The Lives and Times of the Great Composers by Michael Steen

Author:Michael Steen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: MUS006000
ISBN: 9781848312678
Publisher: Icon Books
Published: 2006-02-28T21:00:00+00:00

VERDI

CHAPTER 16

AROUND 10 OCTOBER 1813, less than six months after Wagner was born in Leipzig, Giuseppe Verdi was born near Busseto close to Parma. This was then part of Napoleon’s puppet Kingdom of Italy, so the boy was registered as Joseph rather than Giuseppe. When he died on 27 January 1901, Queen Victoria was lying in state in Osborne. Their demise was celebrated with comparable state funerals. Just as the Queen dominated 19th-century Britain, Verdi stands astride the music of 19th-century Italy.

Verdi knew exactly how to convey emotion and drama in beautiful melody. The arias which we love, such as ‘La Donna è Mobile’ from Rigoletto, have a naturalness and simplicity. His operas therefore provide a contrast to the complex, ‘orchestral’ operas of Wagner. They are essential items in the opera house and elsewhere: how many brides have walked down the aisle to the strains of the Grand March from Aïda! No matter that theat-rical productions of the March often include elephants and giraffes.

With a canny sense of timing and some genuine sympathy, Verdi espoused the cause of Italian nationalism. The combination of his music and his stories conveyed an emotional message to his compatriots, who yearned for delivery from despotic monarchs. This was an aspect which the check-list used by the strict but pedantic censors was not designed to identify. Thus, Verdi could emulate the work of the poet Alessandro Manzoni, whose tragedy Adelchi, about Charlemagne’s overthrow of the Lombard domination in Italy, contained many veiled allusions to the burden of Habsburg rule. In Verdi’s La Battaglia di Legnano, the knights swear to repel Italy’s tyrants beyond the Alps. No wonder that, on the eve of their revolution, the citizens of Rome were delirious about it. No wonder that the chorus in Nabucco, ‘Va, pensiero’, in which the captive Hebrews long for their homeland, launched Verdi’s career.

Verdi’s direct contribution to the revolutionary cause was, however, limited to setting rousing words to beautiful and memorable tunes. During the upheavals of 1848, he was actually based in Paris pursuing his career and his mistress, the former prima donna Giuseppina Strepponi. However, the story of the unification of Italy is such important background to Verdi’s life that, having considered his early years, we must return again to it and to the achievements of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the colourful freedom-fighter, who led the battle for it.

The 1850s saw the three important and very popular operas by Verdi – Rigoletto, Il Trovatore and La Traviata – which were less obviously political. Thereafter, the rate of composition decelerated and came to a halt with Aïda, which was produced in Cairo on Christmas Eve 1871, and the Requiem of 1874, written in honour of Manzoni. There was a long pause before Verdi emerged from retirement to write the two last operas, Otello, produced in February 1887, and finally Falstaff, which was premièred in 1893, just before he was 80.

Verdi kept away from, and was not asked to join, the titanic struggle that rent the musical world to

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