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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: The Great Composers
- Sprache: Englisch
Welcome to The Independent's new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music. Extracted from Michael Steen's book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent's editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time. With Verdi, Italian opera reached its zenith, where music and drama are fused into an indissoluble whole. Although he wrote 28 operas, less than half remain regularly performed. Yet those which are remain a gold standard of characterisation, stagecraft and musical vocabulary. Rigoletto, La Traviata, Un Ballo in Maschera, Aïda – the roll call is long, but it is especially with his final two operas, Otello and Falstaff, that he becomes the unassailable master. But it was not just the excellence of Verdi's artistry which propelled him to fame. Verdi was writing just as Italy was becoming increasingly resentful of Austria's domination, and there was a growing movement to unite the patchwork of territories of which Italy was composed at the time into a unified country. He became identified with the ambitions of reunification, and many of his operas, with their political subtexts, became rallying calls for the nationalists. Michael Steen unpicks how this most unsociable of men, a reluctant politician but a brilliant composer, became the figurehead for the birth of a nation. Born into a modest background, Verdi, with his sound business sense, grew rich and famous; rich enough to ignore the scandalised disapproval of his neighbours at his living openly with his mistress for many years before marrying her. At his death 200,000 people lined the streets to bid farewell to their hero.
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Published by Icon Books Ltd,
Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP email: [email protected]
ISBN: 978-1-84831-805-2
Text copyright © 2003, 2010 Michael Steen
The author has asserted his moral rights.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Steen OBE was born in Dublin. He studied at the Royal College of Music, was the organ scholar at Oriel College, Oxford, and has been the chairman of the RCM Society and of the Friends of the V&A Museum, the Treasurer of The Open University, and a trustee of Anvil Arts and of The Gerald Coke Handel Foundation.
Also by the Michael Steen:
The Lives and Times of the Great Composers (ebook and paperback)
Great Operas: A Guide to 25 of the World’s Finest Musical Experiences (ebook and paperback)
Enchantress of Nations: Pauline Viardot, Soprano, Muse and Lover (hardback).
He is currently engaged in a project to publish one hundred ebooks in the series A Short Guide to a Great Opera. Around forty of these have already been published' and further details on these are given at the back of this book.
INTRODUCTION
Welcome to our ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.
Extracted from his book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, Michael Steen explores the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.
With Verdi, Italian opera reached its zenith, where music and drama are fused into an indissoluble whole. Although he wrote 28 operas, less than half remain regularly performed. Yet those which are remain a gold standard of characterisation, stagecraft and musical vocabulary. Rigoletto, La Traviata, Un Ballo in Maschera, Aïda – the roll call is long, but it is especially with his final two operas, Otello and Falstaff, that he becomes the unassailable master.
But it was not just the excellence of Verdi's artistry which propelled him to fame. Verdi was writing just as Italy was becoming increasingly resentful of Austria's domination, and there was a growing movement to unite the patchwork of territories of which Italy was composed at the time into a unified country. He became identified with the ambitions of reunification, and many of his operas, with their political subtexts, became rallying calls for the nationalists. Michael Steen unpicks how this most unsociable of men, a reluctant politician but a brilliant composer, became the figurehead for the birth of a nation.
Born into a modest background, Verdi, with his sound business sense, grew rich and famous; rich enough to ignore the scandalised disapproval of his neighbours at his living openly with his mistress for many years before marrying her. At his death 200,000 people lined the streets to bid farewell to their hero.
VERDI
AROUND 10 OCTOBER 1813, less than six months after Wagner was born in Leipzig, Giuseppe Verdi was born near Busseto close to Parma. This was then part of Napoleon’s puppet Kingdom of Italy, so the boy was registered as Joseph rather than Giuseppe. When he died on 27 January 1901, Queen Victoria was lying in state in Osborne. Their demise was celebrated with comparable state funerals. Just as the Queen dominated 19th-century Britain, Verdi stands astride the music of 19th-century Italy.
Verdi knew exactly how to convey emotion and drama in beautiful melody. The arias which we love, such as ‘La Donna è Mobile’ from Rigoletto, have a naturalness and simplicity. His operas therefore provide a contrast to the complex, ‘orchestral’ operas of Wagner. They are essential items in the opera house and elsewhere: how many brides have walked down the aisle to the strains of the Grand March from Aïda! No matter that theat-rical productions of the March often include elephants and giraffes.
With a canny sense of timing and some genuine sympathy, Verdi espoused the cause of Italian nationalism. The combination of his music and his stories conveyed an emotional message to his compatriots, who yearned for delivery from despotic monarchs. This was an aspect which the check-list used by the strict but pedantic censors was not designed to identify. Thus, Verdi could emulate the work of the poet Alessandro Manzoni, whose tragedy Adelchi, about Charlemagne’s overthrow of the Lombard domination in Italy, contained many veiled allusions to the burden of Habsburg rule. In Verdi’s La Battaglia di Legnano, the knights swear to repel Italy’s tyrants beyond the Alps. No wonder that, on the eve of their revolution, the citizens of Rome were delirious about it. No wonder that the chorus in Nabucco, ‘Va, pensiero’, in which the captive Hebrews long for their homeland, launched Verdi’s career.
Verdi’s direct contribution to the revolutionary cause was, however, limited to setting rousing words to beautiful and memorable tunes. During the upheavals of 1848, he was actually based in Paris pursuing his career and his mistress, the former prima donna Giuseppina Strepponi. However, the story of the unification of Italy is such important background to Verdi’s life that, having considered his early years, we must return again to it and to the achievements of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the colourful freedom-fighter, who led the battle for it.
The 1850s saw the three important and very popular operas by Verdi – Rigoletto, Il Trovatore and La Traviata – which were less obviously political. Thereafter, the rate of composition decelerated and came to a halt with Aïda, which was produced in Cairo on Christmas Eve 1871, and the Requiem of 1874, written in honour of Manzoni. There was a long pause before Verdi emerged from retirement to write the two last operas, Otello, produced in February 1887, and finally Falstaff, which was premièred in 1893, just before he was 80.
Verdi kept away from, and was not asked to join, the titanic struggle that rent the musical world to the north: he is not to be found on either side of the fissure which divided Brahms and his adherents from the New Music of Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner. This irritated Verdi, who was annoyed that the new generation did not regard his work as modern art. But with Otello and Falstaff, one an opera seria, the other an opera buffa, both unarguably great works of art, Verdi brought the development of Italian opera to its ultimate conclusion. Italian operas composed afterwards, even those of Puccini, are at best but an imitation of what Verdi achieved.
VERDI’S EARLY LIFE
Verdi’s story was by no means the rags to riches one that legend (and particularly he) would have it be: his family, small-holders, were among the less than ten per cent of the population who could read and write.1 Carlo, his father, was an innkeeper who got into trouble for failing to pay his rent and for various irregularities such as permitting unlicensed gambling to take place on his premises; his mother was the daughter of another inn-keeper from a few miles away.
Giuseppe Verdi was born in a small two-storey house* in Le Roncole, a small village a few miles from Busseto. We can imagine that, outside Carlo’s inn, ‘there hung a grey dishcloth attached to a stick; on the cloth was inscribed the word Trattoria
