The theme attracted Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) for his first opera, La Favola d’Orfeo (The Fable of Orpheus, 1607), which is still performed. Monteverdi gave a new dramatic role to the instrumental music. If music was to “move the whole man,” Monteverdi insisted it had to be joined with words. When Orfeo was performed in Mantua, it enlisted an orchestra of thirty-eight instruments and numerous choruses and recitatives (a vocal style carrying on the narrative) to make a lively drama. Later, as director of music at St. Mark’s in Venice, Monteverdi spent thirty years producing books of madrigals and writing operas for Venice’s growing musical audience. The first public opera house, the Teatro San Cassiano, opened in Venice in 1637. Along with the familiar less sophisticated entertainment, such as the commedia dell’arte, the opera flourished.
Within forty years Venice had ten opera houses. By the end of the century more than 350 operas had been produced in the new theaters in Venice, and an equal number by Venetian composers elsewhere. Four companies were performing in seasons that ran for thirty weeks of the year. Wealthy families had season boxes while inexpensive tickets brought in others. Foreign visitors came to Venice for the music. “This night,” John Evelyn wrote in June 1645, “… we went to the Opera where comedies and other plays are represented in recitative music … with variety of scenes painted … and machines for flying in the aire … one of the most magnificent and expensive diversions the wit of man can invent.”
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries produced new opera styles. Alessandro Scarlatti (1660–1725) made Neopolitan opera famous with the aria da capo that gave a new dominance to music over the libretto. The brilliant librettos of Apostola Zeno (1668–1750), from Venice, exploited Greco-Roman themes. One of the most remarkable talents was “Pietro Metastasio” (Antonio D. B. Trapassi, 1698–1782), the son of a Roman grocer, who published his first drama at the age of fourteen. After becoming a court poet in Vienna in 1730, he produced librettos that composers found irresistible. Some of these were set to sixty different scores, and became more familiar than the music. Gluck, Handel, Haydn, and Mozart all used Metastasian librettos.
The German composer Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714–1787) aimed to liberate opera from the singers who demanded show-off arias. “I have striven to restrict music,” Gluck wrote in 1769, “to its true office of serving poetry by means of expression and by following the situations of the story, without interrupting the action or stifling it with useless superfluity of ornaments.” In his own opera on the Orpheus theme he had shown the way toward simple convincing drama.
Still, the hybrid nature of opera exposed it to ridicule. But despite ridicule and the protests of impatient listeners the protean art flourished. Endless combinations of the music of words and the music of instruments, embellished with ballet and the decorative arts, carried the messages of myth, poetry, drama, and panorama. Opera became the profligate art as large casts and lavish settings made it the most expensive public entertainment. It was the only art that without embarrassment called itself “grand.” Then in the nineteenth century “grand opera” came into English from France, where for works suitable for performance at the Paris Opéra it was distinguished from “opéra comique.” It came to mean a serious epic or historical opera in four or five acts with chorus and ballet in which there was no spoken dialogue but all the musical numbers were connected by recitatives (sung dialogue). This kind of musical drama dominated the Paris Opéra in the first half of the nineteenth century. A rising and prospering middle class (Karl Marx’s contemned “bourgeoisie”) became patrons of this luxurious art. Seventy-six volumes of librettos by Eugène Scribe (1791–1861) and numerous compositions of Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864) scored box-office successes again and again. Melodramatic plots and sudden emotional contrasts called for flamboyant music. Performances became longer and longer. Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine lasted six hours. Plots became ever more complicated, choruses grew, and crowd scenes multiplied, with a new generation of scene designers. The heroic singer held center stage. Wagner contemptuously called this a style of “effects without causes.”
In Western Europe it was an age of grandiose political hopes, volatile city mobs, and revolutions without number. In Scribe’s first work for the Paris Opéra (La Muette de Portici, 1828), the heroine, a mute, becomes the victim of the populace she and her brother are trying to defend. When performed in Brussels on August 25, 1830, it sparked a climactic uprising in the movement to establish the Belgian state. It is no wonder that nervous princes kept their censors busy!
Mere political oratory seemed feeble against the power of the grand opera stage to inspire revolutionary ardor or patriotic awe. Now grand opera proclaimed the emerging modern nations. Two new nations, one of the North and the other of the South, each produced an opera composer laureate. Each consummated his own brilliant marriage of the arts—one Italian and Romantic, the other German and Teutonic. Born in the same year, each expressed his country’s new reach for national identity. Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901), immersed in the warm peasant tradition, remained rooted in Sant’ Agata near his native Busseto in the duchy of Parma, where he finally tried to live the life of a farmer and kept in touch with the rich peasant culture. Richard Wagner (1813–1883), born in Leipzig yet spending much of his life in exile from his native Germany, climaxed his lifework in a feat of artistic megalomania. One succeeded in drama of warm romance, the other in grandiose pageants of folkloric mystery.
The two men never met. While Verdi felt contempt for Wagner’s grand theories and regretted their influence on Italian composers, he grudgingly had to admire Wagner’s music. But Wagner had little more than contempt for Verdi’s music, for “I Vespri Siciliani and other nights of carnage.” Protean opera proved a perfect medium both for the burgeoning Italian national spirit and for Germanic megalomania. Distinctive musical traditions had long flourished in both Italy and Germany. Some historians have simplified the contrast as “the eternal antithesis between the playing North and the singing South.” After the sixteenth century the opera houses of Venice and Naples heard a new florid vocal music. The eighteenth century brought from the orchestras of Mannheim and elsewhere a new wealth of instrumental music. Beethoven, as we have seen, had been reluctant to allow his Ninth Symphony to have its first performance in Vienna because he saw musical tastes there “corrupted” by the bel canto and opera buffa of the Italian Rossini (1792–1868). So opera helped new nations find themselves with ties to local history, lore, and tradition, while celebrating the national language.
Verdi was born, before there was an Italy, in Le Roncole, a village of the duchy of Parma. In this province of Napoleon’s empire he had ample reason to feel deprived of nationality because a French clerk had arbitrarily christened him Joseph-Fortunin-François. Then during his youth a new invader made him an “Austrian.” The only son of a village grocer and innkeeper, of peasant stock, Verdi never forgot his hard boyhood. His interest in music was first awakened by the sounds of the church organ. His father acquired an old spinet and had it repaired by a neighbor. Verdi, taught by the village organist, at the age of twelve played the organ well enough to succeed his teacher. His father sent him to neighboring Busseto to live with a cobbler while he went to school. Every Sunday he returned to Le Roncole to play the organ at Mass. Luckily in Busseto lived the merchant from whom Carlo Verdi bought his groceries and wine. This Antonio Barezzi, a music lover adept at wind instruments, was president of the Busseto Philharmonic Society. He took young Verdi into his house as apprentice in his business, and supported his musical education. Verdi, the industrious apprentice, played duets with his employer’s daughter. Barezzi sent Verdi at the age of eighteen to Milan to enter the conservatory of music. Unfortunately the normal age for admission was nine to fourteen, and the authorities were not inclined to bend the rules for a “foreigner” from the duchy of Parma. And he lacked the required grounding in musical theory. Still, he did impress a member of the committee who introduced him to Vincenzo Lavigna, a m
usician at the Teatro alla Scala, the opera house, who took on Verdi as his pupil. At the age of twenty, Verdi became an adept student of harmony, counterpoint, and the fugue. When the conductor of a performance of Haydn’s Creation at the Milan Philharmonic Society failed to turn up, Verdi filled in. He did so well that he repeated at a command performance before the Austrian governor. He then received his first commissions, a cantata for the wedding of a noble family and an opera, which has not survived.
Instead of remaining for the promising opportunities in Milan, Verdi answered his patron’s call to return to Busseto, to apply for the post vacated by the death of the organist of Busseto Cathedral who was also conductor of the Philharmonic Society. Local jealousies and opposition of the churchmen kept Verdi from the post, left a bitterness toward the citizenry of Busseto that he never forgot, and brought his increasing separation from the Church. Completing the “industrious apprentice” scenario, he married Margherita Barezzi in 1836, and after three years returned to Milan. There he saw his opera Oberto produced in 1839. “Not extraordinarily successful,” Verdi reported, yet it was well enough received to lead his friend Bartolomeo Merelli, impresario of La Scala, to give him a contract to compose three operas at intervals of eight months for four thousand livres and half the sale of the copyright.
But before the twenty-six-year-old unknown composer could seize his opportunities, he was overwhelmed by tragedy. “A severe attack of angina” prevented him even from writing a letter to his patron for help. To pay their rent his wife had to pawn “the few valuable trinkets she had.” Now “terrible misfortunes” crowded upon him. His infant daughter had died only the year before in Busseto. The death of his infant son was followed within a few months by the death of his young wife. He was living out the tragic extravagances of the crudest opera melodrama. To complete the irony, his patron at La Scala had changed plans and now demanded a comic opera. Merelli submitted to Verdi some librettos that had already been used unsuccessfully. Verdi chose the least unattractive and gave it his own title.
In the midst of these terrible sorrows I had to write a comic opera! Un giorno di regno proved a failure; the music was, of course, partly to blame, but the interpretation had a considerable share in the fiasco. Harrowed by my domestic misfortunes and embittered by the failure of my opera, I despaired of finding any comfort in my art, and resolved to give up composition.
When Verdi went to ask release from his contract, Merelli scolded him “like a naughty child.”
Merelli saw the genius in Verdi. “I cannot compel you to write; but my confidence in your talent is unshaken. Who knows but some day you may decide to take up your pen again! At all events if you let me know two months in advance, take my word for it your opera shall be performed.” Verdi’s black mood hung on, but Merelli persisted. The next year Verdi weakened enough to take home a libretto that Merelli insisted was just for him. Verdi was overcome by the story’s biblical grandeur, and in the autumn of 1841 completed the score for Nabucco on the theme of the Jewish exile in Babylon. Merelli, living up to his promise, produced Nabucco in March 1842. Despite improvised scenery and costumes, it was a great success, brilliantly sung by Giuseppina Strepponi, who would play a leading role in Verdi’s life. The audience applauded the first scene for ten minutes, which produced Verdi’s dour philosophy: “My experience has taught me the truth of the proverb: Fidarsi è bene, ma non fidarsi è meglio! [Faith in your luck is good, but lack of faith is better].” Nabucco had more than fifty performances that season.
At twenty-eight Verdi was on his way. Merelli now offered him a contract to compose an opera for the following season, leaving a blank space for him to fill in the fee. Verdi’s first step to fame was also the first of his operas on ancient subjects with modern themes. His operas about oppressed peoples wove dramas of rebellion, conspiracy, assassination, and martyrdom around the struggle for liberty. Nabucco became such a parable, and his next operas, too, dramatized an Age of Revolutions. I Lombardi (1843), Ernani (1844), Giovanna d’Arco (1845), Attila (1846) and La Battaglia di Legnano (1849) were all taken by the volatile Italian public to be allegories of their own time. Each of these occasioned a demonstration for the new Italy. The Risorgimento (1815–70), the Italian revolt against foreign domination and toward a unified nation, was in full flood. This was a movement of many diverse groups—Mazzini’s “Young Italy” for democracy, the Neo-Guelfs aiming at a confederation led by the pope, and the Piedmontese favoring the House of Savoy. But Verdi’s passionate music was nonpartisan, in operas celebrating the language, the history, and the romance that could make a nation.
Naturally Verdi became the victim of the foreign occupiers. He was plagued by Austrian censors in Milan and Venice, and by the papal censors in Rome and Naples. In those days merely to utter the word libertà onstage might put the singer in prison. When Un Ballo in Maschera was performed in Naples in 1859, the role of Gustavus III of Sweden had to be changed into an imaginary Earl of Warwick and the sense was garbled by transferring the scene to Puritan Boston in New England. On this occasion, when the crowds before Verdi’s hotel shouted “Viva, Verdi,” they were saluting both Verdi and the new Italy. Everybody knew that the letters of Verdi’s name were also the initials of “Vittorio Emmanuele Re D’Italia.”
What made Verdi’s operas Italian was more than their political message. He never thought of himself as a political person. But he could not prevent the popular symbolism attached to his works, and came to enjoy his own heroic role and the power of his melodies to stir Italian patriotism. Romance, passion, and personal conflict provided the setting for the music that gave his operas their perennial appeal. Some of his librettos originated in Shakespeare, Dumas, or Hugo, others came from run-of-the-mill theater professionals, but his melodies made audiences forget melodramatic crudities of plot. In his fertile period he produced masterpieces year after year, but still could keep his creative powers in reserve over long years of disuse.
At the age of thirty-eight, within the two years after 1851 he composed three operas that alone would have established him in musical history. Rigoletto (1851), commissioned by the theater of La Fenice in Venice, the seventeenth of his twenty-eight operas, and the one that first brought him international fame, was almost not performed. The libretto by Francesco Piave based on Victor Hugo’s play Le roi s’amuse (1832) was originally titled La Maledizione (The Curse). Censors objected that the title smacked of blasphemy and the plot, too, had subversive overtones. It not only showed the central figure, a king (originally the libertine King Francis I of France), in an unfavorable light and allowed him to be upbraided by his court jester for seducing his daughter, but even staged an attempted assassination. For less obvious reasons they objected to Gilda’s body being brought onstage in a sack and to the fact that the leading figure was cast as a hunchback. The Austrian military governor of Venice, banning the performance, expressed to the directors of La Fenice his surprise that “the poet Piave and the celebrated Maestro Verdi should have chosen no better field for their talents than the revolting immorality and obscene triviality of the libretto entitled La Maledizione.”
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 touch
es 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 Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination Page 66