. Got a match?
(She tries in vain to light the pipe from a match struck by HILDA.)
I say,
Old thing—you really look top-hole to-day.
[45] HILDA. Well, naturally: I knew that you were coming.
(GIOCONDA pulls at her pipe in silence, pokes the floor with her stick, and shifts it from hand to hand.) ”

“ Yours, Harry—with a nasty scar.
'P.S.—The cut's above the knee,
And won't be right just yet, I fear
Oh, and what price you marrying me?
Anything doing? Let me hear.
Ring up to-morrow, if you're home.
Where shall we do our bunk? To Rome?'
Now, wasn't that enough to make me mad?
It is a shame! It really is too bad!
'Dear Hilda'—plain 'dear'! And what girl could marry
A man who, when proposing, ends 'yours, Harry'?
Gioconda.
I love his downright manner. In my mind
I see him, a tall figure; and, behind,
His old two-seater. Yes, I see him plainly—
Close-cropped—
Hilda. ”

“ Our feeling that the smile of Monna Lisa del Gioconda awakened in the man the memory of the mother of his first years of childhood would thus be confirmed from another work of Leonardo. Following the production of Monna Lisa, Italian artists depicted in Madonnas and prominent ladies the humble dipping of the head and the peculiar blissful smile of the poor peasant girl Caterina, who brought to the world the noble son who was destined to paint, investigate, and suffer. ”

“ For if the smile of Gioconda had conjured up in him the memory of his mother, we would naturally understand that he was first urged to produce a glorification of motherhood, and to give back to her the smile he found in that prominent lady. We may thus allow our interest to glide over from the portrait of Monna Lisa to this other hardly less beautiful picture, now also in the Louvre.
Saint Anne with the daughter and grandchild is a subject seldom treated in the Italian art of painting; at all events Leonardo's representation differs widely from all that is otherwise known. ”

“ Reality doesn't always come up to the ideal, you know. But that doesn't make me believe any the less in the ideal. Indeed, I believe in it passionately the ideal of a matrimony between two people in perfect accord. I think it's realisable. I'm sure it is."
He paused significantly and looked at her with an arch expression. A virgin of thirty-six, but still unwithered; she had her charms. And there was something really rather enigmatic about her. Miss Spence made no reply but continued to smile. There were times when Mr. Hutton got rather bored with the Gioconda. He stood up. ”

“ But she had no boat; Joconda could not give her one; and when it was stormy weather the men put her back, and would not let her go with them, because she was a child, because she would be a woman. Yes; she understood as she thought of the boat; she understood that it was very bad to be a woman.
Joconda broke in on her thoughts.
'Wild bird of sea and cloud,' she said more tenderly than she had ever spoken, 'you are a stormy petrel, but there may come a storm too many—and I am old. I have done my best, but that is little. If you were a lad, one would not be so uneasy. ”

“ Joconda was always anxious and troubled lest anyhow she had missed the way, and done less than she might in the fulfilling of Saturnino's trust. The man was but a galley-slave, a thief, a murderer; but Joconda was faithful to him as though he had been a king.
She was always anxious. The Mastarna, of whom there were none living save this child and the galley-slave, had all died by violent deaths, the deaths of hunters, of smugglers, or of brigands; of Serapia's people she knew nothing, but report had spoken of that dead woman as of a beautiful light voluptuous fool. ”

“ Then, apparently satisfied, he let her draw near the child, who was sleeping: a lovely creature, half naked, with long black lashes lying on cheeks like mountain rose-leaves, and loose thick curls like rings of amber.
'It is a woman child; so much the worse,' said Joconda, looking down on it.
If it had been a male, it would have been much easier for her; a boy could soon have run about and done something for his daily bread in the boats, or with the mules, or in the firewoods. However, she remembered that, be it what it would, she had promised Mastarna. ”

“ For men and women do not like pity that interferes with their livelihood.
'Thou art a strange one!' said Joconda many a time, for the splendid, abundant, daring health and strength of the child seemed strange there, in those pale fever mists, amidst those pallid, inert populations. She was good to the child, but she was afraid of her. The crimes of the Mastarna men seemed to her fancies to hover, like a cloud of guilt, above this innocent head. The blood that coursed so buoyantly in those blue veins was the blood of an assassin and a robber. Joconda could not forget that. ”

“ The people would make an idol of their hero's offspring, and the child, as she grew older, would be restless and perturbed if she heard that her father had been sent by his judges to pass his life as a galley-slave on Gorgona.
Joconda feared no scorn and unkindness on the score of her birth for the child, if that birth were known; on the contrary, she feared the vanity and the evil passions that, with the knowledge of the blood of the Mastarna in her veins, might by public sentiment be engendered in her.
She would be the child of a hero, almost of a martyr, in the esteem of Maremma. ”

“ I can do all that they can. I can row better than many, and sail and steer; I can dive too, and I know what to do with the nets; if I had a boat of my own you would see what I could do.'
'All that is very well,' said Joconda, with a little nod. 'I do not say it is not. But you have not the boat of your own, that is just it; that is what women always suffer from; they have to steer, but the craft is someone else's and the haul too.'
The child looked at her from under bent brows. ”

“ Art in danger? Speak, speak!”
“Nay, here is no harm for me, Joconde. And I am hither come for sake of a poor Fool that is braver than the bravest—one did jeopardise his foolish life for sake of a maid, wherefore I, Hugo, do give him life. Take now this wallet, within is good store of gold and better—a potent charm to close all watchful eyes. Hist, Joconde, and mark me well! Ranulph o' the Axe is a mighty drinker—to-night, drawn by fame of thy wit, he cometh with his fellows. This money shall buy them wine, in the wine cast this powder so shall they sleep and thou go free.” ”

“ A child was no rare treasure, and there was nothing strange in a lone one being placed with a lone woman who was known to have a little money secured and hidden somewhere. Plenty of people along the coast would have been willing and glad to let Joconda adopt their children, would she have taken them. So without more comment or inquiry the child and the dog were domiciled at the old stone house by the pier in Santa Tarsilla, and there grew and throve, as they best might, in an air that to many was death. ”

“ No; he is gone as he came. I tell you I want no one. If I did, what would that be to you? I do not know why you torment me. I loved Joconda, but, I told you before, you have nothing of her. You are rich and she was poor; your people forgot her all her life long, and I do not see why you should think of her now. As for me, I am well and I need nothing ”

“ San Giacinto stood looking at him in silence, beginning to comprehend what had happened, and really distressed that his comparatively harmless stratagem should have caused so much trouble. He looked at things from a lower point of view than Giovanni, but he was a very human man, after all. It was hard for him to believe that his cousin could have really suspected Corona of loving Gouache; but Giovanni's behaviour left no other explanation. ”

“ Where the streets narrow, the people flatten themselves against the buildings, then come forward again, like waters rushing, receding, rushing.
Giorgio sways along on his mount like a sailor on a flat-bottom boat. The paddling gait of the warhorse is never in step with the beat of the drum; it gives him a seasick feeling. Or is the churning in his stomach a mixture of fear and joy? He glances back at Gaudenzia. She is jibbing her head, actually lifting the groom off his feet as if he were a puppet on a string. She too wants the race to start, and even now wants Giorgio's hand on her leadstrap. ”