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GIUSEPPE VERDI I adored and I adore this art [opera]; and when I am alone and am wrestling with my notes, then my heart pounds, tears stream from my eyes, and the emotions and pleasures are beyond description. Verdi
 Giuseppe Verdi was the greatest composer of Italian opera in the nineteenth century. He was also a man who helped shape his time, and his time helped shape him. When he was born, ‘Italy’ was only a figure of speech; it was composed of small states, each with its own dialect that could not easily be understood by the citizens of other parts of the peninsula. Only the speech of Tuscany, with its capital, Florence, and of other nearby states would be understood as Italian today. The states shared little history; most were under the domination of some foreign power, and each state used different currencies. Music formed the only common bond, and Verdi provided that. He united Italians with his music before they were united politically. His very name, V-E-R-D-I, was an acronym for Vittorio Emmanuele, Re d’Italia, the king of Piedmont, who later became the first king of a united Italy. VIVA VERDI’ became the most revolutionary and patriotic cry in Italy.
Verdi was so famous that letters addressed simply “Maestro Verdi, Italy” reached him. Almost all of Verdi’s earlier operas had an underlying theme of revolt against oppression, at least to the extent allowed by the censors. The audience understood that the oppressed people in Verdi’s works were lightly disguised Italians. Since each Italian city had an opera house as its principal center of recreation, opera was the perfect medium for stirring up patriotic feeling among the oppressed citizens. Applause for Verdi meant applause for independence.
Giuseppe Verdi was born in October 1813 in Le Roncole, a village in the province of Parma. Since Parma was under the control of the French at the time, the child’s name was registered as Joseph Fortunin François, although he was known as Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco. In 1814, Napoleon’s troops were driven from their positions in Italy by the Russians and Austrians. Cossack troops pursued the French through Le Roncole. The infant Verdi’s mother hid with him for twenty-four hours in a nearby church tower, terrified that he would cry and reveal their presence. While they did escape discovery, their house was set on fire.
 In later years, Verdi liked to claim he had illiterate peasant roots, but he really came from a family of small landowners and traders which knew the value of, and were able to provide him with, a classical education. Young Verdi was quiet and precocious. When he was four, in a place where many country children were not even taught to read, he started studying Latin. Verdi was fascinated by music and, when he was seven, his father, who ran an inn and store, bought him a broken-down piano which a neighbor repaired. There is a story that, while serving at mass in the church, he became so engrossed in the music that he did not hear the priest ask him for the wine. To get his attention, the priest kicked him. This knocked him out, and he had to be sprinkled with holy water to be revived.
Verdi developed musically to the point where, at the age of ten, he was sent to nearby Busseto to live and study under the patronage of Antonio Barezzi. When he was 12, he was appointed organist at Le Roncole and each Sunday walked the six miles round trip from Busseto to play (he made the trip barefooted to save shoe leather). By the age of 14, he was teaching and giving concerts and soon began to compose pieces for the local Philharmonic Society. He read classical literature and history and started to develop his interest in nationalism and liberty. He moved in with the Barezzi family and fell in love with one of the daughters, Margherita.
Later Verdi went to Milan to study, his cost underwritten by Barezzi. Milan is now part of Italy but, at the time, it was part of a different country, the Austrian province of Lombardy-Venetia. Passports were necessary to travel between Busseto and Milan. Although Austrian soldiers were everywhere in Milan, ordinary citizens were not interfered with. There were restrictions: beards were forbidden to public employees; students who wore beards or moustaches were refused admission to exams and even expelled; smoking was not permitted in public places. Still, artistic life flourished, especially music, and the opera house of La Scala became the social center of Milan.
At the age of 23, upon completion of his studies, Verdi married Margherita Barezzi, and started working on his first known opera, Oberto. (There might have been an earlier one, Rochester, but it was either lost or incorporated into Oberto.) Produced when he was 26, Oberto was a moderately successful work. Tragically, his wife and two children all died within two years of its première, and his second opera, the comedy Un giorno di regno, was a failure. The despondent Verdi resolved to give up composing but was persuaded to return to music by the impresario Bartolomeo Merelli and the soprano Giuseppina Strepponi. (The latter, who had been scheduled to sing in Oberto, was to become his second wife.) The story goes that Merelli put a copy of the libretto for Nabucco, the Biblical story of the Israelites’ captivity in Babylon, in Verdi’s coat pocket. When he got home, he threw the libretto onto the table and his eyes caught the words Va, pensiero sull’ali dorate, (Fly, thought, on wings of gold), which the Israelites sing as they long for their homeland and freedom. The words kept running through Verdi’s head, and he started to compose. The opera was an immediate success; the Italians identified the captivity of the Israelites with their own dominance by foreigners. Va, pensiero, including the words, “Oh, my country so beautiful and lost! Oh, memory so dear and fatal!”, became like a second national anthem, and Verdi became, involuntarily, a leading figure in the movement toward a free, united Italy. Although the authorities forbade encores of arias and choruses, the audience at La Scala demanded repeats of Va, pensiero so insistently the conductors decided a disappointed audience would be more dangerous than the Austrians and gave the encores. Verdi became a national figure. His name was used to name hats alla Verdi, shawls alla Verdi, and sauces alla Verdi. In its first season, more seats were sold to Nabucco than the city had inhabitants. “To equal this, San Diego Opera would have to give a performance of Aïda every day of the year.” He continued to test the limits of censorship; in his next opera I Lombardi, the tenor sings, “The Holy Land will be ours” and the crowd replies, “Yes!…War! War!”. The audience knew that the Holy Land should be identified as a United Italy. It is difficult for non-Italians to realize just how great his influence was. Audiences saw allusions everywhere and Verdi gave them plenty to identify. The choruses O Signore from I Lombardi and Va pensiero are still taught as patriotic anthems in the elementary schools of Italy.
Operas followed one after the other, including one based on Joan of Arc and another on Attila the Hun. After the première of Nabucco, Verdi wrote 16 operas in 11 years. By the time he was 40 he was the most famous and most frequently performed Italian opera composer in Europe. He commanded huge fees and began to accumulate land and buildings. Now independent, he could decide when, and for whom, he wanted to compose. For a time after the composition of Macbeth, based on Shakespeare’s play, Verdi and Giuseppina lived in Paris, but when a rebellion started in Milan, Verdi hurried back to Italy. He wrote to Piave, his librettist:
Honor to these brave men! Honor to all Italy, which at this moment is truly great! The hour for her liberation has come. It is the people who demand it, and there is no absolute power that can resist the will of the people.…A few more years, perhaps only a few more months, and Italy will be a free, united republic....You talk of music to me! What are you thinking of?…There is, and should be only one kind of music pleasing to the ears of the Italians of 1848: the music of guns!...I would not write a note for all the gold in the world: I should feel immense remorse for using up music paper, which is so good to make cartridges with….Italy will become the finest nation in the world.
Verdi offered his talents to the cause, and found time to compose the patriotic opera, La battaglia di Legnano. (This work tells of the battle of Legnano (near Milan), in 1176, in which the invading Germans were beaten by the Lombards.) The revolt of the Milanese was short-lived and, by the summer of 1849, Venice had fallen to the Austrians, and Rome to the Pope and his French allies.
Until this time, Verdi’s operas had been written in fairly traditional forms, but in his “Middle Period”, he started to experiment. He was anxious to turn from the usual number opera and make the music more continuous. He also concentrated on the words, not just as poetry, but with their meaning enhanced by the music. He also developed his characters more fully. Rigoletto was this first portrayal of a complex character, and Azucena in Il trovatore followed. With Alfredo and Violetta of La traviata, we can really see into their souls.
 While Verdi was in Rome in February, 1859, for the premiere of Un ballo in maschera, it became apparent that war with Austria was looming and Verdi again became a symbol of the desire for freedom. It was at this time that the phrase “VIVA VERDI” started to be used. In April, 1859, Austria declared war. The French and Austrians were fighting all around Verdi’s home, Sant’ Agata, near Busseto, and Verdi started a relief fund for the wounded and their families. On July 12, Napoleon III of France signed a secret treaty with Austria which favored the creation of a confederation of Italian states, with the Pope as honorary President. Lombardy was to join Piedmont under King Vittorio Emmanuele, but Austria was to maintain dominion over Venice. In 1859, Verdi was elected to an Assembly in Parma and was one of those who carried Parma’s decision to join with Piedmont with its capital at Turin. The path to unification had begun. In 1860 Garibaldi and his volunteer “Thousand”, gained control of Sicily and then swept up the peninsula. Among them was a young Arrigo Boito, who was later to serve as librettist for Verdi’s operas Otello and Falstaff. By 1861, the unification of Italy was well on its way, and Verdi was elected to the first Italian parliament. However, Verdi was not an active member, and his formal political career was short.
In 1859, Verdi announced to his friends that he was retiring from composing. Had he carried out this resolution, Un ballo in maschera would have been his last opera. He had written 21 operas in two decades, and he was tired. At the age of 46, he preferred to live the life of a gentleman farmer on his estate. During his “retirement”, he lived simply in the country at Sant’Agata, farming and hunting. He rose at 5:00 A.M. every day and inspected the crops and horses before breakfast. He went for long walks and took drives in the countryside, accompanied only by a pet rooster. He planted a tree for each of his operas and became interested in exotic plants. This hiatus lasted only three years.
Verdi resumed composing with La forza del destino for St. Petersburg, Russia, but his pace did slow down. He traveled extensively, to Russia, Paris, Madrid, and London, supervising productions of his operas. He also played the role of farmer and closely supervised all aspects of the management of his farm at Sant’Agata. Many stories are told about his generosity to, but strictness with, his workers. Two from one of the gardeners follow:
Once when we were pitting down a well, we came up all wet. Verdi made us come into the house and get dry. Then he had us eat ...a big bowl of pastasciutta. Verdi sat down and ate with us . All the rich people of Busseto invited him to dinner, but he never went.
He had a puny pear tree and gave us orders not to touch it. One day he came out into the garden to check on something. When he came to the pear tree, he stopped. “One pear is missing”, he said. “Who took this pear? [One of the workmen confessed.…Verdi] paid him off and said, “Now go. Do not set foot on my land. You could have asked me for anything, and I would have given it to you. But nobody can touch my things”.
He was lured back to composing by the commission to write an opera for the New Cairo Opera House. Aïda was the result. Verdi became a national monument. When he and his librettist, Boito, walked onstage after the premiere of Otello, they received over 20 curtain calls; the audience wept from sheer emotion. At the end of the evening, Verdi’s carriage was pulled back to his hotel by the cheering crowd and he was serenaded for hours. A similar reception met Falstaff, composed when he was eighty years old.
To celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America, Verdi was asked to compose an opera but declined. A close friend, Giulio Carcano, translated the complete works of Shakespeare into Italian and sent them to Verdi. The composer always wanted to base an opera on King Lear, and a libretto was prepared but, much to his regret, Verdi never finished the composition. His feeling for Shakespeare was intense, but when Hamlet was suggested to him, he rejected it as too difficult.
Verdi was also a philanthropist. In 1857 his long-time librettist, Francesco Maria Piave, suffered a paralyzing stroke. During the eight years that he lived on, unable to move or speak, Verdi gave generous support to his wife and daughter. The composer built a hospital near his estate for the benefit of the neighboring people and took an active interest in it until his death, modestly refusing to have his name on it. During particularly hard times, he ordered free polenta (a grain made from corn) to be given away every day at noon. After his operas and the famous Requiem, his most lasting monument is the Casa di Riposo in Milan, built as a home for 100 impoverished retired musicians. Verdi established an endowment for it, and it is still in operation today.
In all, Verdi wrote 26 operas, several in two different versions. During his last illness, the streets near his room were covered with layers of straw so he would not be disturbed by the noise of carriages. Crowds waited silently for news of his condition. He died in Milan on January 17, 1901, at the age of 87. The composer had asked for a funeral with no music and no singing but, as his coffin was placed in the ground, someone in the crowd started to sing Va, pensiero and soon everyone softly joined in the famous melody. A special session of the Roman Senate was called to listen to eulogies, and schools were closed for the day. One month later, the coffins of Verdi and his wife were moved to the Casa di Riposo where they rest today. Two hundred thousand people lined the black-draped streets of Milan. Maestro Arturo Toscanini conducted a choir of eight hundred in Va, pensiero in tribute to Verdi, the artistic symbol of Italy’s drive for freedom.
Verdi died in a united Italy; he spoke for his age, but his music transcends time and place.EAO
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