Can anybody suggest some really, really REALLY good opera, preferably in a non-English language? I don’t care about the story, although I want it to SOUND sad (as sad as possible). It doesn’t matter if what they are singing about is not depressing… it just needs to sound that way. I would also prefer female vocalists, but male would be okay.
It just needs to be really good, and sound really depressing. And not in English. And perhaps it should sound quite EPIC.
Ruggiero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci contains the despairing aria, “Vesti La Giubba”:
Sample verse:
Tramuta in lazzi lo spasmo ed il pianto;
In una smorfia il singhiozzo e’l dolor… Ah!
Ridi Pagliacco, sul tuo amore infranto!
Ridi del duol che t’avvelena il cor!
translated:
Transform into foolery the spasm and the weeping;
Into a distorted grin the sob and the pain…Ah!
Laugh, Clown, about your crushed love!
Laugh about the pain that poisons your heart!
It’s quite epic! You can find soundclips of Pavarotti and other tenors singing it here.
Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata is pretty depressing, too (here is a synopsis), but I haven’t heard it in ages and I can’t remember what the music sounds like. :o I’m sure other Dopers can help out…
The death of Boris, the finale of “Boris Goudonov”.
It may be hard to find a recording, but consider Menotti’s “The Consul”. It’s in English. It’s about a family trying to escape from a country behind the Iron Curtain. It’s not truly epic, but it’s one of the most despair-filled (rather than just sad) works of any kind I’ve ever come across.
A grandmother sings a lullaby with a sweet melody to a sleeping infant. It might be available as a separate aria:
“…Sleep, my child, sleep for me,
My sleep is death…
Let the old ones watch your sleep,
Only death will watch the old.”
The major and most famous aria of the opera is the powerful “To this we’ve come”, sung by the heroine, Magda, and it’s widely available separately: “To this we’ve come, that men withhold the world from men. No ship nor shore for him who drowns at sea. No home nor grave for him who dies on land. To this we’ve come: that a man be born a stranger upon God’s earth, that he be chosen without a chance for choice, that he be hunted without the hope of refuge. To this we’ve come; and you, you too, shall weep…Look at my eyes, they are afraid to sleep…What will your papers do? They cannot stop the clock. They are too thin an armor against a bullet…”
From the finale of the opera: “Lo! Death’s frontiers are open. All aboard!”
O mio babbino caro is hardly sad; it’s from a comedy, after all.
The Flower Song is certainly poignant, telling how the hero managed to make it through his incarceration just looking at the flower Carmen gave him and thinking about her, only to have her treat him as a “thing”, yet he still loves her.
For sad, go with La Boheme, especially third act songs, and I have to agree about the one about the clown…
Susannah, by Carlisle Floyd, is in English and has a female heroine.
If you aren’t sniffling by the end of Susannah’s aria “The Trees on the Mountain”, then I reckon you have a heart of stone. No, screw that, no heart to begin with.
Yes, in context it’s a comedy, but the song taken by itself is quite sad.
Translation (not mine…culled from internet)
‘Oh dear daddy
I love him, he is so handsome
I want to go to Porta Rossa
to buy the ring
yes, yes I want to go there
And if my love were in vain
I would go to Ponte Vecchio
and throw myself in the Arno
I fret and suffer torments
Oh God, I would rather die
Daddy, have pity, have pity’