The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (87 page)

When Verdi was ordered to write another opera, he reluctantly agreed instead to make changes. The libertine king was transformed from the historical Francis I to an imaginary duke of Mantua (who now had no key to Gilda’s bedroom). Verdi’s focus had shifted from the sins of the prince to the paternal devotion of the hunchback court jester (whose name was changed from Triboletto to Rigoletto).

But Verdi would not alter his music. When a prima donna in Rome demanded a new aria to show off her talents, Verdi refused, although this would have suited operatic conventions. “My idea,” he explained, “was that ‘Rigoletto’ should be one long series of duets without airs and without finales, because that is how I felt it.” This emphasis on duets signaled Verdi’s diversion from the melodramatic fireworks of grand opera librettos to the melodic expression of character and the musical reaction of people to one another. His original touches included the brilliant delineation of
minor characters and the storm music of the final act with a “wordless chorus” offstage suggesting the wind.

Il Trovatore
, one of his most beloved and durable works, was composed in twenty-eight days, and completely scored by the end of 1852, even before it had been commissioned. The libretto, set in fifteenth-century Spain, recounted a civil war and rebellion against the king of Aragon. It was no wonder that, for a change, the censors gave him no trouble. The impossibly complicated plot of witch burning, poisonings, gypsies, and mistaken identities leaves modern audiences as puzzled as the Roman censors must have been. But the plot is dissolved by Verdi’s music. Though sophisticated critics ridicule it as “the fool’s gold of song,” laugh at the “Anvil Chorus” and the farrago of “overscored folk songs,”
Il Trovatore
has captured audiences everywhere. In this bizarre Italian marriage of the arts, a musical drama attained immortality without the aid of a plausible story. The audience at the first performance in the Teatro Apollo in Rome on January 19, 1853, cheered it to a success that rivaled
Rigoletto
’s.

But Verdi’s next triumph would be quite different.
La Traviata
, at the opposite pole from the wild histrionics of
Il Trovatore
, was a real-life contemporary tragedy. Alfredo, a man of good family, falls in love with Violetta, a beautiful woman of ill-repute, and shocks his family by taking her to live with him in the country. Knowing that she is dying of consumption, she sacrifices herself and gives up Alfredo in response to the pleas of his father who is unhappy because the scandal is endangering the marriage prospects of Alfredo’s sister. The tragedy is compounded when Violetta returns to her former protector, who challenges Alfredo to a duel. Later, Alfredo, learning of her sacrifice, returns to her as she is dying. The libretto by Piave was adapted from a play (1852) and a novel (1848) by Alexandre Dumas
fils
that was drawn from Dumas’s own experience. First performed at La Fenice in Venice in March 1853, only six weeks after the Roman triumph of
Il Trovatore
, the new opera was hooted off the stage. “ ‘La Traviata,’ last night,” Verdi wrote a friend, “was a fiasco. Is the fault mine or the singers?… Time will show.” Some blamed the disaster on the plump singer playing the consumptive Violetta, and on a hoarse Alfredo. A more likely explanation was Verdi’s defiance of all operatic conventions. Grand opera was a drama of kings and emperors, generals and gypsies. But here was a tubercular heroine caught up in a scandal of the contemporary demimonde.

The story must have had a special poignancy for Verdi himself at that moment. Since the death of his young wife he had been living with Giuseppina Strepponi, a talented actress who had once had a “clear, sweet, and penetrating” voice. She had borne three sons to her earlier paramour, and the people of Busseto were loudly complaining of the scandal. Verdi had
to defend himself to his ailing father. Antonio Barezzi, Verdi’s patron and father-in-law, was slow to accept Giuseppina. For years Verdi dared not take her along to openings of his new operas in Italy. And not until 1859 did Verdi agree to legalize their union.

The Venetian audience would not tolerate an opera heroine in contemporary costume, wearing a gown she might have worn into the theater, as she did on the first performance of
La Traviata
. At its revival the following year, Verdi ordered costumes from the age of Louis XIII, two centuries earlier. Somehow the audience did not mind the incongruity of a mid-nineteenth-century tragedy of manners in seventeenth-century costume, and
La Traviata
was soon acclaimed in London, Paris, New York, and St. Petersburg.

After
La Traviata
, Verdi ceased composing at his manic pace. He chose his projects deliberately either because the themes appealed to him or because he now could command large fees. Commissions came from abroad. For the Paris Opéra he composed
Les Vêpres siciliennes
(1853) in the Meyerbeer “grand opera” mold, followed by
Simon Boccanegra
for Venice (1857; 1881),
Un Ballo in Maschera
for Naples (1859),
La Forza del Destino
(1862) for St. Petersburg, and
Don Carlos
for the Paris Exhibition of 1867. Verdi was no longer impatient for glittering commissions, but his great and most improbable successes were yet to come.

Aida
, widely agreed to be the most popular of operas, had a bizarre origin. Although Verdi never wrote his own librettos, his active role in shaping the libretto and the plot of
Aida
appears in his letters. In 1869 an invitation purporting to be from Ismail Pasha, khedive of Egypt, asked Verdi to compose the music for an opera to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal. The request came from a French librettist, Camille du Locle, who offered a scenario by Auguste Mariette (1821–1881), the pioneer French archaeologist. Mariette had settled in Egypt, founded the Egyptian Museum, unearthed the temples of Dandarah and Edfu, excavated Karnak, and was the government’s inspector of Egyptian monuments. He now provided the plot and would assure the historical authenticity of scenery, costumes, and institutions. Working with an Italian opera singer Antonio Ghislanzoni (1824–1893) who had lost his singing voice and turned to writing librettos, Verdi would put together the text for the drama that endlessly enchants opera audiences.

When the request came, Verdi, contented on his farm at Sant’ Agata, was thought to have given up composing. Probably pleased that the khedive had chosen him over Wagner, he still twice refused. Verdi was finally persuaded less by the large fee and the rights in all countries outside Egypt than by the romantic site, and the chance (recalling his first success with
Nabucco
)
to reach out again beyond the conventional European subjects.
Aida
was not completed in time for the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, nor even for the opening of the Cairo Opera House that same year, which had to be (and was) satisfied with
Rigoletto
.

Verdi paid close attention to the words of the libretto and made a great effort to avoid the cliché. Yet
Aida
would become the stereotype of grand opera. There were last-minute difficulties. The Prussian siege of Paris in 1871 prevented Mariette from taking his scenery and costume designs to Egypt, and Verdi’s preferred conductor could not come. Appalled at the sensational publicity to celebrate an engineering triumph in the land of the pharaohs, Verdi determined not to go to Cairo. To the correspondent of a Milan newspaper who had been sent there, he complained:

Opening to a resounding success in Cairo on December 14, 1871, six weeks later
Aida
was performed at La Scala, and continued its triumphal career in Trieste and London. But Verdi generally refused invitations to attend openings, saying his presence would not improve the opera.

Even in the exotic setting of
Aida
we hear the theme of patriotism that had resounded throughout Verdi’s earlier operas. The conflict between love of a person and love of country is dramatized in Radames and in Aida herself, while the audience is constantly reminded that Egypt is being menaced from without by the Ethiopians. Was
Aida
, appearing just after Rome had been captured and made the capital of a new Italy, and the Kingdom of Italy established under Victor Emmanuel, Verdi’s final operatic celebration of his newly unified independent nation? At the death of Manzoni (1785–1873), author of the classic
I Promessi Sposi
(1825–27), the poet laureate of Italian nationalism and Verdi’s idol, Verdi composed a requiem Mass, in which he incorporated passages he had composed for the death of Rossini. It was performed in 1874 on the first anniversary of Manzoni’s death.

Verdi seemed able to hold his energies in reserve as he vegetated on his farm, Sant’ Agata. After
Aida
he allowed sixteen years to pass before composing another opera. He turned to Shakespeare. His own talents had not declined. And in his two final operas, each the fruit of many years, he had the perceptive collaboration of the composer, librettist, and man of letters Arrigo Boito (1842–1918). Verdi’s
Otello
, substantially Shakespeare’s plot with the Venetian first act omitted, was performed at La Scala in 1887. He enjoyed its spectacular success, toured Europe with the company, and for a while was lifted out of his depression. Verdi would not be pleased to hear critics acclaim it for its Wagnerian dramatic continuity—with no breaks allowed, even for applause. But the poignancy of his characters is Shakespearean. As a tragic opera it may be unexcelled.

Few expected to hear another new opera by Verdi. But without the opera companions whom he enjoyed creating, Verdi felt lonely. Even as the audience was applauding
Otello
at La Scala, he lamented, “I loved my solitude in the company of Otello and Desdemona! Now the public, always eager for novelty, has robbed me of them, and I have only the memory of our secret conversations, our cherished intimacy.” Encouraged by Boito, he created a new, and more affable, companion. By 1890 Verdi had begun composing music for
Falstaff
, a libretto that Boito had fashioned from Shakespeare’s
Merry Wives of Windsor
and and the two parts of
Henry IV
. Verdi had composed no comic opera since
Un Giorno di Regno
, his fiasco fifty years before, in the midst of his overwhelming personal tragedy. For a while after
Otello
he seems to have considered doing something with Don Quixote. And he might have wondered if he was not living out that Quixote theme. Why, after a half century of triumph in tragic opera, should he go to such lengths to risk himself on what he had never proven himself able to do?

Characteristically and self-consciously, Verdi refused to quit while he was ahead, or rest with the laurels of world fame at the age of eighty. “It may be thought very rash of me,” he wrote Boito in 1889, “to undertake such a task.” But he went ahead playfully, while refusing to agree to terms or to reveal his progress on the work. He wrote a friend in January 1891, “all projects for the future seem to me folly, absolute folly!… I am engaged on writing
Falstaff
to pass the time, without any preconceived ideas or plans; I repeat,
to pass the time
! Nothing else.” “In writing Falstaff,” he noted six months later, “I have thought neither of theaters nor of singers. I have written it to please myself, and I believe that it ought to be performed at Sant’ Agata and not at the Scala.”

But it was performed at La Scala on February 9, 1893, with both Verdi and Giuseppina (who had sung fifty years before in his first opera) in the audience. Not only a grand personal success, but an opening to the future,
Falstaff
proved that comic opera was alive and full of promise. Sober critics have exhausted their vocabularies in praise of
Falstaff
, its brilliant orchestration, its melody, its marriage of libretto and music, its wit and subtlety. Although
Falstaff
has never attained the popularity of Mozart’s
Figaro
, Rossini’s
Barber of Seville
, or Wagner’s
Die Meistersinger
, it carries the mature wit and wisdom of Verdi’s eighty years.

The last words of
Falstaff
, sung to a fugue accompaniment, declared,
“Tutto nel mondo è burla”
(All the world’s a joke). So he proclaimed the gulf between himself and his still-envied adversary, Richard Wagner, a decade after Wagner’s death. Human warmth, wit, and resignation were Verdi’s way of expressing the national spirit. When the man who had conducted
Otello
reported its brilliant successes in England, Verdi wrote in 1889:

T
HERE
could hardly have been more antithetic characters than Verdi and Wagner. Verdi flourished in the traditions of romantic opera, composing music for librettos that captured his fancy. He took his subjects where he found them—in Shakespeare, Hugo, Dumas, and from talented librettists like Piave, Boito, Ghislanzoni. These subjects varied from ancient Babylon, Egypt, or medieval Spain to mid-nineteenth-century Paris. Though he wrote letters, he was not a man of words. He refused to write his memoirs, and appealed to collaborators to provide the poetry for his music. Verdi was inarticulate except in his music, which seemed to satisfy his needs for expression. Rooted in the soil of his Italy, he spent his later years in retreat on his farm, Sant’ Agata. His modifications of opera aimed to make it a more effective vehicle for his music.