Verdi’s twin passions (Part 1)

I analyzed Wagner three years ago in a seven-part series for BSR (click here). Verdi surely deserves no less. The problem is how to narrow the focus when writing about a man who lived 87 years, composed 29 operas and also was identified with Italy’s political unification. By comparison, Wagner died at age 69, having written 13 operas.

Trying to judge who was the better composer is as impossible as choosing a favorite among one’s children. There’s no question, however, about who was a greater mensch. Verdi was a national hero, a leader of democratic ideals, a champion of the dispossessed. His music stirred patriotic fervor and also plumbed the emotional price that society exacts from those who love not wisely but too well. Both stemmed directly from his own personal experiences.

A woman shunned

When he was 22, Verdi married Margherita Barezzi, who was the same age. They had two children who died in infancy while Verdi was composing his first opera. Margherita died of encephalitis at age 26, in 1840. Verdi, of course, was devastated.

Two years later he met the soprano Giuseppina Strepponi, whom Verdi biographies euphemistically describe as his “lifelong companion.” Let’s be blunt: Society shunned Strepponi as a virtual whore. Before she and Verdi got involved, she slept with singers and managers and gave birth to three illegitimate children (all of whom she relinquished for adoption). Strepponi sang lead roles in Rossini’s Cenerentola, Bellini’s Norma and I Puritani and Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, Roberto Devereux and L'Elisir d'Amore. She was described as having a "limpid, penetrating, smooth voice...a lovely figure...deep inner feeling.”

Strepponi sang the lead role of Abigaille in the premiere of Verdi’s Nabucco in 1842, when she was 27 and the composer 29. She and Verdi began to live together in 1847, a union that scandalized the citizenry of his hometown. They finally married in 1859 and remained in a mutually supportive relationship until her death in 1897 at the age of 82.

It’s no coincidence that Verdi’s 1853 masterpiece, La Traviata, concerns a courtesan who falls in love with a respectable young man but is forced to leave him because of the shame their relationship brought to his family. Verdi wrote that it was “a subject for our own age.”

Also relevant are the characters of Aida (1871), a black woman involved with an Egyptian general; Leonora in La Forza del Destino (1862), a Spanish noblewoman who ran off with an Inca man, and several other operas where a person of rank is involved in a passionate relationship with an outcast.

A libertarian at heart

Scholars disagree about the extent of Verdi’s personal involvement in the Risorgimento, the political movement for Italian liberation and unification. But there’s no dispute that the movement utilized his music, that he was friendly with its leaders, and that his name became the cry for an independent Italian kingdom. The initials VERDI—meaning Victor Emmanuel, Re d’Italia (King of Italy)— were scrawled on walls throughout the Italian peninsula.

Verdi rejected political office because he was at heart a libertarian who wanted to left alone, to work on his own projects without government or religious interference. Yet in his support for Italian unification he was the opposite of, say, a contemporary states’ rights advocate like Ron Paul.

Most opera lovers are aware of the Risorgimento’s link to Verdi’s "Va pensiero" chorus from Nabucco, in which Hebrew slaves subjugated by the Babylonians sing of their dreams for freedom. Less publicized is the fact that another hymn in that opera elicited calls for an encore on opening night despite the knowledge that the Austrian rulers forbade the singing of encores. That was Immenso Jehova, sung by the Hebrews to thank God for saving them.

‘Leave Italy for me’

Nabucco opened in 1842, when Garibaldi formed his Italian Legion with a black flag that represented Italy in mourning, with a volcano at the center that symbolized the Italian people’s dormant power. Nabucco told the story of people in despair, whose world seemed to have been destroyed, just as Verdi’s family had been destroyed.

In 1846, when the new Pope Pius IX initiated some liberal reforms, Verdi presented his Alzira, in which Peruvian Indians revolt against their Spanish masters.

Later that year came the premiere of Verdi’s Attila, in which the Roman general Ezio sings to the Huns, Avrai tu l'universo, resta l'Italia a me ("You can have the universe, but leave Italy for me"). Spontaneous cheers greeted that phrase on opening night in Venice.

Next came Macbeth, in which Verdi had Scottish refugees sing Patria oppressa ("Down-trodden country").

In 1847 Verdi traveled to London to conduct the premiere of his Masnadieri, in which the son of a count becomes a member of a gang of highwaymen even as he longs to return home, singing, “O mio castel paterno” ("O castle of my fathers").

From London, Verdi went to Paris, writing to friends about "being able to lead the life I wish." He took an apartment around the corner from Strepponi's house and worked with her on the composition of Jérusalem, about the Crusade to liberate the Holy Land from the Muslims. A handwritten love duet in the composer's autograph score contains alternative lines in her handwriting as well as his. At the end of 1847 Verdi rented a little house in Passy and went to live there with Strepponi, much like Alfredo and Violetta in La Traviata six years later.

Opera with a purpose

During the Cinque Giornate— the Five Days of Milan in 1848 when Italians rebelled against their Austrian rulers— Verdi quickly returned from Paris to Milan and wrote Il Corsaro. The chief corsair is a pirate in exile who laments his condition and vows, “Si, di Corsari il fulmine” ("Yes, I shall strike the lightning blow of the Corsairs.”) At the opening, Austrian soldiers charged Italian crowds with swords and bayonets, killing five people and wounding 59.

Verdi also wrote The Battle of Legnano, which opened in Rome in January 1849, specifically as "an opera with a purpose." The final chorus proclaimed, “Italia risorge vestita di Gloria, invitta e regina qual'era sari” ("Italy rises again robed in glory!”). Rome was in turmoil and the Pope held prisoner. Within days of the opera’s premiere, on February 9, Rome became a republic. The government of the Papal States was replaced by a republican government with a constitution proclaiming that all religions could be practiced freely.

So it seems beyond doubt that Verdi identified with the Risorgimento and intentionally tied himself to the cause.

To read the second article in tis series, click here.