Alexandra Wilson
Academic, author and critic
‘When I discovered opera as a student all those years ago, Verdi’s works were my first love. I’ve really enjoyed revisiting his life and works: they remind us that opera and politics are never far apart.’
In paintings and in photographs, from youth to old age, Giuseppe Verdi cuts a rather severe figure – his brow creased, his mouth turned resolutely down beneath that bushy beard, his mood solemn and inscrutable. Only in some of the photographs taken late in life do we glimpse a twinkle in the eyes, as if the man had finally started to let down his guard. One wonders what he thought about the life he had lived, across almost a century of drastic social change and dramatic political events, of personal sorrows and astonishing professional achievements. The journey from son of a rural innkeeper to country squire – a ragsto-riches narrative that he was not averse to embellishing – had been a long one.
Verdi was born before the Battle of Waterloo; he died during the Boer War. He lived through revolutions and the much-longed-for unification of his country. He could be a harsh taskmaster with librettists and singers, ill-humoured at times, yet was capable of acts of great charity, founding a hospital near Parma and a retirement home for musicians in Milan. He witnessed the death of both his children in infancy, followed soon after by that of his first wife. He was ostracised by his local community for living out of wedlock for years with the soprano Giuseppina Strepponi. The act of creativity often gave him headaches, stomach aches and sore throats.
The early years of Verdi’s career saw him to-ing and fro-ing between his native Emilia-romagna and the city of Milan, where he studied, went on honeymoon and finally secured the premiere of his first opera, Oberto, at La Scala (1839). The latter resulted in a contract for three further operas at the theatre and being taken onto the books of Ricordi, Italy’s leading music publishing house. After the triumph of his third opera, Nabucco (1842), the work with which Verdi said ‘it is fair to say my career began’, impresarios from all over the peninsula came knocking, and he stepped onto an operatic conveyor belt, usually writing at least an opera a year up to the end of the 1850s. Although working at such
Verdi moved gradually away from the rigid conventions of Italian Romantic opera
a pace lent a formulaic quality to some of his early works, he moved gradually away from the rigid musical conventions of Italian Romantic opera, developing a keen interest in literature from Schiller to Shakespeare and a determination to put drama on an equal plane with music.
By the 1860s, he had become the most famous and powerful Italian opera composer of his era. With acclaim, money and clout came the luxury of being able to take his time over character psychology, to give each opera its own distinctive musical ‘tinta’, as he put it. The gaps between his works became longer, the subjects and the musical style more varied. Verdi wrote operas on a larger canvas (the five-act, French-style Grand Opera Don Carlos) and that required lavish scenic spectacle (Aida). Ever the perfectionist, he returned to operas written earlier in his career –
Simon Boccanegra, Macbeth – revising and modernising them for new contexts.
Verdi’s final two Shakespearean operas, Otello and Falstaff, written in a glorious Indian summer and often regarded as the preserve of Verdi connoisseurs, took him to new realms of musical and dramatic sophistication. The correspondence with the librettist Arrigo Boito surrounding Otello shows the extent to which Verdi was by now involved in crafting the drama as well as the music. Subtleties of characterisation were now paramount, Verdi specifying, for example, exactly how he envisaged the role of Iago to be acted, with ‘an absent-minded manner, nonchalant, indifferent to everything, disbelieving, witty, speaking well and ill lightly, with an air of having his thoughts on matters quite different from those he is speaking about’. Working with Boito prompted Verdi to develop a new, more flexible and responsive musical language, better suited to the subtleties of the text.
Verdi’s career reminds us of the many ways in which opera has been political. He was, himself, one of the most politically active of composers. He was an ardent supporter of the Risorgimento, the movement for the Unification of Italy, which was finally achieved in 1861. Encouraged by Conte Camillo di Cavour, a leading figure in that movement and later the united Italy’s first prime minister, he stood for political office, being elected as a representative in the first Italian Parliament. His name was used as a political slogan and his works were appropriated for political ends. However, the musicologist Roger Parker has cast doubt upon the oft-repeated claim that Verdi was proclaimed by the Italian people as the Bard of the Risorgimento through spontaneous performances of his choruses, demonstrating that some of his early biographers falsified reviews in order to mythologise him.
During his early career, Verdi often set patriotic subjects, such as La battaglia di Legnano about Barbarossa’s defeat at the hands of the Lombard League. Nabucco, more famously, with its story of the chosen people yearning for their homeland, chimed with the mood of the Risorgimento movement. Even Macbeth,a work that tapped first and foremost into the contemporary Romantic vogue for misty northern landscapes and the supernatural, featured a chorus of exiled Scots. Later he would move away from nationalistic topics toward subjects that focused upon the plight of strong but flawed individuals. Here, too, he often struck a political note of sorts, championing the underdog.
Despite the creative freedoms he came to enjoy as Italy’s leading opera composer, Verdi often faced difficulties bringing his works to the stage in the form in which he wanted them. Opera houses were regarded as founts of potential sedition and disorder in Italy, particularly after the revolutions of 1848, and operas could be censored on political, moral or religious grounds. State censorship was heavy-handed: libretti were scrutinised for inflammatory subjects or language. There was no single set of rules for the peninsula, but as a rule of thumb, they tended to be strictest in Rome and Naples. Regional bans on topics like conspiracy, assassination, disrespect towards rulers, suicide or illicit love affairs made life difficult for an opera composer.
Verdi and his librettists frequently found themselves hauled up in front of the authorities and asked to account for themselves whenever rumour had it that an opera was about to appear on a subject that was deemed in some way provocative. I Lombardi alla prima crociata offended both the church and the police authorities, but Verdi remained resolute, stating ‘It shall be given as it is or not given at all’. For Stiffelio, meanwhile, Verdi and his librettist were forced, reluctantly, to accept changes – the subject matter, about a Protestant church minister with an adulterous wife, with quotations from the New Testament, was simply too inflammatory.
Verdi appeals to the modern age as a man who stuck to his artistic principles
Once an opera set off on its journey around Italy and was out of Verdi’s control, bowdlerised performances were the norm. Macbeth was deemed unacceptable in Rome, for the supernatural element; in Naples and Palermo, for the killing of kings; and in Austrian-controlled Milan, for the chorus of exiled Scots. Removing the offending elements resulted in nonsensical plotlines. Numerous cities staged Rigoletto – an opera based on a play that had already been banned for ‘repulsive immorality’ – under alternative titles, turning the feckless Duke’s arias into hymns to fidelity, or giving the opera an implausible happy ending in which the heroine survived.
Nowadays, we do not worry that anyone might take inspiration from Rigoletto and try to assassinate royalty, and the only time Verdi’s operas create moral panic is when a director tries a ‘provocative’ reworking. Yet they still have political resonances of a different sort. Today, the two Verdi works that speak most closely to contemporary sensibilities and cultural politics are La traviata and Rigoletto, whose popularity has overtaken that of Il trovatore, the Verdi opera sine qua non for the Victorians and in the first half of the 20th century. La traviata appeals for its psychological realism and insight into the plight of wronged women. Rigoletto’s themes of disability, corrupt power and sexual exploitation seem ever more topical. Aida has become a textbook case for considerations of cultural imperialism, while Otello prompts debates about race and casting.
Verdi appeals to the modern age, then, as a man who stuck to his artistic principles, as a champion of the vulnerable, the excluded or the dispossessed, and for the perennial popularity of his music. Such was the volume of his output that there is always more Verdi to discover: it is worth a delve into the lesser-known repertory, including that extensive ‘back catalogue’ of early works. Much of the snobbery that used to surround his oeuvre has now dissipated. We no longer subscribe to the view that Verdi’s works are too tuneful to be good, summed up wittily by his biographer Francis Toye in 1930: ‘There was no merit to be gained by professing admiration for a composer whose music could be enjoyed by anybody gifted with any musical receptivity whatever’.