Two Hearts that Beat as One

Beginning to end, there might not be another opera with more exciting music than Don Carlo. Now it is by no means Verdi's best opera. It isn't even one opera; so many changes and revisions have been made, so many different versions exist, that there is no definitive interpretation. In its completely unexpurgated form, it's something like four hours long. Dramatically it is a bit of a mess, and it doesn't really flow. Everything stops; someone sings an aria--over and over again. It lacks the violent intensity of a Trovatore, the tragic inevitability of La Traviata, and the musical invention of his last, possibly greatest, if not his most popular, Falstaff. What it lacks in unity, though, it makes up for in sheer verve, one knock-your-socks-off piece after another, like this super-manly, totally homoerotic duet ("Dio che nell' alma infondere") in which Don Carlo and Rodrigo swear their friendship: