THIS YEAR MARKS THE CENTENARY of Giuseppe Verdi’s death, and you can hardly move without meeting some sign of it. Companies with short schedules, such as the Atlanta Opera and the Palm Beach Opera, have devoted the entire season to Verdi; the rather grander San Francisco Opera conducted a Verdi festival this summer; the Kirov Opera of St. Petersburg went to London to perform six Verdi operas and the “Requiem” in ten days at Covent Garden; the Metropolitan Opera has put on a pair of nationally televised Verdi evenings and issued a three-CD set with fifty of its most famous singers since Caruso singing Verdi; the Sarasota Opera inaugurated a Verdi cycle that will run through 2013 and present all of his operas with “traditional, romantic staging”–a commodity that, in an era of operatic stage directors with big new ideas, is getting harder to come by with each passing year. Perhaps the highlight of the current Verdi celebration is EMI’s issue of the digitally remastered set “Les introuvables du chant verdien,” a collection on eight CDs of the composer’s greatest hits in hard-to-find performances from 1903 to 1954. Even the most fanatical collectors are bound to find unfamiliar gems here–although the accompanying notes do not trouble to point out just what riches are included. Some digging is required to find out that the tenor, Francesco Tamagno, singing Otello’s “Niun mi tema” in 1903, happened to be the first Otello in 1887; that the baritone Victor Maurel tossing off Falstaff’s patter song “Quand’ero paggio” (with two encores, one in French) in 1907 was the first Falstaff in 1893 (and caused Verdi endless headaches with his maniacal egotism); that the bass Francesco Navarini intoning “Il lacerato spirito” from “Simon Boccanegra” in 1907 was the Grand Inquisitor in the debut of the Italian version of “Don Carlo” in 1884. Giuseppe Borgatti in 1928 gets perfect the unbearable weight that his ruinous folly has become for the broken Otello. Alexander Kipnis in 1931 outshines Navarini by portraying Fiesco’s despair at his daughter’s death with burnished obsidian tone, beauty of line, and a low F-sharp of preternatural potency. WHEN YOU ADD IN ALL THE OTHERS–Mattia Battistini, Fedora Barbieri, Jussi Bjorling, Eva Turner, Beniamino Gigli, Tito Gobbi, Boris Christoff, Enrico Caruso, Titta Ruffo, Antonina Neshdanova, Luisa Tetrazzini, Nellie Melba, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Helge Roswaenge, Lilli Lehmann, Ezio Pinza–you have as fine a collection as has ever been assembled. Unfortunately, the package fails to provide texts for the music, so that unless the listener is intimate with some seventeen operas he will be pretty much at sea. The words matter, because Verdi was one of the supreme musical dramatists and perhaps the greatest of musical moralists–that is, a thinker of the utmost seriousness whose natural medium was music for the stage. Born in 1813, Verdi was the son of a tavern keeper in Roncole, a village in Parma. He was fortunate in his choice of father, who bought the boy a broken spinet, and had a neighbor fix it. (Verdi kept it the rest of his life.) The village organist taught him to play, well enough that at the age of twelve he replaced his teacher in the organ loft. But there were things he would never learn in Roncole, and so his father sent him up the road to Busseto, which offered music instruction in its school, as well as a military band and an amateur philharmonic society. The stripling Verdi took musical Busseto by storm, learning to play several instruments, composing hundreds of little works and not a few larger ones for local consumption, and wooing Margherita Barezzi, whose father was a well-to-do merchant. AT EIGHTEEN VERDI APPLIED FOR ADMISSION to the Milan Conservatory, but the examiners were put off by his advanced age–fourteen was the usual cutoff–and by certain yokel mannerisms of his at the keyboard. Their rejection daunted him, but Barezzi’s financial assistance enabled Verdi to study privately in Milan with Vincenzo Lavigna, an operatic composer and a conductor at La Scala. After three years of city living, he returned to Busseto, where he married Margherita and settled into the position of maestro di musica for the town–but only after a protracted controversy that pitted the forces of respectable Christendom, who opposed the self-proclaimed atheist Verdi, against the secular types of the philharmonic. Bigger things were soon brewing, and Milan beckoned once again: In 1839, his first opera, “Oberto, conte di San Bonifacio,” had its premiere at La Scala. But life wasn’t entirely easy. Margherita bore Verdi two children, both of whom died in infancy. Then in 1840, as he was writing his second opera “Un giorno di regno” (the only comedy in his repertoire until the twilight masterpiece “Falstaff”), Margherita came down with rheumatic fever and died six days later. Verdi’s intimates feared he would go out of his mind. “A third coffin goes out of my house. I was alone! Alone!” Music held no consolation, and he vowed never to compose again. The hardheaded impresario Bartolomeo Merelli, however, would not let the composer out of his contract, and Verdi hobbled his way to the end of the score. The opera bombed, closing after one night to the Italian audience’s hooting and whistling. But some months later Merelli convinced Verdi to take a look at a promising libretto spurned by Otto Nicolai. The result was “Nabucco,” which captured the heart of the Italian populace. Verdi’s music spoke with more telling fervor than even the most inspired political oratory to the Italian longing for unity and freedom from Austrian domination. The highlight of “Nabucco” was the chorus “Va, pensiero, sull’ali dorate” (“Go, thought on golden wings”), in which Hebrew slaves captive in Babylon sing of their yearning for their native land and ask God for the fortitude to endure their exile. During a rehearsal, the carpenters who were rebuilding some scenery paid no attention to the soloists who were trying to sing over their noise; but they stopped their hammering and listened in reverent silence to “Va, pensiero” then thumped on the stage with their tools to register their approbation. When Verdi’s next work, “I Lombardi alla prima crociata,” had its premiere at La Scala in 1843, the Milanese audience had no trouble understanding who the Lombards and the Saracens were really meant to be in the battle cry “La Santa Terra oggi nostra sara” (“The Holy Land will be ours today”). In 1845, Verdi’s newest musical and patriotic triumph “Giovanna d’Arco,” drew rowdy crowds that the police did their best to break up, but without success. Verdi belonged to the people of Italy as no serious artist could today. He became a political figure in his own right, elected to the first parliament of the newly founded Kingdom of Italy in 1860. The popular shout “Viva Verdi” became a national rallying-cry, with a double significance: The composer’s name was an acronym for Vittorio Emmanuele, Re d’Italia–Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy–and it was never really clear whether the cheer honored Verdi or the king more. ALTHOUGH VERDI WAS DEADLY SERIOUS about politics, his art was the principal object of his political passion. From 1842 to 1851 he was remorselessly prolific, turning out operas at the rate of more than one a year. “Nabucco,” “Ernani,” and “Macbeth” still have their occasional place in the repertory of major opera houses, but for the most part, the works produced in this period are rarely staged anymore. Verdi was later to speak of this time as his years “in the galley.” As he wrote to a woman friend in 1846, “Who knows whether one day I shall not wake up a millionaire! What a beautiful word, full of meaning! Beautiful! And how empty by comparison are fame, glory, genius.” (He left an estate worth over $23 million in today’s money.) The woman Verdi fell in love with after Margherita’s death was Giuseppina Strepponi, who sang Abigaille in the opening run of “Nabucco” but who was really not terribly impressive a singer. It was an unlikely match. She had gone
through innumerable lovers and at the age of twenty-six had borne three or four illegitimate children by at least two different fathers. But Verdi loved her, and she proved to love him back. In 1848, he bought an estate outside Busseto and installed Strepponi, to whom he was not married. The townspeople responded with ire. In an 1852 letter that he wrote in response to a severe chastisement from Antonio Barezzi, Margherita’s father, the composer declared: “I demand my freedom of action, because everyone has the right to it, and because my nature rebels against doing as others do.” The hackneyed self-congratulation in this heroic rejection of desiccated convention is mockable, but Strepponi’s love for Verdi did change his life, and he loved her well enough to marry her, in 1859. NOT UNEXPECTEDLY, Verdi arrogated to himself the freedom to ignore his vows when they became inconvenient, as his wife got old and bedeviled him with newfound religion. His prima donna became an overripe second banana, and another soprano, twenty years younger, took up where Strepponi left off: Teresa Stolz sang Verdi rather better than Strepponi had–she was a soloist in the original performance of the “Requiem Mass” in 1874, and starred throughout Europe in his operas–and more important she made the aging composer feel young. Their affair caused a scandal, and Strepponi’s jealousy nearly drove Verdi around the bend. She held on until her death in 1897. Thereafter, Verdi was Stolz’s alone, and their correspondence from 1900, when he was eighty-seven and she sixty-six, is remarkable for its erotic passion. Verdi’s art treats desires so intense that mere speech is unable to do them justice: They must be sung. Nobility, and particularly what it means to a democratic age, is the great theme of Verdi’s operas. He works on a broader canvas than Mozart, takes in the grand clashing ambitions of political men as well as their erotic natures, and traces the subtle connections between the two sorts of passion. Not enough attention has been paid to Verdi’s force of mind. He is regarded as the possessor of an exquisite lyric gift and a concomitant deficiency in brainpower. It was really Wagner who created the taste by which Verdi’s stature is diminished. Anyone so engagingly melodious, so much in the Italian tradition, cannot be really serious, the way Germans and their admirers are. The highest praise that advanced musical thinkers accord Verdi is that he contributed to the happy demise of the number opera, with its succession of sharply delineated formal episodes that subordinated drama to vocal display, and replaced it with a freely flowing action served by “endless melody.” Thus it is only Verdi’s late operas–“Otello,” “Falstaff,” and perhaps as well “Aida” and “Simon Boccanegra” in its revised version–that are considered in the same breath as Wagner as intellectual productions. Of course, little of this matters to the listeners who flock to his operas. Verdi understood love and rendered its effect superbly. Even erotic villainy gets its full measure of musical beauty, though it is a dramatically complex beauty that reveals the less than savory nature of the longing expressed. In the scene that opens Act II of “Nabucco,” the Babylonian princess Abigaille (who is in love with the captive Hebrew officer Ismaele, who for his part loves her sister Fenena, who is not really Abigaille’s sister, for Abigaille is an adopted slave) first vents her fury at being unlucky in love and swears that everyone will pay for her unhappiness, then changes gears and remembers how she used to be so much in love that others’ tears would make her weep. Verdi demonstrates how, even for the wicked Abigaille, love has the power to change the world completely (although not for long, as the high priest soon enters with the news that Fenena is freeing the Hebrews, and Abigaille launches into a cabaletta of insane bloody-mindedness, vowing that the throne shall be hers and everyone shall grovel at her feet). TO SIMILAR EFFECT, Verdi gives the baritone villain in “Il Trovatore,” the Conte di Luna, as heartfelt an expression of love for Leonora as he does the tenor hero, Manrico, who also burns for her and, unlike Luna, is loved in return. The aria “Questa o quella” near the beginning of “Rigoletto,” in which the Duke of Mantua sings of his ceaseless pursuit of sexual pleasure, seems at first the natural effervescence of cavalier high spirits. Later, however, after the duke has raped Rigoletto’s daughter, Gilda, the catchy jauntiness of that first melody is shown to conceal a callous brutality. Verdi lets one feel the attractiveness of a potent virility that eagerly takes whatever pleasure the world offers, then reveals the duke’s depraved indifference to the suffering of the creatures who furnish those pleasures. RIGOLETTO HIMSELF IS DRAWN with equal subtlety. No man loves his daughter more than Rigoletto does Gilda, and their duet “Piangi, fanciulla” in which the hunchbacked jester consoles his daughter as best he can after her rape, is perhaps the most heartbreaking music Verdi ever wrote. Yet even paternal love that seems pure can be tragically contaminated by self-love. The subsequent duet “Si, vendetta” shows Rigoletto to be thinking not so much of his daughter’s pain as of his own dishonor. The music describes the sudden onset of virile resolution in a man who has made a career of being less than a man, the courtiers’ laughingstock and lickspittle; but there emerges as well a savage gaiety, rendered by a repeated rhythmic sequence of dotted half-note, dotted eighth-note, and sixteenth-note, at the prospect of the terrible fate he shall arrange for his tormentor. Gilda, who loves the duke in spite of everything, urges forgiveness; Rigoletto won’t hear of it. Ultimately, she will undo her father’s scheme to murder the duke and will die in the place of the man she loves. Verdi’s musical depiction of these characters and the moral universe they inhabit–and do their part to create–leaves one richly distressed and raptly flummoxed as only the greatest tragedies can do. One can find the same subtlety of imagination in all of Verdi–from “La Traviata” to “Ernani” to “Aida.” But Verdi’s most complex and thrilling treatment of erotic and political passions is “Don Carlo,” based on Friedrich Schiller’s play. Don Carlo, Infante of Spain, is engaged to Elisabetta, Princess of France; deeply in love with each other, they appear bound for the greatest happiness, but then for reasons of state the French king decides his daughter ought to marry instead Carlo’s father, King Filippo II. Carlo pines for his lost love, and his friend Rodrigo, Marquis of Posa, coaxes him to snap out of it and to turn his attention to more serious matters–convincing Filippo to grant Flanders freedom from Spanish oppression. In no time Carlo and Rodrigo are singing of liberation with the same passion that Carlo just sang of love. Addressing the king, Rodrigo in his clarion baritone delivers a soaring exhortation to advance the cause of human freedom, while the king’s gruff rumbling bass is the perfect instrument to express the belief that depraved humanity requires a stern hand to keep it in line. It is hard to say whether politics or love is the more perilous activity. Carlo channels his unfortunate romantic longing into a hot-headed political defiance, in the name of freedom; against the backdrop of an auto-da-fe, father and son face each other with swords drawn, and Carlo ends in the paternal dungeon. The king’s terrible loneliness, the isolation of a public man obsessed with a private passion, is highlighted in his soliloquy “Ella giammai m’amo,” the most beautiful aria ever written for the bass voice. The long orchestral prelude to the aria is a masterpiece of dramatic writing. As he sits alone in his study at dawn, having spent a sleepless night there, strings play a simple haunting figure of four eighth-notes, repeat it once, play a very similar figure of four sixteenth-notes, repeat it three more times with the slightest variation, then reiterate the whole phrase: The passage evokes a tortured mind that cannot turn from th
e one thought that consumes it; that agonizing thought speeds up and slows down but never lets up its torment. Love holds no happiness for anyone. When love fails, it’s back to ruling the world, or saving it. Rodrigo sacrifices himself for Carlo, seeing to it that he, not Carlo, is blamed for the Flanders revolt (with the intention that Carlo then go to Flanders and actually lead the revolt). Agents of the Inquisition murder Rodrigo while he is visiting Carlo in prison. With Rodrigo’s selflessness as his inspiration, Carlo tells Elisabetta honor now means more to him than love. The two of them shall meet again in heaven, he predicts, and enjoy the bliss they were denied on earth, but for now there is the world’s urgent business to attend to: Carlo is on his way to Flanders when King Filippo and the Grand Inquisitor step out of the shadows and block his path. Carlo appears to be done for, and Schiller’s play ends with that suggestion; the opera, however, contrives his salvation, through the intercession of a mysterious friar, evidently the ghost of Carlo’s grandfather Carlo V (the noble emperor in “Ernani”), who whisks the young prince off into the protective darkness of the monastic cloister. Is this death for Carlo? Hard to say; but it is certainly not life as he has known it. In “Don Carlo” the only chance of salvation–a word pointedly repeated both in Schiller’s play and Verdi’s opera–is to be had in leaving the tragic world of forlorn erotic hope and thwarted political decency. Verdi never put much stock in heaven–Strepponi complained of the baleful coldness of her husband’s unbelief–but in his most thoughtful opera whatever comes after death is preferable to the best that life has to offer. VERDI’S WAS A SEVERE AND DISENCHANTED NOBILITY, and in the “Messa da Requiem,” his one notable non-operatic work, one sees both the greatness and the spiritual confinement of that attitude. In this mass, written specifically in memory of the great novelist and patriot Alessandro Manzoni, there are passages that make one fear for one’s soul: The best-known portion, the “Dies irae” chorus, calls up the swirling tumult of infernal winds, and there is nothing else quite as hair-raising in sacred music. And yet, there is really nothing comparable in the mass to make one thrill at the prospect of heaven. In the final “Libera me,” the choral response to the soprano’s desperation effectively puts to rest the obsession with last things, and the soprano comes at last to share this wise serenity. Man’s triumph after death is the work of sound secular sentiment and force of mind; the overpowering passions associated with eternity are overcome by a steady reasonableness at home in this world. One feels Verdi’s inadequacy under the aspect of eternity if one compares this with, say, Hector Berlioz’s “Requiem,” which shows what it is to be a soul confronted with the full power of divine majesty and the rapturous mystery of God’s justice. Where Verdi’s “Requiem” treats death as a man of little or no faith must face it, without any assurance of what lies beyond, or with a premonition of the eternal inane, Berlioz’s is confident of the next world and casts human morality in its light. Berlioz’s music seems the work of a soul in secure possession of the everlasting truth; these are the sounds that heaven might make in response to human importunity. Still, Verdi’s art belongs among the most unabashedly noble of the nineteenth century. To make great feelings and actions seem possible to people who do not ordinarily think of such matters, to remind an audience that its moral horizons could be extended beyond customary limits: This was Verdi’s achievement. Opera, like modern art in general, would take a different direction in the name of democratic inclusiveness after Verdi, toward the cultivation of sentiments too base even to be considered monstrous. In Verdi’s own day, Bizet’s “Carmen,” Mascagni’s “Cavalleria rusticana,” Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci “effectively closed out the nineteenth century and ushered in the twentieth with a festival of moral haplessness that featured low-life sex and knife play. Alban Berg’s “Lulu,” widely considered the greatest twentieth-century opera, recounts the misadventures of a beautiful and unfeeling slut who leaves a sad trail of human flotsam in her wake and herself ends up a victim of Jack the Ripper. Modernism turns romanticism inside out and thus makes life look as ugly, brutal, and perverse as possible. Twentieth-century operas as stylistically various as Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,” Berg’s “Wozzeck,” Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress,” and Britten’s “Peter Grimes” all share a fascination with the very worst the world has to offer. Degradation is their meat. THESE OPERAS ARE ALL REMARKABLE works of art, attaining a severe and disturbing beauty, audaciously rich in their musical dramaturgy. But they are not the kind of fare people of moral discernment want to have to swallow on a regular basis. So a century after Verdi’s death, one is grateful to find him still the cornerstone of the operatic repertoire. He represents the best of a particular art at the moment at which it was at the summit of its achievement. There will not be another like him. Algis Valiunas is a writer in Greenacres, Florida. October 22, 2001 – Volume 7, Number 6
