GiuseppeVerdi

Milan’s Conservatoire turned Giuseppe Verdi down in 1832. Antonio Barezzi, a merchant from Busseto who had helped pay for his move to Milan, kept supporting him, and Verdi studied privately with Vincenzo Lavigna, formerly a musician at La Scala. He learnt counterpoint and went to the theatre. Four years later he married Barezzi’s daughter Margherita and took a municipal musical post in Busseto. His patrons had known him since he was a boy and had heard him play, and they supported him with their own money.

His parents kept an inn and shop at Le Roncole, where he was born in 1813. He learnt the organ locally, then studied with Ferdinando Provesi in nearby Busseto. Oberto, his first opera, reached La Scala in 1839 and earned him further commissions. His daughter Virginia had died in 1838; his son Icilio died in 1839, and his wife Margherita in June 1840, when Verdi was twenty-six. That September the theatre presented his comedy Un giorno di regno, which failed.

1842–⁠50Nabucco and later commissions

Commissions followed for I Lombardi, Ernani, I due Foscari and Attila, among others. Verdi chose subjects, argued over casts, dealt with censors and supervised rehearsals, then moved to the next theatre. Writing to Clara Maffei on 12 May 1858, he looked back to Nabucco: “Sixteen years in the galleys!” The work required music that a particular singer could deliver on a particular evening. He learnt how to move from dialogue into a slow melody, let an interruption change the situation, then release the singer into a fast cabaletta.

By the beginning of the 1850s he could afford to fight hard for a subject. Victor Hugo’s Le roi s’amuse, with its predatory king and court jester, met fierce resistance from the Venetian censors. King Francis I became the Duke of Mantua; the jester kept his deformity, his malice and his daughter. Rigoletto opened at La Fenice in March 1851. In the final act Rigoletto believes he has paid for the Duke’s murder. He then hears the Duke singing La donna è mobile inside the inn, and on opening the sack he finds Gilda.

1853Il trovatore and La traviata

Il trovatore opened in Rome in January, La traviata in Venice in March. Azucena, the Romani woman in Trovatore, has raised the son of the man who burnt her mother; her memories repeatedly take the opera back to the fire. Its lovers sing grand melodies while she tells the story they do not understand. Traviata was adapted from Dumas fils. In it, Alfredo’s father asks Violetta to give up his son so that his daughter can make a respectable marriage.

In the long scene with Germont, Violetta first assumes he wants a temporary separation. As his meaning becomes clear, her quick objections give way to the quiet line of Dite alla giovine. She agrees to leave Alfredo and asks Germont to tell his daughter what the sacrifice has cost. The duet changes pace several times, following each stage of what she learns. In the party music elsewhere in the opera she sings in a different manner, brilliant and ornamented, as a woman paid to be amusing.

Sant’AgataSant’Agata, Don Carlos and Aida

Strepponi became Verdi’s partner and, in 1859, his wife. They made their home at Sant’Agata near Busseto, where he bought land, supervised farming and took a close interest in irrigation. Strepponi told the publisher Léon Escudier that he got up at about dawn to examine the wheat, the maize and the vines, while she preferred to see the sunrise from her bed. During these years he also visited Paris and St Petersburg.

He supported Italian unification and entered the new national parliament in 1861. In Don Carlos, written for Paris in 1867, Philip II can order executions but cannot command his wife’s love or withstand the Grand Inquisitor. Verdi set their confrontation as a duet for two basses. The original five-act French version includes the meeting at Fontainebleau where Carlos and Elisabeth fall in love; the later Italian revisions changed how much of this scene the audience sees.

1874–⁠1901Requiem, Otello and Falstaff

When Alessandro Manzoni died in 1873, Verdi proposed a Requiem for the first anniversary of his death. He conducted it at San Marco in Milan on 22 May 1874. The Libera me reworked music he had written for an abandoned collective memorial to Rossini. The Dies irae returns several times, breaking into the prayers for mercy. At the end the soprano returns to a plea that is close to speech.

Arrigo Boito worked with Verdi on Simon Boccanegra, whose revised version of 1881 gained the Council Chamber scene. Otello followed in 1887. Boito cut Shakespeare’s Venetian first act, and Verdi began the opera with a storm off Cyprus and the crowd waiting for Otello’s ship. Their second new opera, Falstaff, reached La Scala in 1893, fifty-three years after Verdi’s first comedy had failed. In it the old knight is tipped into the Thames in a laundry basket, and he later joins in the final fugue.

The Quattro pezzi sacri, published in 1898, included the Stabat Mater and Te Deum. Strepponi had died the previous year. Verdi founded the Casa di Riposo per Musicisti in Milan for retired singers and players without sufficient means, and asked to be buried in its chapel. He died in Milan on 27 January 1901. A month later, crowds accompanied his body and Giuseppina’s to the Casa di Riposo.