Giuseppe Verdi

• 1. Introduction

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  Giuseppe Verdi was an intensely private man who liked to claim he had risen from illiterate peasants. The truth was tidier and less romantic. Both his parents came from families of small landowners and traders. His father, listed in the baptismal register as an innkeeper, pushed hard to further his son's education. Verdi spent a lifetime hiding that fact. Here was a composer who married the soprano Giuseppina Strepponi in a near-secret ceremony, witnessed only by a coachman and a church bell ringer. A composer who broke off relations with his own parents and ordered them to leave his estate. A man one of his biographers called a full-time grumbler and reactionary, yet whose funeral drew a crowd estimated at three hundred thousand. How did a boy from a village near Busseto come to dominate Italian opera after Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti? Why did he twice claim he would never compose again? And how did the same melodies that delighted royalty also become a code scrawled on walls by patriots dreaming of a unified Italy?

• 2. A Father's Ambition

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  Le Roncole was the village near Busseto where Verdi was born, then inside the borders of the First French Empire, in the Taro department. The baptismal register, prepared on the 11th of October 1813, called him born yesterday. Because days were often reckoned to begin at sunset, that could mean either the 9th or the 10th of October. Following his mother, Luigia Uttini, Verdi always kept his birthday on the 9th, the day he believed was his.

  Baistrocchi, the village schoolmaster, gave the four-year-old private lessons in Latin and Italian. After Verdi learned the organ and showed such hunger for music, his parents bought him a spinet. By the age of eight, after Baistrocchi died, Verdi became the official paid organist of the local church. His younger sister Giuseppa, said to be his closest childhood friend, died at seventeen in 1833.

  In 1823, when he was ten, his parents enrolled him in a Ginnasio in Busseto run by Don Pietro Seletti while they kept running their inn at Le Roncole. The boy walked several kilometres back to play the organ on Sundays. At twelve he began studying with Ferdinando Provesi, maestro di cappella at San Bartolomeo. The music historian Roger Parker describes a picture of youthful precocity nurtured by an ambitious father, a sustained and elaborate formal education. It is exactly the picture Verdi worked to hide.

  Verdi later recalled the flood of his teenage output: marches for band by the hundred, little sinfonie for church and theatre, concertos and variations he played himself, serenades, cantatas and church music. This account comes from an Autobiographical Sketch he dictated to the publisher Giulio Ricordi in 1879. It remains the leading source for his early life, though written with hindsight and not always reliable on contentious matters.

• 3. Milan And First Triumphs

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  Antonio Barezzi, a local patron and grocer, became the engine of Verdi's rise. He paid for Verdi to study privately with a teacher in Milan after the boy applied unsuccessfully to the Conservatory. Verdi had been giving piano and singing lessons to Barezzi's daughter Margherita. By 1831 they were unofficially engaged, and he married her in May 1836.

  Grief came fast. Margherita gave birth to Virginia Maria Luigia on the 26th of March 1837 and to Icilio Romano on the 11th of July 1838. Both children died young, Virginia on the 12th of August 1838 and Icilio on the 22nd of October 1839. While Verdi worked on his second opera, Un giorno di regno, Margherita died of encephalitis at the age of 26. The comedy was premiered only months later, given a single performance, and flopped.

  Verdi claimed he then vowed never to compose again. But the La Scala impresario Bartolomeo Merelli pressed a libretto on him, one the composer Otto Nicolai had already rejected. It became Nabucco. This verse today, tomorrow that, here a note, there a whole phrase, Verdi remembered, and little by little the opera was written. Premiered on the 9th of March 1842, Nabucco took off. At its La Scala revival that autumn it ran an unprecedented fifty-seven performances. Within three years it had reached Vienna, Lisbon, Barcelona, Berlin, Paris and Hamburg. By 1848 it played in New York, by 1850 in Buenos Aires.

  What followed Verdi later called sixteen years in the galleys. In a letter from 1858 he wrote that since Nabucco he had never had one hour of peace. In April 1845, working on I due Foscari, he wrote that he could not wait for the next three years to pass, that he had six operas to write, then addio to everything. He paid sharp attention to his contracts, naming exact sums for new works and arrangements, and began buying land near his birthplace as his fortune grew.

• 4. Strepponi And Sant'Agata

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  Giuseppina Strepponi sang in a Parma production of Nabucco that Verdi oversaw in 1843, a personal triumph attended by his father Carlo. Strepponi later said their relationship began that year. She was known for amorous relationships and many illegitimate children, and her history stayed an awkward factor between them until they agreed on marriage. Before she left for Paris in October 1846, Verdi gave her a letter pledging his love. On the envelope she wrote: 5 or the 6th of October 1846. They shall lay this letter on my heart when they bury me.

  In May 1848 Verdi signed a contract for land and houses at Sant'Agata in Busseto, ground that had once belonged to his family. He built his own house there, completed in 1880, now known as the Villa Verdi, and lived there from 1851 until his death. He and Strepponi moved in on the 1st of May 1851, living openly in an unmarried relationship.

  The town punished her for it. Strepponi was shunned in Busseto and at church, and while Verdi appeared indifferent, she was not. A growing estrangement with his parents followed. In January 1851 Verdi broke off relations with them, and in April ordered them to leave Sant'Agata, though he found them new premises and helped them settle financially.

  Strepponi captured the life he craved in an 1858 letter to the publisher Léon Escudier. His love for the country had become a mania, madness, rage and fury, she wrote. He rose almost with the dawn to examine the wheat, the maize, the vines. Their tastes coincided, she added, except over sunrise, which he liked to see up and dressed, and she from her bed. The couple finally married on the 29th of August 1859 at Collonges-sous-Salève, then part of Piedmont, with only the coachman and the bell ringer as witnesses.

• 5. Fighting The Censors

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  What does the sack matter to the police, Verdi demanded over Rigoletto. The opera, based on Victor Hugo's Le roi s'amuse, set its intended murder of royalty and its hunchbacked hero against the censors of the time. They wanted the hero made no longer ugly and hunchbacked. Verdi refused, insisting it was splendid to show a character outwardly deformed and ridiculous yet inwardly passionate and full of love. If those qualities were removed, he said, he could no longer set it to music. He compromised only by swapping a Duke for the King. Premiered in March 1851 in Venice, it vindicated him across Italy and Europe. Knowing the Duke's song La donna è mobile would be a hit, Verdi kept it out of orchestral rehearsals and drilled the tenor in private.

  Stiffelio had run into the same wall, its censors offended by the supposed adultery of a clergyman's wife. Verdi reworked it, but even the recycled version, Aroldo of 1857, failed to please. He raged against the Neapolitan censor over the opera that began life as Gustave III, telling a correspondent he was drowning in a sea of troubles. He broke his contract, fought through litigation, and the work eventually reached the stage as Un ballo in maschera after Rome's censors demanded still more changes.

  The opera critic Joseph Kerman noticed something singular about all six operas Verdi wrote between 1849 and 1853. Their heroines, in Kerman's words, come to grief because of sexual transgression, actual or perceived. Kerman and the psychologist Gerald Mendelssohn link this run of subjects to Verdi's uneasy passion for Strepponi. The first opera he ever wrote without a specific commission, apart from Oberto, was Il trovatore, begun after his mother died in June 1851. It is the one opera of his that focuses on a mother rather than a father.

• 6. Viva Verdi

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  Viva VERDI began in Naples in 1859 and spread through Italy as an acronym. It stood for Viva Vittorio Emanuele Re D'Italia, long live Victor Emmanuel King of Italy, a coded cheer for the future king. Verdi himself had become esteemed as a representative of the unification ideals, his early choruses much in the spirit of the movement.

  The music historian Philip Gossett warns that myths intensifying such sentiment began circulating in the nineteenth century. One popular claim holds that when Va, pensiero was first sung in Milan, the audience demanded an encore in nationalistic fervour, a striking act since encores were forbidden by the government. In fact the piece encored was not Va, pensiero but the hymn Immenso Jehova. Mary Ann Smart notes that music critics at the time seldom mentioned political themes, and Roger Parker argues nationalistic historians later exaggerated the political dimension.

  Verdi was no mere symbol, though. In 1848 the nationalist leader Giuseppe Mazzini, whom Verdi had met in London the previous year, asked him for a patriotic hymn, and Verdi complied. The opera historian Charles Osborne calls the 1849 La battaglia di Legnano an opera with a purpose, the movement's own opera. Its tenor hero's final words ring out: whoever dies for the fatherland cannot be evil-minded.

  Verdi entered real politics in 1859, elected to the new provincial council and sent to meet King Vittorio Emanuele II in Turin. On the 17th of October he met Cavour, the architect of unification. Cavour pressed him that holding office was essential to securing Italy's future. Verdi accepted on one condition, confiding that after a few months he would resign. Elected on the 3rd of February 1861 for Borgo San Donnino to the parliament in Turin, he scarcely attended after Cavour's death later that year deeply distressed him. In 1874 he was named to the Italian Senate but took no part in its work.

• 7. The Late Masterpieces

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  Aida was commissioned by the Egyptian government for the opera house built by the Khedive Isma'il Pasha to mark the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. The house actually opened with Rigoletto instead. The French prose libretto by Camille du Locle, drawn from a scenario by the Egyptologist Auguste Mariette, was turned into Italian verse by Antonio Ghislanzoni. Verdi confessed Ancient Egypt was a civilization he had never been able to admire, yet the offer was enormous, and Aida was first performed in Cairo in 1871. During rehearsals for the Naples production he amused himself by writing his String Quartet, the only chamber music by him to survive.

  Verdi seemed to retire into his sixties. His biographer John Rosselli wrote that the Requiem confirmed him as the unique presiding genius of Italian music, with no fellow composer near him in popularity. First performed at the cathedral in Milan on the 22nd of May 1874, the anniversary of the death of Alessandro Manzoni, it honoured the writer. The spinto soprano Teresa Stolz, who had created Aida in its European premiere, sang the solo. She became closely associated with Verdi, to Giuseppina's initial disquiet, and stayed his companion after Giuseppina died in 1897 until his own death.

  Arrigo Boito, whom Verdi had met as a twenty-year-old in 1862, became his close collaborator. Boito had once criticised Verdi's reliance on formula rather than form and earned the composer's wrath, but the two were reconciled. Boito proposed Otello privately in 1879. Even when it was nearly finished, Verdi teased: shall I finish it, shall I have it performed, hard to tell, even for me. It premiered triumphantly at La Scala in February 1887.

  After Otello, Verdi said he had at last earned the right to laugh a little, having massacred so many heroes and heroines. Boito secretly built a libretto from The Merry Wives of Windsor with material from Henry IV. On the 10th of July 1889 Verdi wrote back: so be it, so let's do Falstaff. Premiered at La Scala on the 9th of February 1893, with ticket prices thirty times higher than usual, the applause at the end lasted an hour. The comedy ends with a fugue on the line that everything in the world is a jest, but he laughs well who laughs the final laugh.

• 8. The Man And The Myth

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  I do not very much like the man Verdi, John Rosselli concluded after writing his biography. He named the autocratic estate owner, the part-time composer, the seemingly full-time grumbler and reactionary critic of the later years. Yet Rosselli admitted he had to admire him, warts and all, sensing a deep integrity beneath the life even when Verdi was unreasonable or wrong.

  Verdi guarded his privacy ferociously. Gerald Mendelsohn describes a man who deeply resented efforts to inquire into his personal affairs, who saw journalists, would-be biographers, his Busseto neighbours and the operatic public as an intrusive lot. He kept himself to himself, never discussing his private life, maintaining when it suited him the legends of his peasant origins and his indifference to criticism. He was never explicit about religion. Anti-clerical by nature in his early years, he built a chapel at Sant'Agata but is little recorded attending church. Strepponi wrote in 1871 that she would not call him an atheist, but he was not much of a believer.

  In his last years Verdi turned to giving. He published a song in 1894 for earthquake victims in Sicily. From 1895 he planned, built and endowed a rest home for retired musicians in Milan, the Casa di Riposo per Musicisti, and built a hospital at Villanova sull'Arda near Busseto. His last major composition, the Four sacred pieces, appeared in 1898. In 1900 the assassination of King Umberto deeply upset him, and he sketched a setting of a poem in the king's memory but could not finish it.

  While staying at the Grand Hotel, Verdi suffered a stroke on the 21st of January 1901. He grew feebler over the next week, with Stolz caring for him, and died on the 27th of January at the age of 87. After a private burial at Milan's Cimitero Monumentale, his body was moved a month later to the crypt of the Casa di Riposo. On that occasion Arturo Toscanini conducted Va, pensiero with a chorus of 820 singers before a crowd estimated at 300,000. The same melody patriots had once made a code now sang the composer into the ground.