Silent final vowels in Italian opera

When I took singing classes in college, I noted that final vowels are often omitted in Italian words, presumably so the word will scan properly. Mozart did a lot of this in the libretto for Don Giovanni, for example. This made it easier to understand something I noticed in the dialog of the Marx Brothers’ movie A Night at the Opera. Specifically, the operatic impresario Hermann Gottlieb (Siegfried Rumann), speaking to Mrs. Claypool (Margaret Dumont) in Groucho’s presence, mentions a singer who he says is “the greatest tenor since Caru.” Perhaps a mechanical fault caused the last syllable in “Caruso” to fade out, but much later he says something else I can’t ascribe to that. Policemen are chasing Harpo backstage, and he eludes them by swinging on the backdrop ropes like Tarzan on vines. This causes backdrops to rise and fall in view of the puzzled audience, horrifying Gottlieb and maddening the conceited tenor Rodolfo Lassparri (Walter Woolf King). One backdrop is the deck of a battleship, and Gottlieb moans, "A battleship in Il Trovator[e]!" (the “e” left out, that is.)
So my question is: Are final vowels routinely omitted in Italian opera wherever they may occur, or merely to make the lyrics scan?

Not just opera, but Italian song in general.

Ma 'natu sole, 'cchiu bello_ohinè
O sole mio, sta 'nfronte_a_te

Where I used underscore, the printed lyrics have a curved line connecting successive vowels to show elision. Two vowels smooshed into one syllable. Pretty much one vowel takes over another. This is for scansion. But in several Italian dialects, final -e becomes a schwa sound (like in German), and can easily be dropped. In some Italian dialects, spoken final vowels fade out into nothingness. Listen to Marlon Brando in The Freshman, when he orders “*du’ espress’ * [two espressos].”

In French, the unaccented final -e is not pronounced in speaking, but in verse and singing, it counts as a schwa syllable. This -e is considered the “release” of the consonant before it. The action of a harpsichord uses jacks that rise up and pluck the string when a key is pressed, then when you let go of the key the mechanism falls back into place with a soft clack noise. Voltaire compared this after-noise of the harpsichord action to the release of the final -e in French.

In Sanskrit, each consonant has an inherent short /a/ vowel as the default setting. In modern Hindi, this short -a is not pronounced when final in a word. (For example, yoga is pronounced “yog.”) But, as in French, it’s counted as a syllable in verse, and you can hear Hindi singers enunciating this vowel in songs even though it’s silent in spoken Hindi.

Thanks, Jomo Mojo. :slight_smile:
I’ve found this in French myself, because of the liaison common in Erik Satie’s “La Diva de l’Empire.” Final e’s that would be silent in French speech are given full syllabic status so the word will scan: “El-le dan-se,” for example; in spoken French that would be only two syllables.
In Spanish this is common too. In the humorous song “La Cucuracha”:
Es lo mismo que si_un calvo
En la calle_encuentra_un peine.

I even did a bit of this myself. In the Ray Conniff singers’ version of “Cuando Caliente el Sol,” the English for one line is:
Don’t give me your love
For a moment, for an hour,

I rendered it into Spanish as:
No des tu amor
Para_minuto, o una_hora,

:slight_smile: