Giuseppe Verdi
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Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi (October 10, 1813 – January 27, 1901) is to date the most influential composer of XIX Century's Italian School of Opera. His works are frequently performed in opera houses throughout the world and, transcending the boundaries of the genre, some of his themes have long since taken root in popular culture - such as La donna è mobile, from Rigoletto. Oftentimes scoffed at by the critics, in his lifetime and today, as catering to the tastes of the common folk, overly simple in chromatic texture and shamelessly melodramatic, Verdi’s masterpieces dominate the standard repertoire a century and a half after their composition.
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Biography
Early life
Verdi was born in 1813 in Le Roncole, a village near Busseto in the Duchy of Parma and Piacenza, nowadays in the province of Parma. His father was an innkeeper. When he was still a child, Verdi's parents moved to Busseto from the province of Piacenza, where the future composer's education was greatly facilitated by visits to the large library belonging to the local Jesuit school. Also in Busseto, Verdi received his first lessons in composition from Ferdinando Provesi, who was in charge of the local philharmonic society.
Verdi went to Milan when he was twenty to continue his studies, but the Conservatory of Music rejected him, citing the fact that he was two years over the age limit. Verdi took private lessons in counterpoint while attending operatic performances in Milan, as well as lesser concerts of, specifically, Viennese music. Association with Milan's beaumonde convinced him he should pursue a career as a theatre composer.
Returning to Busseto, he became town music master and, in 1836, married Margherita Barezzi. Their two children died in infancy.
Initial Recognition
The production of his first opera, Oberto, by Milan's La Scala, achieved a degree of success, after which Bartolomeo Merelli, an impresario with La Scala, offered Verdi a contract for two more works. This resulted in Un giorno di regno and Nabucco. His wife died while he was working on the former, which flopped at the premiere. However, Nabucco, produced in 1842, made Verdi famous. A number of operas followed shortly, I Lombardi and Ernani among them, premiering in various Italian cities.
The most important and original among Verdi's early operas is Macbeth. For the first time, Verdi attempted an operistic adaptation of a work by his favorite dramatist – William Shakespeare – and by creating an opera without love story, he broke a basic convention in Italian 19th Century's opera.
In 1847, I Lombardi, revised and renamed Jerusalem, was produced by the Paris Opera and, due to a number of Parisian conventions that had to be honored, became Verdi's first work in the grand-opera style.
Great Master
At the age of thirty-eight, Verdi began an affair with Giuseppina Strepponi, a soprano in the twilight of her career. Their cohabitation before marriage was regarded as scandalous in some of the places they lived. Verdi and Giuseppina married in 1859. She soon retired and Verdi, remembering Gioacchino Rossini's example, decided to retire as well. He was well-off, famous, and in love. It may have been Giuseppina herself who convinced him to continue his career. The result was one of Verdi's greatest masterpieces: Rigoletto. Based on a play by author Victor Hugo, the libretto had to undergo substantive revisions in order to satisfy the epoch's censorship, and the composer was on the verge of giving it all up a number of times. The opera was produced in Venice in 1851 and soon became a great success.
With Rigoletto Verdi sets up his original idea of musical drama, as a cocktail of heterogeneous elements embodying a social and cultural complexity, beginning from a peculiar mixture of comedy and tragedy. Rigoletto musical range includes band-music such as the first scene or the song La donna è mobile, Italian melody such as the famous quartet Bella figlia dell'amore, chamber music such as the duet between Rigoletto and Sparafucile and powerful and concise declamatos often based on key-notes like the C and C# notes in Rigoletto and Monterone's upper register.
La Traviata, Verdi's next great opera, was composed and produced two years later. It is based on Alexandre Dumas, fils' play The Lady of the Camellias.
A number of operas followed, among them such repertoire staples as Il Trovatore, Les vêpres siciliennes (commissioned by the Paris Opera), Un ballo in maschera, La forza del destino (commissioned by the Imperial Theatre of St. Petersburg), and a second version of Macbeth.
In 1869, Verdi composed a section for a Requiem Mass in memory of Gioacchino Rossini. Verdi proposed the Requiem to be a collection of sections composed by other Italian contemporaries of Rossini. The Requiem was compiled and completed, but it was not performed in Verdi's lifetime. Verdi later reworked and used the "Libera Me" section he composed for the Rossini Requiem as part of a complete Requiem Mass, honoring Alessandro Manzoni, who died in 1873. The complete Requiem was first performed at the cathedral in Milan, on 22 May 1874.
Verdi's final great opera, Aida, was commissioned from him for the celebration of the opening of the Suez Canal. According to some sources, when the organizers approached Verdi, he turned them down. They warned him they would ask Charles Gounod instead. Verdi agreed that they should. Only when they threatened to engage Richard Wagner's services did Verdi begin to show some considerable interest.
In fact, the two composers, who were the leaders of their respective schools of music, seemed to resent each other greatly. They never met. Verdi's comments on Wagner and his music are few and hardly benevolent ("He invariably chooses, unnecessarily, the untrodden path, attempting to fly where a rational person would walk with better results"), but at least one of them is kind: upon learning of Wagner's death, Verdi lamented: "Sad! Sad! Sad! ... a name that leaves a most powerful mark on the history of our art." Of Wagner's comments on Verdi, only one is well-known. After listening to Verdi's Requiem, the great German, prolific and eloquent in his comments on some other composers, said, "It would be best not to say anything."
Aida premiered in Cairo in 1871 and was an instant success.
Twilight
The next dozen years Verdi worked sparingly if at all, slowly revising some of his earlier scores.
Otello, based on William Shakespeare's play, premiered in Milan in 1887. Its music is "continuous" and cannot easily be divided into separate "numbers" to be performed in concert. Although masterfully orchestrated, it lacks the melodic lustre so characteristic of Verdi's earlier, great, operas.
Verdi's last opera, Falstaff, whose libretto, by Arrigo Boito, was based on Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor and Victor Hugo's subsequent translation, was a moderate success: mainly, the audiences wished to express their gratitude to the old composer. The score is chiefly algebraic and contains none of Verdi's former melodic genius.
Verdi died in 1901. Thus, he may have heard, or perused the scores of, Giacomo Puccini's La bohème and Tosca, Ruggiero Leoncavallo's Pagliacci, Petr Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades, but, unfortunately, what he thought of these operas, penned by his immediate and fairly worthy successors, remains a mystery.
Verdi's operas are a staple of the standard repertoire.
Verdi's role in the Risorgimento
In the 1840s, the popularity of Verdi's music coincided with the Risorgimento, the campaign for a unified Italian nation. The wild success of Nabucco in particular put Verdi's name and music in the minds of many Italians at the time. They perceived in Verdi's works a sadness that reflected their own unhappiness with the status quo, and a vibrant strain conjuring romantic visions of Italian unification. Verdi's songs were especially resonant in Milan, then under Austrian occupation.
In particular, Nabucco's "Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves", the tender lament of captives in Babylonia, was an immense success, and reportedly could be heard sung in the streets of Milan in 1843. Also known as Va' Pensiero from its first line, the song has been proposed from time to time as the Italian national anthem. It begins:
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Fly, thought, on wings of gold; |
Va, pensiero, sull'ali dorate; |
Full lyrics can be found here: [1] and a recording (MP3 format) here: [2].
Milan was still under Austrian occupation and was beginning to consider supporting Victor Emmanuel's effort in Italian reunification, as it afterwards did. Clandestine partisans started therefore plotting to have the then-King of Sardinia conquer Milan. Due to severe Austrian censorship, this campaign was given a codename: "Viva VERDI." Verdi was a secret acronym for Vittorio Emanuele Re D'Italia, referring to Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy. This enabled nationalists to freely shout their support for Victor Emmanuel, while outsiders assumed they were fans of the composer. Giuseppe Verdi was aware of this use of his name and is supposed to have consented.
Other references to political events have been seen in Verdi's I Lombardi.
Style
Verdi's predecessors who influenced his music were Rossini, Bellini, Giacomo Meyerbeer and, most notably, Gaetano Donizetti. With the possible exception of Otello, he was free of Wagner's influence. Although respectful of Gounod, Verdi was careful not to learn anything from the Frenchman whom many of Verdi's contemporaries regarded as the greatest living composer. Some strains in Aida suggest at least a superficial familiarity with the works of the Russian composer Mikhail Glinka, whom Franz Liszt, after his tour of the Russian Empire as a pianist, popularized in Western Europe.
Throughout his career, Verdi refused to use the high C in his tenor arias, citing the fact that the opportunity to sing that particular note in front of an audience distracts the performer before and after the note comes on.
Although his orchestration is often masterful, Verdi relied heavily on his melodic gift as the ultimate instrument of musical expression. In fact, in many of his passages, and especially in his arias, the harmony is ascetic, with the entire orchestra occasionally sounding as if it were one large accompanying instrument - a giant-sized guitar playing chords. Some critics maintain he paid insufficient attention to the technical aspect of composition, lacking as he did schooling and refinement. Verdi himself once said, "Of all composers, past and present, I am the least learned." He hastened to add, however, "I mean that in all seriousness, and by learning I do not mean knowledge of music."
However, it would be incorrect to assume that Verdi underestimated the expressive power of the orchestra or failed to use it to its full capacity where necessary. Moreover, orchestral and contrapuntal innovation is characteristic of his style: for instance, the strings doing the rapid ascending scale in Monterone's scene in Rigoletto accentuate the drama, or, also in Rigoletto, the choir humming six closely grouped notes backstage portray, very effectively, the brief ominous wails of the approaching tempest. Verdi's innovations are so distinctive that other composers do not use them; they remain, to this day, Verdi's signature tricks.
Verdi was one of the first composers who insisted on patiently seeking out plots to suit their particular talents. Working closely with his librettists and well aware that dramatic expression was his forte, he made certain that the initial work upon which the libretto was based was stripped of all "unnecessary" detail and "superfluous" participants, and only characters brimming with passion and scenes rich in drama remained.
Eponyms
- The Verdi Inlet on the Beethoven Peninsula of Alexander Island just off of Antarctica
- Verdi Square at Broadway and West 72nd Street in Manhattan
- Asteroid 3975 Verdi
References
- Budden, J. (1973) The Operas of Verdi, Volume I, 3rd ed, Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198162618
- Budden, J. (1973) The Operas of Verdi, Volume II, 3rd ed, Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198162626
- Budden, J. (1973) The Operas of Verdi, Volume III, 3rd ed, Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198162634
- Kamien, R. (1997) Music: an appreciation - student brief, 3rd ed, McGraw Hill. ISBN 0070365210
- Gal, H. (1975) Brahms, Wagner, Verdi: drei meister, drei welten, Fischer. ISBN 3100243021
- Michels, Ulrich (1992) dtv-Atlas zur Musik: Band Zwei, 7th ed, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag in association with Bärenreiter Verlag. ISBN 3-423-03023-2
See also
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