Verdi (Master Musicians Series)

"As soon as I became interested in opera and Verdi, which was in the early 1980s, I started looking for things to read. It came to my attention that there was this guy called Julian Budden who had written a monumental monograph in three volumes called The Operas of Giuseppe Verdi , offering an in-depth discussion of every single opera by Verdi. This man had extraordinary knowledge and had been able to write somewhere the region of 1,500 pages on this composer. And this set of three volumes was made available in Italian translation at the time when I still lived in Italy. The reason why, rather than that fundamental and monumental three-volume work, I’ve chosen his Verdi in the Master Musicians series is that even though it was published more than 30 years ago, it remains a great introduction to who Verdi was. It is a book that is neatly divided into two parts, with about 150 pages on his life and slightly more on the music. The parallel discussions of life and work are organised, as one would expect, chronologically. Some would find this predictable, but I find this refreshing—I’m a fan of chronology; it’s a mid-life thing, perhaps! This book has many glimpses of who Verdi was and much reliance on the correspondence and on the views that were expressed by critics and Verdi’s contemporaries and collaborators. There are also a few very well-chosen images in the insert in the middle showing anything from the portraits of Verdi’s key collaborators to set designs to portraits and photographs of Verdi himself. So, for those who are looking for an enjoyable and approachable read and who want to get a sense of his life and his work, and those who want to have access to a quick discussion of Rigoletto or Falstaff and other major operas, it’s a great place to go. There are a few notated musical examples but those aren’t discussed at a technical level which would put off the general reader. On the contrary, they are there and allow people who are musically literate to go a little deeper and may feel encouraged to look at a whole score. Otherwise, you can just gloss over those passages and you won’t lose the thread of the discussion. Normally, if someone asks me where to start if they want to read about Verdi, this is the book that I recommend because it is very approachable and enjoyable, but also rigorous and detailed. In a market where there are many monographs of the composer, of very uneven quality, this book remains a safe bet and a rewarding read. That’s right. The conservatoire at Milan doesn’t have much of a reputation for talent-scouting. They rejected not only Verdi, but also Franz Liszt . . . But Verdi’s life is indeed remarkable. When you go to Roncole, a small village which is about three miles from the town of Busseto, what you see is a big sign. Today, Roncole is now called “Roncole Verdi”; they have renamed the town. It’s as if they renamed “Stratford-upon-Avon” as “Stratford Shakespeare”. So, there is this big sign that quotes Verdi stating in a letter: “I was, I am, and always will be a peasant from Roncole.” There is the myth of Verdi as a peasant—of Verdi the man who belonged to the land, the man of humble origins, the great genius who developed and flourished against all odds. That myth is heavily exaggerated. Verdi did not come from a particularly poor background; his parents ran a business and were innkeepers in Roncole. If you want to look for a composer who was really poor at birth, then that’s Donizetti—but we rarely talk about that. Verdi himself, later in life, liked to fuel the myth of being rough around the edges and very practical—someone who made it due to instinct and genius rather than access to superior education or anything like that. I think that Julian Budden and, more to the point, the book by Frank Walker, are very careful at telling us that his is a remarkable life, but that Verdi also had some extreme strokes of luck. Having a church with an organ directly in front of his birthplace—it’s maybe 30 steps from his birthplace to the church—was a stroke of luck, and there’s no shame in saying that. Also encountering patrons like Antonio Barezzi, who became his first father-in-law and generously supported him—that was another stroke of luck. Finding a teacher like Vincenzo Lavigna in Milan was a great stroke of luck too. “The conservatoire at Milan rejected not only Verdi, but also Franz Liszt . . .” It’s not even clear how exactly Verdi obtained his first contract for La Scala, but that was something that definitely worked in his favour. He made his way into the operatic world when Bellini died prematurely and Donizetti’s career also ended prematurely due to illness. There was only a brief overlap between the two of them. All of this meant that Verdi was the right man in the right place and the right time. There were quite a few factors that worked in his favour. Horrendous tragedy, absolutely. You are referring to the loss of his two children and his first wife in the space of a couple of years. This is a story that is repeated very often and is actually told inaccurately, speaking of myth and reality, which is such an important dualism when we talk about Verdi’s life and his operas. Verdi later wrote an autobiographical account which described the beginnings of his career more or less as follows: I did Oberto, Conte di San Bonifacio ; it was successful, and so I was given a contract to write three further operas. The first of these was to be Un giorno di regno —an opera buffa—and then he goes on to say “and here grave misfortunes begin.” My first child falls ill and dies, and then my second child falls ill and dies, and then my wife falls ill and dies. Now, all of this doesn’t actually happen after Oberto and in the period of a few weeks, as Verdi seems to indicate. The first child died in 1838, even before Verdi produced Oberto . The second child dies in 1839, and, finally, his wife dies in June 1840. At that point, they were only choosing the subject for the opera that would become Un giorno di regno . So, there’s the sense that Verdi plays a role in creating his own life story. We’re not talking about deliberate lies or mystifying the historical record—we’re talking about a certain perception that he came to have. Still, one would never dream of diminishing the impact of this kind of tragedy, of the loss of two children and his wife. When Verdi tells the story of the third coffin that leaves his house, he states: “ Ero solo. Solo ”—I was alone, alone. The sense of loneliness that must have pervaded his life following her death must have been very powerful and probably had an impact on how he then became extremely self-sufficient and increasingly independent as a thinker. Verdi is already firmly established and recognised internationally as the leading living opera composer, together with Rossini who had retired. But by 1850, Verdi is the guy that does Italian opera like nobody one else does. At that point, there are three operas that appear consecutively: Rigoletto in 1851, and Il trovatore and La Traviata appeared within less than three months of each other from January to March of 1853. Today we refer to these group of works collectively as the “popular trilogy.” But they are three remarkably different pieces in terms of subject matter, in terms of how the librettos are shaped, in terms of character depiction, and in terms of the musical materials they contain. If there is one common denominator between them beyond chronology, it’s just how different they are. “Verdi’s melodies are perceived as being so infectious that they get out there and are instantly memorised—they are the perfect earworms” Verdi’s music, in his view, has a unifying quality that works well with the subject matter. Rigoletto is set in a medieval court and was meant to be the story of the king of France, but the censors of Venice didn’t allow that and so Verdi had to change it to the Duke of Mantua. La traviata is set obviously in nineteenth-century Paris even though the censors in Venice required it to be set in the eighteenth century. Il trovatore is set in Spain and there are gypsies. These are all things that inform the way in which Verdi approaches the composition of each opera. If you know Verdi and you know these three operas but not by heart, it’s very easy to find your way around them. You cannot mistake the one for the other. At this point, Verdi is very secure in striking a specific approach to the composition of a whole work. He does this without using the same devices that you would find in Wagner for example, such as recurring motifs that are woven through the fabric of a score and unify it. Verdi does this by adopting an overall tone, a character, a colour—a tinta , as he said himself. This is a generic and elusive concept, but there is this sense in Verdi that each opera is very individual. When Verdi discussed the subject matter of Rigoletto , he wrote something like: my notes may be beautiful or ugly, but they have a purpose. They work with a certain story. We cannot just change the story of Rigoletto and expect me to use the same music because it wouldn’t work. Operas like Rigoletto , Trovatore , and Traviata have gone on to become immensely successful. They epitomise Verdi in so many ways and they epitomise opera in general. It’s emblematic that among the recognisable tunes that we mentioned at the beginning, several are from these operas. They are these iconic moments in opera. Do they become iconic because these operas are really successful or are these operas successful because they contain especially appealing and especially effective musical material? These questions are impossible to answer. Yes, it is fascinating. Verdi, in a way, retired after Aida , and there was no sense that he was going to write new operas. He remained deeply interested in what was happening in the world of opera, he continued to work on Don Carlos and its revisions, and he revised Simon Boccanegra , so his mind was still active. But no one would have expected in the mid-1880s that he would have come up with another opera, let alone two. It is truly extraordinary. The circumstances have to do with the encounter with librettist Boito and his relationship with Ricordi, his publisher. There was a bit of a conspiracy to smoke Verdi out of his hiding. The connection with Boito certainly proves crucial and that relationship was tested for the revisions for Simon Boccanegra . One thing leads to another, Verdi sort of ‘wakes up’ and prepares the four-act version of Don Carlo for La Scala. And then, little by little, plans materialise for Otello and then for Falstaff ."