Fred: Think of this as a rollercoaster. Down we go, and then up we go again, and then down we go and then up we go again. Hold on because this is life.

Rhiannon: From WQXR and the Metropolitan Opera. This is Aria Code. I'm Rhiannon Giddens.

Alma: My conservatory became these people's houses, and my practice rooms were these people's bathrooms.

Rhiannon: Every episode, we crack open a single aria to see what's inside.

Maria: The stories that are larger than life, they're twice as unnatural, but they help us navigate the real.

Rhiannon: Today, it's “Non Più Mesta,” the joyous finale to Gioachino Rossini's take on Cinderella, La Cenerentola.

Joyce: By the time it hits the last note, the sensation is that you're in the heavens.

Rhiannon: I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you probably already know the Disney version of the Cinderella story, right? You could fill in all the major plot points between once upon a time and happily ever after. There's the singing mice and there's the pumpkin Ubers, and there's the really uncomfortable-looking footwear and all of that. You may not know that there's actually quite a few different versions of this story, and they're not all kid-friendly, even though I've read some of them to my kids. There's the one where Cinderella kills her stepsisters. I didn't read that one, I promise.

There's the one where the stepsisters have to chop off their toes in their heels, try to fit them into the shoe. That's a little gruesome. I didn't read that one either. Anyway, you get the picture. Don't worry, there's none of the bloody stuff in the operatic version that we're going to talk about today. It's by the great Italian composer, Gioachino Rossini. There are twists, like there's a stepfather instead of a stepmother, and instead of a fairy godmother, it's the Prince's tutor, Alidoro who acts as a wingman getting the two love birds together.

Also, no singing mice, no slippers, no coaches expiring at midnight. In fact, there's no magic at all, except for the music. The Aria that ends this opera, Nacqui all'affanno Non più mesta is sung by Angelina, the Cinderella character. All her wishes have come true. She's married the Prince, she's forgiven her family, and they're about to live, you guessed it, happily ever after. I think it's such a powerful story because it's reassuring. No matter how bad things might be there's this chance that you're going to find a way out. It's that thing that keeps coming up in the Arias this season, a sense of hope.

If you ever thought, there's really nothing more to say about the Cinderella story, I've got four people who might beg to differ. First, Mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, who sang the role of Angelina at the Met.

Joyce: When you live with a character for a long time, you become invested and it's very difficult just to walk away because I love her. She's been such a part of my career and my artistry for a long time.

Rhiannon: Next, Fred Plotkin, author of Opera 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving Opera.

Fred: I love all of opera, every year of it from 1597 to today. Opera is that giant reflecting mirror that we see in the fun house, that accentuates every aspect of the human experience.

Rhiannon: Up next, Maria Tatar, a professor of Folklore Mythology at Harvard.

Maria: It was only when I had children of my own and I started reading them fairy tales, the tales that I had grown up with, that I realized that these tales were deeply problematic, and I wanted to figure out where they had come from, why they were so violent, and how they have migrated into our entertainment.

Rhiannon: Finally, Alma Salcedo, a young woman with the Cinderella story of her own. She also happens to be an opera singer.

Alma: Music has always, always been in my life since I was nine months old, my mom tells me, that I was already singing with my grandpa.

Rhiannon: Now, the story of La Cenerentola. It begins once upon a time.

Joyce: When I made my debut at Teatro La Scala in Milan, I was very nervous and I was doing these mental exercises that, "Okay, Joyce, if they start to boo you, just keep singing. Lock it out, and no matter what, just keep singing." So far, the show had gone okay, and there was this moment where I'm present behind a backdrop before the big final scene happens, and I've done a quick change into this big white gown. Then, the backdrop rises, and there we are. I have to make a long, slow walk down to center stage to start “Non Più Mesta.”

It was thrilling and my adrenaline was going like crazy, and I was thinking, "Come on, Joyce, just enjoy this and be really present so that you remember it." Once the curtain comes down, the opening part had gone well, and we started the fast part. I'll never forget. I looked down in the pit and the conductor, Bruno Campanella took his left hand, and he gave it to me. He just basically said, "Now, it's yours." It was such an invitation to not be with the orchestra or keep it in tempo. It was an invitation to fly.

Maria: Cinderella is ubiquitous and try, as they might, folklorists have not been able to find any kind of original. I think there probably is not one. The story that we tell children today contains all kinds of magic. There is the enchanted pumpkin, which turns into a coach. The mice who become coachmen.

Fred: La Cenerentola was actually not based on the story of Cinderella as we know it. It was based on a libretto by a man named Jacopo Ferretti.

Maria: Ferretti and Rossini were determined to remove magic from the story, in part because they understood that stagecraft had its limits.

Joyce: It's more of enlightenment philosophy. The idea of goodness conquering evil.

Fred: La Cenerentola is only part of the title. The rest of the title is La Bontà in Trionfo, The Triumph of Goodness. That's a key part of the story.

Maria: The staging of Cinderella as an opera is an incandescent moment in the history of fairy tales because we see exactly how cruel the stepsisters are to her. You see the mocker make demands and the stepfather, there's not a moment where he practices any kind of benevolence toward his stepdaughter. We realize the extent to which she becomes a victim.

Alma: I was born in Venezuela, and I lived there with my family. Life there was real difficult. Venezuela has just gone down. We are just prisoners of these people that they just want to get richer and richer. They don't care about people; they don't care about anything else but themselves. They call it democracy, but it's not at all. There's no free expression anymore. It's like a snowball that started and now it's taking over everything. We feel completely, completely hopeless.

Fred: We meet our Cinderella figure, who we call Angelina, although an Italian, it would be La Cenerentola.

Joyce: She's sitting by the fireplace. She's been berated by the sisters and denigrated to just being dust on the floor, essentially.

Fred: She's ignored, she's unhappy, she has no prospects. She's surrounded by mice. She's cold, which is why she sits by the fire.

Joyce: She's very sincere and clings to her purity.

Fred: We hear in the music, at the very start of the opera, her sadness.

Alma: So it was very stressful situation because you were trying to balance between your job or queuing to get food, and it was really hard to accomplish both things because if you didn't work, there's no money for you to go queuing for your food. I was a singer and I loved music, and I was trying to hold onto it. I wasn't ready to let that go, but all of the sudden, my mom got diagnosed with skin cancer. When we got the news, it was honestly heartbreaking because we knew we could not get any treatment. You have to understand that in Venezuela, it's just very hard to get even a simple pill because there's none. There's nothing. My mom and I, we decided to leave because otherwise, she was going to die. That's why we decided to come to Spain.

Joyce: It's easy to think, "Oh, this is just a fairy tale," right? To not go deeply into this story, and I think that's a mistake because there's a universal truth within them. You know why I think about what the Cinderella story would be today, and I look at immigrants, I look at prisoners, I look at those below the poverty line, and these are human beings looking for the opportunity for a better life, but oftentimes they're denigrated to the basement, to the dust bin. Their life is seen as less important. This is an opera that looks squarely at how human beings treat each other.

Alma: We got into Spain, and you know how hard it is for an immigrant to find a job and to start over, no matter your desire to work and to do well. I had to put all my music dreams and all that I had build up in my heart just aside. I started cleaning houses, babysitting, taking care of the elderly, some English lessons, you name it, and literally become Angelina. I did all the work that I could get everything, in the morning, at night, in the afternoon. I start my day very early and I finished very late. I felt like a robot.

I would get up, go to work, go back home, sleep, and do the same thing day after day. But my music dreams and that flame, I wasn't going to let that go that easy. My conservatory became these people's houses, and my practice rooms were these people's bathrooms. I made sure that nobody was around. I would sing something just for my own sake. You know those runners that they go, and they get ready, set, but nobody said go. I was just there ready to start, but I never got the opportunity.

Fred: The prince in disguise gets to watch Angelina's goodness being played out over and over again. Angelina's true compassion shines through.

Joyce: It's the end of the opera, the grand finale. The Prince says basically, "Let's get married," and Cenerentola has entered the wedding hall and she says, "Wait a second. I need to see my family."

Fred: She could reject the stepsisters and her stepfather and say, "Okay, I've married into the royal family now, I don't need all of you."

Joyce: She could kick them out of the castle and move on to her great life. She's in power essentially.

Fred: Rather she says-

Joyce: "I actually really want to forgive you."

Maria: She embraces her stepsisters and her father. She brings them back into the family. She restores the family order, and her act of kindness is something that will become transformative.

Fred: The big payoff comes at the end of the opera with Nacqui all'affanno. Non più mesta, this great aria, which usually blows the roof off the opera house.

Joyce: He goes, ta-dam. You get immediately the sense of there's something precious and something very unique and special and it's not necessarily going to be grand. It's going to be intimate. We've had a big orchestral introduction, and it's just her and her purity and her voice. She says, "I was born in sorrow and with tears, and I suffered."

Fred: She's telling finally what she's known to herself. "I was born in this sad state, crying alone, sitting by the fire. There was no enchantment, there was nothing in my life."

Alma: My mom got better, but still was so hard to get phone calls from Venezuela to hear all my aunts and my cousins. The conversations where we don't have anything for dinner tonight or my son got sick, and we just don't know where to get his medicine. I said to my mom, "I feel so guilty that we are here, and we are eating every day. We feel secure. We really need to give that to them as well." I work more so we could put the money together for my aunt and her two kids for their tickets to come here. It took me more than a year and a half to put some money together.

I saved every single cent. They got here and I was so happy that they were here that I overlooked the fact that the family of two that were only my mom and I, suddenly became a family of five. I had to work even more now. Then, when I realized that, sorry, my musical dreams and all these, I just had to make peace with myself and just say, "I love this. I love music, but maybe this is not for me."

Fred: The second line of the aria is, "[Italian language]." I suffered while my heart kept silent. This whole thing from beginning to end is about the heart. Listen to the thrum, to the heartbeat that you hear throughout this aria. When you understand that Angelina at her essence is about her heart, then we get the whole opera and what it means.

Maria: The story of Cinderella really tells us there is something that will enable you to get to be the person you want to be, and that somehow, beauty will triumph over the violence and evil in those fairytale worlds and in our own.

Alma: Then something amazing happened. I met what I call my fairy godparents, a Venezuelan pianist, Gabriela Montero, and her husband, Sam McElroy. He's a baritone. I have a friend that introduced me to them. I was super nervous, and I sang for him, and they didn't even know me, and they opened their hearts and their house for me. I would come to Barcelona every Friday, and they paid for my ticket to come here to practice, and I would get classes with Sam. Honestly, at that time, he believed more in myself than I did. They gave me the strength and the support I needed to finally dedicate myself to this.

Maria: There are two features of fairy tales that are important. One is magic.

Joyce: As we go on and she's walking through this memory of what she's lived, then all of a sudden you hear the music change and it's the magic. It's the Stardust coming in.

Maria: The second is metamorphosis.

Joyce: She says, "Out of nowhere, like a lightning bolt-”

Fred: Boom.

Joyce: “-my fate changed."

Maria: This is so important for the fairytale because it reminds us that there is hope, that you can move from an abject state to a happily ever after. There's stories that are larger than life. They're twice as unnatural, but they help us navigate the real.

Joyce: The first time she mentions that her fate and her life has changed, it ends almost like a question. It's not resolved. It's almost as if she doesn't dare believe it.

Fred: She describes it in a very slow, deliberate way so that we can absolutely get every word.

Joyce: She repeats, "[Italian language]," and this time it's much more authoritative. What's beautiful with Rossini, he also gives us some fantastic chord change on that word [Italian language] which means to change, and she resolves it.

Alma: My life changed completely. They started doing fundraisings for me to be able to move to Barcelona. I stopped cleaning houses and babysitting. I've been three months into just singing, taking classes with wonderful people. My cheek sometimes hurts from smiling so much.

Joyce: Once she's owned this sense of change, we get a little bit of the lighthearted comedy [sings] and it's that [sobs] sense of the sisters that they didn't get the Prince and now this person that they've treated so badly is elevated above them. Everybody's crying a little bit [sobs] and [sings]. She says, "No, no, no, no. There's no sense here for crying. No."

Fred: She says, "Figlia, I'm your daughter, sorella, I'm your sister, amica, friend. Tutto trova in me, all of this is found in me."

Joyce: "You will find in me your family."

Fred: That's powerful.

Joyce: This is the magnanimous sense, the Trionfo La Bontà, which is the secondary title of the opera, The Triumph of Goodness. It's the moment now of the party. The party can actually really start, and the chorus comes in on it, and they have this wonderful, bubbly, long crescendo celebrating the day with her. She looks around and she can't quite believe what has happened.

Alma: All the stuff that Angelina has done before, it was never for herself. She was a servant, so she was doing it to make everybody else feel good and safe. At the end, she finally gets to be herself. Yes, I relate to that a lot.

Joyce: Then we go into the finale of the aria, “Non più mesta,” which becomes the fireworks. She says, "No more sadness."

Fred: We suddenly have the introduction of a flute and I love that. It's like ellipses ... [sings]. Then here she goes, "Non più mesta accanto al fuoco, no more sad times for me, sitting next to the fire. No!” With an exclamation point.

Joyce: It's written as staccato. She's checking out her new status. Am I allowed to speak here? [laughs] It's also not quite believing her luck as she says, "No more sorrow, no more cleaning the pots and the pans by myself." She tiptoes through the first utterance of this. All of a sudden, nobody stops her and so we get a second repetition of this, and this time, it's a little bit more legato. She starts to elaborate a little bit. She starts to go up and get excited and then pulls herself back and repeats it again.

Of course, through all of this, we're getting this long-sustained tension of the crescendo, the adding of notes, the embellishment. The fire is starting to really percolate.

Maria: Cinderella sings in a way that is so enchanting and so powerful that it erases all traces of the past, of the suffering, of the misery, of the cruel treatment from her stepsisters and her stepfather. In many ways, that is the power of the opera. The voice transcends all else, and suddenly, we're transported into this rainbow future. We know that she will live happily ever after.

Alma: Non più mesta accanto al fuoco, I'm not longer sad. I'm not longer tearful. Well, sometimes I am tearful, but because I'm happy. My family's doing so well and everything that I had to go through, it just made this so much better. I appreciate every second, every syllable I sing. I'm trying to do this with my whole heart. I just want to become the best singer I can and then let my voice take me wherever I need to be. I'll be forever, forever thankful to every single person that has helped me to fulfill my dreams.

Fred: She has realized something beyond her dreams. If she dreamt it, she didn't think it was possible.

Joyce: Then we have the third repetition of this, this no more sadness, non più mesta, and it's off to the races. Her emotion overcomes her, and she really sort of explodes in this excitement.

Fred: You have uncorked the champagne or this [Italian language], this being Italian opera, and suddenly, all the effervescence come forth.

Joyce: It's a slow-motion tsunami wave that you just can't get off. [laughs]

Fred: There are these thrilling, cascading runs down two octaves.

Joyce: [mimics the singer]

Fred: Think of this as a rollercoaster. Down we go, and then up we go again. Hold on because this is life.

Joyce: I do a staccato A up to a high C sharp, which is not a note I would ever sustain and sing in public, but I could always nail it with the staccato [sings]. It always felt as if I was on the top of the mountain hitting the stars. There's something really percussive and rhythmic, and there's a quality of Olympic sport with this music. She can't help herself. She keeps going and [sings]. It's total unfiltered joy. By the time it hits the last note, I mean generally, the sensation is that you're in the heavens. The conductor will usually accelerate the end and then the audience gets to participate just as fully, and they usually jump to their feet and scream. [laughs]

[applause]

It's as it should be in a beautiful opera about joy and love and the triumph of goodness over evil. You don't want it to end.

Rhiannon: That was Mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, writer Fred Plotkin, folklores Maria Tatar, and Mezzo- soprano Alma Salcedo decoding, Nacqui all'affanno. Non più mesta, the finale of Rossini's La Cenerentola. Joyce will be back to sing it for you after the break. Here's Joyce DiDonato singing, Nacqui all'affanno, “Non più mesta” on stage at the Metropolitan Opera. [music]

[applause]

Rhiannon: It is actually impossible to be sad listening to that Aria, you can probably hear me smiling over the airwaves. That was Joyce DiDonato singing “Non Più Mesta” from Rossini's La Cenerentola, and what an amazing note to end our second season of Aria Code on. I know, I can't believe it either – 21 arias and counting so many amazing artists and guests, and such beautiful music. Thanks for being a part of our little Aria cult. There's always room for more, so keep on telling your friends and heck, even your enemies about the show.

Those reviews in Apple podcasts are also really helpful, so keep them coming. Aria Code is a co-production of WQXR and the Metropolitan Opera. The show is produced and scored by Merrin Lazyan. Emily Lang is our associate producer; Brendan Francis Newnam and Helena de Groot of Public Address Media are our editors. Matt Abramovitz is our executive producer, sound design and mixing by Matt Boynton and Ania Grzesik; and original music by Hannis Brown. I'm Rhiannon Giddens and until next time, wishing you a very happy ever after.

 

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