The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  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:

  You in Cairo?… in these days art is no longer art, but a trade … something that must achieve, if not success, notoriety at any price! I feel disgusted and humiliated. In my early days it was always a pleasure to come before the public with my operas, almost friendless and without a lot of preliminary chatter or influence of any kind, and stand up to be shot at; and I was delighted if I succeeded in creating a favourable impression. But now what a fuss is made about an opera! Journalists, singers, directors, professors of music and the rest must all contribute their stone to the temple of publicity, to build a cornice out of wretched tittle-tattle that adds nothing to the worth of an opera, but may rather obscure its true merits. It is deplorable, absolutely deplorable!… All I want for Aida is good and, above all, intelligent singing, playing and stage production.

  (Translated by Dyneley Hussey)

  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:

  You talk of the “triumph of Italian art”! You are mistaken! The young Italian composers are not good patriots. If the Germans springing from Bach have arrived at Wagner, that is well. But if we, the descendants of Palestrina, imitate Wagner, we commit a musical crime and produce works that are futile, not to say harmful.

  51

  A Germanic Union of the Arts

  THERE 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.

  Richard Wagner’s aims were cosmic and metaphysical. He was plagued by twin talents, for words were as much his medium as music. He left twelve volumes of prose and poetry, a diary, and a seven-hundred-page autobiography, which he dictated in his last years to Cosima, “my friend and wife, who wished me to tell her the story of my life.” Unlike Verdi’s, Wagner’s musical works had a conscious coherence and focus, which he tried also to express in writing. And he remains the only great composer meriting a place in the history of literature. His struggle to see the world whole haunted him, and eventually governed his musical genius. While his writings remain known only to scholars, his music reaches across languages into concert halls, living rooms, and airwaves everywhere. His versatility was his burden. And in Wagner raged the age-old Western conflict between the music of the word and the music of instruments, between ideas and feeling, thought and sound. This too explained his unique creations.

  Still, even if he had never come to the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk (unified work of art), he would be among the great composers. Before he made his grand synthesis of the arts he had paid his dues to the conventions of operatic tradition.

  It was appropriate that Wagner’s birth at Leipzig on May 22, 1813, was encompassed in mystery. His mother, Johanna Wagner, never gave her eight children a full account of her own origins. Her parents were bakers, but her mother may have been an illegitimate daughter of a prince of Weimar. It is not even certain whether Richard’s father was Johanna Wagner’s husband, Friedrich, the police official charged with keeping order during the turbulent days of Napoleon’s occupation of the city. Or was Richard the son of Johanna’s intimate friend and frequent visitor Ludwig Geyer, a painter-actor-singer who took the numerous family under his care on the death of Friedrich Wagner by typhus in November 1813? Richard himself harbored, and perhaps enjoyed, the suspicion that Geyer was his father, but near the end of his life (1878) he seems to have changed his mind. The question had an added piquancy, which attracted Nietzsche, for the Geyer paternity seemed to raise the possibility that Wagner was a Jew.

  Apart from the Napoleonic turbulence of his surroundings, little was unusual about Richard Wagner’s boyhood. Johanna married Geyer and moved the family to Dresden. Geyer died in 1821 but left his influence on the young Wagner through his friendship with Carl Maria von Weber. “Look, there’s the greatest man alive!” Richard would exclaim to his little sister when Weber passed their house, “You can’t have any idea how great he is!” While he was no prodigy, he early discovered a passion for the theater. Exploring backstage in Geyer’s theater, he never forgot “something mysteriously ghostly about the beards, wigs, and costumes, which the addition of music only intensified.” He early conceived an enthusiasm for Greek history and mythology, and at thirteen translated the first three books of the Odyssey. When the family moved back to Leipzig in 1827, his classical interests were stirred by a literary uncle, and he developed an adolescent passion for Shakespeare. At fourteen he had decided to be a poet.

  It was a performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio in Leipzig in 1829, by Wagner’s own account, that awakened his interest in music. And he developed a crush on the famous prima donna who played the title role. He recalled this as the most important single experience of his life. When he learned of Beethoven’s life and struggles, he was impressed by “the most sublime, transcendental originality.” Wagner had found the polestar by which he would chart his new course for music. Teaching himself, he found music his “daemonium.” Plunging into Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at seventeen, he made a piano arrangement. His earliest surviving letter is his unsuccessful effort to persuade a Mainz publisher to issue the work. A decade later Wagner would write a short story with the title that might have been given to his whole musical autobiography, A Pilgrimage to Beethoven (1840). “I don’t really know what career had been planned for me,” a German musician in the story recalls, “I only remember that one evening I heard a Beethoven symphony for the first time, that I thereupon fell ill with a fever, and when I recovered, I had become a musician.”

  At the University of Leipzig he studied music and enjoyed the romantic student life. But his real master remained Beethoven, whose quartets and symphonies he studied obsessively. Wagner’s own symphony was performed in Leipzig when he was twenty. In that year he composed an opera for which, as would be his lifelong custom, he wrote his own libretto. But Die Feen (The Fairies) was not produced till a half century later. His second opera Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love, following Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure) failed after a single disastrous performance. The next six years he spent conducting small-town opera companies around Germany. In 1836 he married the self-centered and erratic actress Minna Planer. Their turbulent off-and-on life together would bring him unhappiness till her death in 1866. They went to Riga, where he conducted concerts and opera, but soon had to flee to escape his creditors.

  En route to London, Wagner experienced the storm that drove his ship into a Norwegian fjord and stirred the crew to sing and tell the stories of the flying Dutchman that became material for his opera. Then on to Paris, the opera mecca of the age. The misery of his three years in Paris was compounded of starvation and professional failure. But it was rich in preparation. There he completed Rienzi (after a novel by Bulwer-Lytton about fourteenth-century Rome), which ends with the Capitol in flames consuming the hero and others. And he came to know Berlioz. At this time, too, he had the leisure to be stimulated by Friedrich Raumer’s history of the Hohenstaufens and by a classical-scholar friend from Königsberg, Samuel Lehrs, to explore medieval Germany. There he discovered the folk ballad of Tannhäuser and Venus, and the story of Lohengrin. He also composed Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman), his first o
pera to enter the permanent repertory, and his first statement of the theme of redemption through love and sacrifice that would occupy him throughout his life.

  When Dresden accepted Rienzi for performance in 1842, it was lucky for Wagner, freeing him at twenty-nine from the orbit of the Paris Opéra and returning him to Germany, where he belonged. He happened upon a copy of German Mythology, by Jacob Grimm (1795–1863), which, along with a bottle of mineral water, he would take on his solitary walks. For him, he recalled, Grimm was “a complete rebirth,” an “intoxicating joy” at perceiving “a world in which, until then, I had been like a child in the womb, apprehending but blind.”

  Rienzi, still in the Parisian grand opera tradition, was Wagner’s first triumph. After Der fliegende Holländer he was appointed a conductor of the Dresden Opera, where he developed the medieval mythological themes to which he had been awakened in Paris. Tannhäuser showed him already struggling toward his “unified” concept of opera, which would not depend on featured arias and “numbers,” and used orchestral motifs for continuity. Lohengrin, usually considered the last of the great German Romantic operas, advanced from the theme of personal renunciation to the myth of the Holy Grail and to cosmic issues. But the Dresden Court Opera forbade its performance, with personal objections to Wagner for his project of a new autonomous national theater and for his political activities.