The Man Verdi

"Frank Walker is a classic in Verdi scholarship. It appeared in 1962 and then was reprinted recently by the University of Chicago Press—something I was delighted about and sanctions the enduring importance of this book. Let’s look at the story of Verdi bibliography for a brief moment. Verdi is a very famous man who lives a very long life. Now, famous people who live long lives have biographies published whilst they are still alive. During Verdi’s lifetime, there were analytical studies of his operas, such as the one by Abramo Basevi which has been translated into English recently and edited magnificently by Stefano Castelvecchi. And there was also the biography by Arthur Pougin. But there is also all the myth-making. Verdi dies in 1901, and within 12 years of his death, there are celebrations of the 100th anniversary of his birth. Then in 1951, there are celebrations of the 50th anniversary of his death. All of these moments of monumentalisation and enshrining are characterised by a certain about of myth-making. There are ways of writing biography, of talking about art in general and about music in particular, that inform those specific moments in Verdi scholarship. So, there is a great deal of “oh yes, Verdi was a peasant”, “oh yes, Verdi was a patriot”, “oh yes, ‘Va, pensiero’ is the song of the Italians” without problematising and looking at the historical record. Frank Walker comes along and writes the book that we—even though I wasn’t born yet!—had been waiting for at that point. He writes an in-depth biographical study which stands out because it draws to an unprecedented extent on archival research and primary sources. Walker looks at the letters, he looks at the historical record, and he uses all that to draw a picture that is detailed, compelling, coherent, and reliable like few other biographical studies have managed to do either before or, frankly, since. This is a really great place to go. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Those of us who are passionate about Verdi and who love the story of his life now have access to thousands upon thousands of letters that are published in admirable critical editions. We have the Verdi and Boito correspondence and a lot of the Verdi and Ricordi correspondence, for example, and many other volumes of correspondence published by the Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani in Parma, Italy. They offer an extraordinary amount of detail that wasn’t available even to Walker. But you can go to Walker and read through it, or just focus on specific chapters, and what you get is the twofold perspective on Verdi’s life and people who were important to him. What I find fascinating about Walker and reading him is that he gives an acknowledgment and tribute to a great artist, but it is also an acknowledgment and tribute to those who were close with him—who collaborated with him, who helped to make the man Verdi. Sure, we can call him a genius, but this book is about Verdi the man. I’m tempted to say there is a sociological component. You read about Verdi’s early life and immediately there is this area that Walker recognises as being problematic. He sifts through the documents and separates myth and reality for the first time—how was Verdi really trained? What sort of professional opportunities did he have? Then, when you come to the beginning of his career, the book explores the relationship between the young composer at the outset of his career and the impresario Bartolomeo Merelli, as well as two singers including Giuseppina Strepponi. Then you go on and encounter a figure like Emanuele Muzio who was Verdi’s student, as well as his friend and collaborator. As you go on even further, you get to what is perhaps my favourite part of the book, which is truly seminal. This is the part that talks about Verdi and Giuseppina Strepponi. Strepponi was, as we have said, a key singer in Verdi’s early career, but is remembered for the great love that developed in 1847. Verdi travels through Paris to go to London, and on the way back he stops in Paris again and produces Jérusalem for the Academie Royale de Musique (the so-called Opéra), it is there and then that his friendship with Strepponi becomes a fully-fledged relationship that will last a lifetime. This talks about Verdi’s love of Strepponi, but what’s really worthwhile and timely when we think about feminist approaches, here we have a book that doesn’t theorise, but that fully recognises how influential Strepponi was on Verdi. For example, Strepponi may have been pivotal in identifying the subject of Il Trovatore , we don’t know and we will probably never know for sure. She was not only a prominent singer who had retired but she was a woman of great culture—she was fluent in French as well as Italian, and her French was certainly better than Verdi’s. She could also read and write in English which was not common at all at the time. So, she had her own interests and literary tastes. The extent to which she contributed to Verdi’s development is merely touched upon here, but through the letters from Strepponi that are contained in this book, there is a sense of just how extraordinary this person was and how, really, Verdi wasn’t alone. “Here we have a book that doesn’t theorise, but that fully recognises how influential Giuseppina Strepponi was on Verdi” We have the monuments, the streets, the piazzas, the portraits, and the operas themselves, but opera is such a collaborative artform to begin with and for Verdi, then, we also have Strepponi’s presence, whose importance cannot be overestimated. When the Strepponi correspondence is published in its entirety in an accurate edition then we will be closer to paying her full justice. But for someone like Walker to come along in the 1960s and bring this woman, this artist, to the fore in Verdi bibliography, that’s really pathbreaking and is, in itself, a very good reason to read this book. Absolutely. For a long time, Verdi was described as one of the men who made Italy—together with the likes of Mazzini, Cavour, and Garibaldi. Verdi was perceived as the artist who had expressed the struggle for Italian liberation and unification with the music and stories of his operas. The myth was formed to a considerable extent after the unification of Italy and around the chorus “Va, pensiero” from Nabucco , which was taken to be a metaphor for the state of the Italian people in the early 1840s. As soon as the Kingdom of Italy was formed, Italy’s first prime minister Cavour called Verdi to the first Italian parliament and he was part of the process of not only making Italy but making Italians as a great role model. The historical record was manipulated in such a way as, for example, to argue that the chorus “Va, pensiero” was encored in Milan in 1842; thanks to the work of Roger Parker, we now know that it wasn’t. “The myth was formed to a considerable extent after the unification of Italy and around the chorus “Va, pensiero” from Nabucco ” Towards the end of the twentieth century, in the 1990s, a lot of work was done that took a revisionist approach to the question of Verdi and the Risorgimento. The line of reasoning was that the historical record was lacking. Although one can read the plot of the operas metaphorically, there is only scant evidence that audiences or Verdi’s contemporaries did so. There’s little, especially up to 1848, to show that Verdi or his librettists intended for these works to be political—to be expressions of current tensions and agitations relating to aspirations that led to the formation of Italy as a unified and independent nation. My take is that certain things were definitely exaggerated, and we owe a debt of gratitude to the revisionists who have made us think carefully about the historical record. I do resist, however, the approach of looking primarily for evidence of audience response. That sort of evidence is elusive by nature and in a world where written expression was closely monitored and public behaviour including in theatres was very carefully regulated, it is very difficult to even hypothesise a situation where there would be a big uprising during an opera performance—where people would be crying out loud “Viva L’Italia” or anything like that. What is interesting to me is to see how the censors position themselves in regard to Verdi’s operas. Mind you, we’re not just talking about Verdi. One of the points that needs to be made is that while we’ve been talking about the Risorgimento and Verdi, I’m more interested in talking about opera and the Risorgimento. I’m interested in seeing what the censors do and what their responses can be, not just to operas like Nabucco or Attila or Giovanna d’Arco —operas that tell the story of subjugation of one people by another. Opera was a dominant form of entertainment, and so you could not ban opera altogether. The show must go on, so to speak, and the authorities aimed to keep a certain balance and preserve a certain social order of power. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Opera was part of what Italian historian Alberto Banti has called “the morphology of national discourse”. We have notions of liberty and patria, of course, but these are not the most important. We have notions of honour, faith, and oaths, of making an oath or investing one’s honour in the pursuit of a cause. There’s also religion as a unifying element of the people. These are all things that come up in the operas, and censors exercised a measure of control over these themes. I have personally argued, for example, that the censoring of Giovanna d’Arco —which contains many references to the Virgin Mary—in Milan (the words of several passages were changed) has to do not so much with referring to the Virgin Mary in general terms, so it’s not a problem of religious propriety, but rather that the religious imagery seems to advocate that the Virgin Mary will support those who fight for freedom. “Opera was a dominant form of entertainment, and so you could not ban opera altogether. Authorities aimed to keep a certain balance and preserving a certain social order of power” These are things that are not about the Risorgimento; Verdi is not necessarily making statements with regard to a national cause. Rather, opera is of the Risorgimento; it is part of a culture where the destiny of Italy was very much a concern. These things are difficult to pin down with accuracy and with precision—and so we need to keep talking about them. Personally, I’m not happy with the 20th-century traditionist approach, with the many inaccuracies that are highlighted in Roger Parker’s work and the work of others, but I’m also not happy with the radical revisionism where they say “we have no evidence, therefore it’s not true.” No. If we don’t have evidence, then we keep looking for it (for instance, a young American scholar, Douglas Ipson, is doing fascinating work on the reception of Verdi’s operas before 1848). It’s very important to separate myth from reality, but in so doing we must be careful not to be sceptical and dismissive about everything. Myth is often built on certain foundations, and we just need to understand what those foundations are."