In paintings and in photographs, from youth to old age, Giuseppe Verdi cuts a rather severe figure – his brow creased, his mouth turned resolutely down beneath that bushy beard, his mood solemn and inscrutable. Only in some of the photographs taken late in life do we glimpse a twinkle in the eyes, as if
the man had finally started to let down his guard.
One wonders what he thought about the life he had lived, across almost a century of drastic social change and dramatic political events, of personal sorrows and astonishing professional achievements. The journey from son of a rural innkeeper to country squire – a rags-to-riches narrative that he was not averse to embellishing – had been a long one.
Verdi was born before the Battle of Waterloo; he died during the Boer War. He lived through revolutions and the much-longed-for unification of his country. He could be a harsh taskmaster with librettists and singers, ill-humoured at times, yet was capable of acts of great charity, founding a hospital near Parma and a retirement home for musicians in Milan.
The act of creativity often gave him headaches, stomach aches and sore throats
Verdi witnessed the death of both his children in infancy, followed soon after by that of his first wife. He was ostracised by his local community for living out of wedlock for years with the soprano Giuseppina Strepponi. The act of creativity often gave him headaches, stomach aches and sore throats.
Who was Giuseppe Verdi?
Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) was one of the most influential Italian opera composers of the 19th century. His operas, with their intense emotional power and melodic richness, have earned their place at the centre of the opera and classical repertoire. Powerful and emotive, Verdi’s operas are often driven by basic human emotions and dramatic conflicts, such as love, power, betrayal, and redemption.
Giuseppe Verdi was born in Le Roncole near Parma in 1813, the first child of Carlo, an innkeeper, and Luigia, a spinner. He began his life as a subject of the duchy of Parma in an Italy largely enclosed within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Both he and his music were associated with the Risorgimento cause that would turn the disparate states that made up the peninsular into a unified nation. Verdi himself served as a deputy in the first Italian parliament for four years from 1861.
For a period of 50 years in the 19th century, Giuseppe Verdi dominated the world of Italian opera. His first great opera, Nabucco, made him a national figure when it was unveiled at La Scala in Milan in 1842. At the same venue in 1893, his final masterpiece, Falstaff, showed him still a force to be reckoned with when a group of composers two generations younger than himself was beginning to make its mark. From an international perspective, by this point Verdi represented not merely Italian opera, but virtually Italy itself.
‘Foreign critics constantly referred to his music as crude and noisy’
Part of Verdi’s dominance can be ascribed to good timing. When he composed his very first opera, Oberto, in 1839, the Italian opera scene was looking depleted. Bellini was dead, Rossini had retired from operatic composition, and Donizetti, his eyes largely on Paris and Vienna, had less than a decade to live. Within Italy itself, lesser figures such as Saverio Mercadante and Giovanni Pacini maintained active careers.
Verdi’s initial style was certainly less complex or learned than that of Mercadante; foreign critics, like the influential Henry Chorley in London, constantly referred to his music as crude and noisy – which, compared to the later works of Donizetti, it was.
But, even at this date, Verdi’s music possessed virtues that impressed and excited audiences. Part of the appeal of the early operas lies in their sheer immediacy. They make their points quickly, viscerally and with a sense of what works in the theatre.
Verdi was never ashamed of the popularity of his music
Over the ensuing decades, Verdi would develop and refine every aspect of his art, eventually acquiring a subtlety that enabled him to respond to the drama with finesse as well as power. Of course, there were subtleties in the earliest works that gave them distinction; an effect such as the six solo cellos introducing the prophet Zaccaria’s aria in Nabucco would have appealed, as it still does, to connoisseurs.
Even so, the more mature Verdi could be critical of his early scores. When he revised the 1847 Macbeth for a Parisian production in 1865, he wrote of ‘passages that are weak and, what is worse, lacking in character’, replacing them with more dramatically focused material.
Verdi was never ashamed of the popularity of his music. ‘When you go to India, or the interior of Africa, you’ll hear Trovatore,’ he wrote in 1862, with slight exaggeration (though within six years of its 1853 premiere the opera had been performed on six continents). He also believed that the true measure of a work’s value was not the critical reaction at the first performance, but the box-office at the sixth.
What was Verdi like as a person?
Verdi the man was a complex individual, capable on the one hand of great acts of generosity, and on the other of a harshness that is, at times, shocking. At the end of his life, he claimed the greatest of his works to be the retirement home he founded in Milan for elderly operatic artists fallen on hard times. He also endowed a hospital at Villanova, not far from his birthplace. His talent made him a wealthy man and numerous acts of personal kindness demonstrate his philanthropy.
Nevertheless, people who fell foul of him – a group that included his own parents, whom he repudiated after a major disagreement whose exact nature remains unknown – were rarely forgiven. His rejection of the conductor Angelo Mariani, a one-time close associate and devoted interpreter, was pursued with vindictive intensity; again, it is uncertain whether rivalry over the soprano Teresa Stolz – Mariani’s fiancée and subsequently, according to gossip, Verdi’s mistress – led to the end of their friendship.
When did Verdi marry?
Verdi eventually married Giuseppina Strepponi, with whom he had been in a long-term relationship, in 1859. Strepponi’s many acclaimed roles included Abigaille in the premiere of Nabucco in 1842.
Was Verdi religious?
In later years, Verdi exaggerated the poverty of his upbringing – his innkeeper father owned property in the area of Busseto, where Verdi was born and where he returned to live in his maturity. As for religion, although Verdi gave the 19th century one of its greatest religious works in the shape of the Requiem, he was in all but name an atheist.
That he never forgave local clerics for opposing his youthful candidature for a post in Busseto is arguably apparent from the various negative portrayals of priests in his operas – though these also have a larger context in papal opposition to a united Italy and in Verdi’s overall liberal stance.
While patriotism motivated Verdi just as nationalism did his exact contemporary Wagner, it neither consumed him nor contained any racist overtones. He did warn, however, of the danger of Italian culture losing its essential character by being influenced by foreign – and specifically – German techniques. Wary of the impact of Wagner the artist, he offered his own refutation of Wagner’s theories and methods in the renaissance of Italianate lyricism exemplified by Otello and Falstaff.
The fierceness of Verdi’s manner in his personal dealings – he called himself ‘the bear of Busseto’ – had a more positive side in his artistic collaborations. The ceaseless demands he made of his librettists – notably the loyal Francisco Maria Piave, who wrote the texts for ten of his 28 operas – was borne of a determination to take the drama every bit as seriously as the music, and to make them work together for the same artistic aim. Nothing could be allowed to get in the way of this goal, which Verdi pursued in score after score with an integrity that has been matched by only a handful of other operatic composers, and exceeded by none.
Verdi’s influences – from Shakespeare to Ancient Egypt
Across the course of his composing career, Verdi moved gradually away from the rigid musical conventions of Italian Romantic opera, developing a keen interest in literature from Schiller to Shakespeare and a determination to put drama on an equal plane with music.
By the 1860s, he had become the most famous and powerful Italian opera composer of his era. With acclaim, money and clout came the luxury of being able to take his time over character psychology, to give each opera its own distinctive musical ‘tinta’, as he put it. The gaps between his works became longer, the subjects and the musical style more varied.
Verdi wrote operas on a larger canvas (the five-act, French-style Grand Opera Don Carlos) and that required lavish scenic spectacle (Aida). Ever the perfectionist, he returned to operas written earlier in his career – Simon Boccanegra, Macbeth – revising and modernising them for new contexts.
Verdi’s final two Shakespearean operas, Otello and Falstaff, written in a glorious Indian summer and often regarded as the preserve of Verdi connoisseurs, took him to new realms of musical and dramatic sophistication. The correspondence with the librettist Arrigo Boito surrounding Otello shows the extent to which Verdi was by now involved in crafting the drama as well as the music.
Subtleties of characterisation were now paramount, Verdi specifying, for example, exactly how he envisaged the role of Iago to be acted, with ‘an absent-minded manner, nonchalant, indifferent to everything, disbelieving, witty, speaking well and ill lightly, with an air of having his thoughts on matters quite different from those he is speaking about’. Working with Boito prompted Verdi to develop a new, more flexible and responsive musical language, better suited to the subtleties of the text.
Verdi and the censors
Despite the creative freedoms he came to enjoy as Italy’s leading opera composer, Verdi often faced difficulties bringing his works to the stage in the form in which he wanted them. Opera houses were regarded as founts of potential sedition and disorder in Italy, particularly after the revolutions of 1848, and operas could be censored on political, moral or religious grounds.
State censorship was heavy-handed: libretti were scrutinised for inflammatory subjects or language. There was no single set of rules for the peninsula, but as a rule of thumb, they tended to be strictest in Rome and Naples. Regional bans on topics like conspiracy, assassination, disrespect towards rulers, suicide or illicit love affairs made life difficult for an opera composer.
Verdi and his librettists frequently found themselves hauled up in front of the authorities and asked to account for themselves whenever rumour had it that an opera was about to appear on a subject that was deemed in some way provocative. I Lombardi alla prima crociata offended both the church and the police authorities, but Verdi remained resolute, stating ‘It shall be given as it is or not given at all’.
For Stiffelio, meanwhile, Verdi and his librettist were forced, reluctantly, to accept changes – the subject matter, about a Protestant church minister with an adulterous wife, with quotations from the New Testament, was simply too inflammatory.
Removing the offending elements resulted in nonsensical plotlines
Once an opera set off on its journey around Italy and was out of Verdi’s control, bowdlerised performances were the norm. Macbeth was deemed unacceptable in Rome, for the supernatural element; in Naples and Palermo, for the killing of kings; and in Austrian-controlled Milan, for
the chorus of exiled Scots.
Removing the offending elements resulted in nonsensical plotlines. Numerous cities staged Verdi’s great revenge tragedy Rigoletto – an opera based on a play that had already been banned for ‘repulsive immorality’ – under alternative titles, turning the feckless Duke’s arias into hymns to fidelity, or giving the opera an implausible happy ending in which the heroine survived.
Disability, corrupt power and sexual exploitation: Verdi’s themes are as fresh as ever
Nowadays, we do not worry that anyone might take inspiration from Rigoletto and try to assassinate royalty, and the only time Verdi’s operas create moral panic is whena director tries a ‘provocative’ reworking. Yet they still have political resonances of a different sort.
Today, the two Verdi works that speak most closely to contemporary sensibilities and cultural politics are La traviata and Rigoletto, whose popularity has overtaken that of Il trovatore, the Verdi opera sine qua non for the Victorians and in the first half of the 20th century.
La traviata appeals for its psychological realism and insight into the plight of wronged women. Rigoletto’s themes of disability, corrupt power and sexual exploitation seem ever more topical. Aida has become a textbook case for considerations of cultural imperialism, while Otello prompts debates about race and casting.
Verdi appeals to the modern age, then, as a man who stuck to his artistic principles, as a champion of the vulnerable, the excluded or the dispossessed, and for the perennial popularity of his music. Such was the volume of his output that there is always more Verdi to discover: it is worth a delve into the lesser-known repertory, including that extensive ‘back catalogue’ of early works.
Much of the snobbery that used to surround his oeuvre has now dissipated. We no longer subscribe to the view that Verdi’s works are too tuneful to be good, summed up wittily by his biographer Francis Toye in 1930: ‘There was no merit to be gained by professing admiration for a composer whose music could be enjoyed by anybody gifted with any musical receptivity whatever’.
When did Verdi die?
A week after suffering a stroke, Verdi died in Milan on 27 January 1901, aged 87. An estimated crowd of 300,000 people attends the transfer of his body to the crypt of the Casa di Riposo.
Best of Verdi: six works to explore
Rigoletto (1851) – Centred on a court jester, this tragedy explores themes of revenge and morality.
La Traviata (1853) – Il Trovatore follows the life of a Parisian courtesan, and is a moving story of love and sacrifice.
Il Trovatore (1853) – An early Verdi favourite, Il Trovatore is known for its complex plot and memorable arias, such as ‘Di quella pira’.
Don Carlos (1867) – Verdi’s five-act ‘grand opera’ tackles political intrigue, love, and personal conflict amid the backdrop of the Spanish Inquisition.
Aida (1871) – This monumental later opera is set in ancient Egypt, and blends impressive spectacle with intimate personal conflict.
Requiem (1874) – Verdi’s Requiem is one of the fieriest and most imposing Requiems in the repertoire.
George Hall and Professor Alexandra Wilson
We named Verdi one of the greatest composers ever and one of the world’s best opera composers ever
Read our reviews of the latest Verdi recordings here