If Verdi felt comfortable with the Austrians, they were similarly untroubled by him. Their censorship was generally light before 1848, and even afterwards they allowed revivals of Attila and Nabucco at La Scala. A few alterations were demanded for Ernani but none for Nabucco or indeed Attila, and only one, an esoteric change, for I lombardi, where the words ‘Ave Maria’ were substituted by ‘Salve Maria’. Censors in Lombardy-Venetia, and in other parts of Italy, were at the time less concerned with politics than with questions of religion and morals. The Austrians were more perturbed a little later by Verdi’s Stiffelio, in which a Protestant minister, quoting the New Testament, forgives his adulterous wife, than by a Roman general telling Attila to leave Italy to him.
The Habsburg authorities did not regard Verdi as politically dangerous before 1848 because they had no reason to do so. The composer was a man of range as well as talent, and he had no intention of limiting his settings to his time or his country. In fact he preferred to base his works on the dramas of foreign writers: only five of his twenty-six operas have an Italian provenance. Among the dramatists he used were Byron, Voltaire, Eugène Scribe and Alexandre Dumas fils, but his favourites were Schiller, Victor Hugo and, above all, Shakespeare. Apart from Macbeth, the English playwright provided Verdi with the material for his two last and perhaps greatest operas, Otello and the incomparable Falstaff; he also inspired him with the idea of King Lear, which Verdi hoped for years to turn into a huge, magnificent, unconventional opera.
Since the era of the Risorgimento coincided with that of Romantic opera, subsequent generations have spent much time searching for connections between the two. Doubtless they would have liked to make them with Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti, but the last two had died too soon, and the first was politically unacceptable. Rossini’s operas contain the odd suggestively patriotic phrase. The soprano in Tancredi, for example, has to sing of ‘cara Italia’, while the protagonist in L’italiana in Algeri exhorts her listeners to ‘think of the fatherland’ and do their duty; the composer had even written a hymn for Murat that began with the line, ‘Italy, arise; the time has come’. Yet such occasional sentiments could not rescue Rossini from his well-known transgressions: that he had been a conservative happily working for the Bourbons, that he was a friend of Metternich for over forty years, that he had written embarrassing cantatas for the reactionary Holy Alliance,‡ and that in April 1848 he had been so frightened by the situation in Bologna that he had run away to Florence.
Scourers of Verdi’s librettos were able to affirm their hero’s patriotic credentials without having to deal with encumbrances like these. The connections they made were, nevertheless, often tenuous: no reading of Macbeth’s libretto can convince one that Verdi was thinking of Italy when he made his Scottish exiles sing of their ‘oppressed homeland’. Similar connections were also made by foreign writers who, though often sceptical about other claims of united Italy, propagated the Verdian myth without investigating how much of it was true. A typical example is the Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who claimed that Verdi ‘lived near the centre of gravity of his nation, and spoke to his countrymen and for them, as no one else did, not even Manzoni or Garibaldi’. The composer, he alleged, was tireless in his work for the cause. ‘The hymn which Verdi wrote for Mazzini is only an episode in a single great campaign.’ The patriot ‘responded deeply and personally to every twist and turn in the Italian struggle for unity and freedom. The Hebrews of Nabucco,’ Berlin added, piling up the mistakes in the space of half a paragraph, ‘were Italians in captivity’, and their famous chorus was ‘the national prayer for resurrection’.17
On glancing at Verdi’s librettos, one quickly becomes aware of the complex and intimate nature of his stories. The typical Verdian plot has the tenor and soprano falling in love and being thwarted by the baritone, sometimes with the assistance of the mezzo. Even Legnano is based on a love triangle: the soprano had loved the tenor but, believing him to be dead, had married the baritone, who swears vengeance on realizing that his wife and the resurrected tenor still love each other. Any political messages in the works are subordinate to the amorous problems of the leading characters and are further obscured by the difficulty in the ‘Risorgimento operas’ of identifying the true villains. If the crusaders in I lombardi are the good guys, why are they trying to kill each other, and why is the Saracen Orontes the opera’s most appealing figure? Why does Attila, the archetypal barbarian invader, become the most sympathetic character in the eponymous opera? Why in Legnano is another ferocious aggressor, Barbarossa, treated so gently, and why do audiences need to be reminded that Italy’s historic divisions were so deep that the citizens of Como had fought on the emperor’s side against the Lombard League?
The myth most frequently repeated is that audiences at Nabucco identified themselves with the Hebrew slaves, regarded their chorus (‘Va pensiero’) as a kind of secret national anthem, and demanded encores of it at every performance. A glance at the words, by Temistocle Solera, makes one wonder how such a myth could ever have gained credence.
Go thoughts on golden wings,
Go rest upon the slopes, the hills,
Where, soft and mild, the sweet breezes
Of our homeland smell so sweet!
Greet the banks of the Jordan,
The ruined towers of Zion.
Oh my homeland so beautiful and lost!
Oh, remembrance so dear and fateful!
Golden harp of the prophetic bards:
Why hang mute upon the willow?
Rekindle the memories in our breast,
Tell us of times past.18
The words and music are beautiful, but they are a lament for the past rather than a martial call for action; not until the end of the scene, and only after Zechariah has told them to ‘rise up’ and stop behaving like ‘timorous women’, do the slaves think of breaking their chains. The chorus itself contains nothing relevant to the current situation in Italy. Contemporary Italians could still smell the ‘sweet breezes’ of their homeland, they could still see such towers as they had not demolished and they could still enjoy the banks of the River Po, even with an Austrian viceroy in Milan. They had no need of ‘so dear and fateful’ a ‘remembrance’.
While investigating Nabucco, Roger Parker was puzzled to find that, although contemporary journals often wrote about other scenes of the opera, they made few references to ‘Va pensiero’ and no mention of spectators demanding encores. Later he discovered that the tale of the encores had been constructed by Franco Abbiati, the author of a four-volume biography of Verdi published as recently as 1959. In his support Abbiati had cited one particular review, which had made no mention of the encores, but had evidently taken the idea from a different review in a different journal reporting a different performance in which an encore had been given to a different chorus, ‘Immenso Jehova’, which concludes the opera and contains not the slightest hint of aspirational nationalism.19
Music can, of course, stir people and encourage them to have noble and heroic sentiments even if that had not been the composer’s intention. There are moments in Beethoven’s symphonies that can make one feel one is leading a cavalry charge. Donizetti had had no propaganda project in mind when he wrote Gemma di Vergy in 1834, but its performance in the revolutionary atmosphere of Palermo at the end of 1847 led to shouts of ‘Long live Italy!’, ‘Long live the pope!’ and even ‘Long live the king!’ Norma had a similar effect, equally unintended by its long-dead composer, at La Scala in 1859. Some of Verdi’s operas, performed in the feverish ambience of certain Risorgimento years, also inspired people to see unintended patriotism in the works and to shout their approval at them. Yet with the sole exception of Legnano in Rome, the evidence for political shouting – as opposed to the usual baying of claques – is weak. Verdi was popular outside as well as inside the opera house because he wrote melodies which people could sing in taverns or whistle on street corners, tunes that could be performed by town bands, on barrel-organs and later on
the accordion. His music and plots inspired many people and doubtless incited some of them to take up arms or make other sacrifices for Italy. Yet the operas of other composers had a similar effect, Bellini’s I puritani, for example, or Donizetti’s Marino Faliero.
Nearly all of Verdi’s early operas – the fifteen he wrote before 1849 – soon went out of fashion, though a few enjoyed a revival in the twentieth century and then joined the international repertoire. Most of them share defects seldom found in the later works, including an over-hearty boisterousness and noise levels so much higher than those of his predecessors that Verdi seems to belong to a special category of loudness beside Beethoven; Queen Victoria was at least half right when she complained that I masnadieri was ‘very noisy and trivial’. In addition, Verdi’s orchestration in the early works is often primitive, sometimes repetitious and on occasion little more than an accompaniment, the equivalent of strumming, when all the strings are playing in unison. As Verdi rarely began to orchestrate before he started rehearsals, this is not altogether surprising. Critics have accused him of composing ‘barrel-organ music’, which is an unfair charge, but he did make excessive use of stage-bands, and some of his instrumental music carries a whiff of the fairground.
Artistic evaluation is fraught with the problems of subjectivity and in Verdi’s case by the knowledge of how great a composer he became later, from Rigoletto (1851) onwards. Yet it is clear that, just as he was not a national patriotic figure in 1848, neither was he the Italians’ favourite operatic composer at that time. Donizetti’s operas were performed far more frequently. If Verdi had died after Legnano, at the age of thirty-five, his legacy would have looked poor compared to Bellini’s, who had died at thirty-three. Without the knowledge that they had preceded Il trovatore and La traviata, it is unlikely that many of the early operas would be performed today; some of them, such as Oberto, Alzira and Giovanna d’Arco, might have disappeared altogether. Perhaps only Nabucco, Ernani and Macbeth would now be in the repertoire.
7
The Making of Italy
PIEDMONT 1850S
If the Austrian Empire had been defeated in 1848, the victorious new Italy would have been very different from the one that emerged a decade later. Like the Germany born in 1871, it would have become a confederation of states, each of them retaining its own government and parliament.* Even if Piedmont had been dominant in the north, it would not have been in a position to ‘piedmontize’ the rest of the peninsula. All the main rulers further south – the pope, the grand duke and the Neapolitan king – had accepted parliaments early in 1848, and they could surely have remained as constitutional monarchs within a confederation. Ferdinand of Naples and Leopold of Tuscany would then have had a status comparable to the Kings of Württemberg and Bavaria in 1871.
The chief loser in 1849 seemed to be Piedmont, yet the real victims of Austria’s success in Italy were revolution and federalism. For all the passion of Mazzini and the heroics of Garibaldi, many of their patriotic contemporaries came to accept that independence would not be won by conspiracies and guerrilla warfare. Nor did an Italian confederation now seem a system sufficiently strong to confront the armies of the Austrian Empire. What Italy needed, patriots now argued, was a powerful dynasty – one like the Hohenzollern in Prussia – around which it could coalesce. And once Naples and Tuscany had revoked their constitutions and joined the Austrian side, the only possible candidate for the role was the Savoia, now represented by Charles Albert’s son, Victor Emanuel II. Despite a war so disastrous that it had led to an abdication, the Savoia managed to shrug off the embarrassment of defeat and emerge as the standard-bearers of Italy, kings of the only constitutional and anti-Austrian state in the peninsula.
A significant figure in the rehabilitation of Piedmont was that improbable statesman, Massimo d’Azeglio, who in the spring of 1849 was close to despair. ‘The people of Italy,’ he had decided, were ‘twenty per cent stupid, rascally and bold, eighty per cent stupid, honest and timid, and such a people has the government it deserves.’ It was the Italians rather than the Austrians who were the real problem for Italy. ‘Even if the Austrians went away of their own accord we should not be a nation as a result of that … We have to give thought to forming Italians if we wish to have an Italy.’1
Azeglio was chosen as prime minister of Piedmont in May 1849 despite his lack of parliamentary and administrative experience; even since his election to the parliament in Turin the previous June, he had usually been absent from Piedmont, recuperating from his Vicenza wound. He appeared to have neither the enthusiasm nor the qualifications needed for high office, and he had already turned down offers of ministerial positions. Even as premier he did not hide his impatience or his boredom with debates in which he seldom participated. Yet unexpectedly he proved to be a success. An honest and clear-sighted politician, admired both at home and abroad, his wisdom and his moderation were crucial for the consolidation of the parliamentary system.
Azeglio’s success in persuading the new king to accept the constitution was perhaps his most notable achievement. Victor Emanuel would have preferred to abolish parliament altogether, but Azeglio persuaded his bluff and uncouth new sovereign to retain a system which gave him the powers he most coveted: the supreme command of the armed forces and the authority to make war or peace without consulting parliament. The statesman also did his master a service by promoting his image as ‘il re galantuomo’ (‘the gentleman king’), a sobriquet that caught on and is still sometimes used to describe him. Later Azeglio came to regret this favour, realizing it was an unsuitable nickname for a boorish individual whose chief passions were hunting, philandering and posturing as a great commander.
Other priorities for Azeglio were the conclusion of a peace treaty with Austria and a reduction in the enormous power of the Church in Piedmont. During his premiership, legislation known as the Siccardi Laws introduced freedom of worship, abolished religious censorship, tackled the Church’s control of education and ensured that civil and criminal cases involving priests would now be tried in state courts. Yet he remained unenthusiastic about the job and in the autumn of 1852, after three and a half years, he was happy to let it go. By then he was contending with difficulties with parliamentary opponents, who thought his anti-clericalism too weak, difficulties with the king who thought it too strong and refused to sign further laws ‘that might displease the pope’, and difficulties with a minister he had brought into government, the arrogant and assertive Cavour, who lorded it over cabinet meetings and even announced policy in parliament without consulting his colleagues.
On his resignation Azeglio refused a pension and honours, even an offer of the Order of the Annunziata, which would have given him the privilege of calling the king ‘cousin’; as he himself informed Victor Emanuel, he was returning to the profession of painter, and it would hardly be fitting for the king’s cousin to be a seller of pictures. Yet he remained involved in politics, and his letters of the period reveal him to have been Italy’s shrewdest and most knowledgeable commentator on political affairs, a man who should have been consulted more often over the next decade both by Cavour, his successor, and by Victor Emanuel. One service he was persuaded to perform was to chaperone the king during a royal visit to London and Paris in 1855: his principal English duties were to prevent Victor Emanuel from making gaffes and coarse jokes at court and to read out the official speeches in Italian, a language which the monarch spoke badly. Cavour joined the party at the last moment and persuaded Victor Emanuel to trim his huge moustache, but neither he nor Azeglio could prevent him from gossiping maliciously in both capitals or telling a startled Queen Victoria that he hoped to execute Mazzini and exterminate the Austrians.
Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, was a very different character from his predecessor. Assiduous and energetic, he was a natural parliamentarian who spoke clearly and intervened often in debates. He dominated the small ‘Subalpine Parliament’ in Turin, an oval hall in the Palazzo Carignano decorated with gilt and up
holstered in red velvet so that it looked more like a theatre or a stage-set than a debating chamber. He also dominated his cabinets, frequently doing the work of colleagues whose abilities seemed to him inadequate. In 1855, in addition to his role as prime minister, he was foreign minister, finance minister and supervisor of the army and the navy.
Another way in which Cavour differed from Azeglio was in his lack of patriotic feeling. His instinct had always been to go north, to travel to Britain and France and see what was going on in the countries he most admired. In Italy he preferred to stay in Piedmont and seldom showed interest in the rest of the peninsula; never in his life did he go south of Pisa. Until his final years, he pooh-poohed the idea of unification and complained as late as 1856 that Manin, the Venetian patriot who now favoured Italian independence, was too preoccupied with ‘the idea of Italian unity and other such nonsense’.2 Yet the events of 1848–9 and his experience under Azeglio made him eager for a further fight with Austria. Were he able to obtain the support of Britain and France, he believed he could expel the Austrians from Italy and create an enlarged Piedmont spread across the whole of the north.
Ingratiation of these potential allies thus became an early goal in his premiership. One possible way of achieving it was to offer military support to both in their Crimean War against Russia, a curious proposal opposed by his colleagues and by the public, who did not see what Piedmont could conceivably gain from interfering in the Eastern Question. Cavour persisted, however, hoping that his new allies would be grateful and believing that the war would redeem Piedmont’s military reputation; like later Italian leaders, he yearned for his country to be taken seriously by the powers of northern Europe. In 1855 a small army was duly dispatched to the Black Sea, where its men did nothing except die of cholera until they played a small role in a French victory near the end. Piedmont did not gain anything from the subsequent peace treaty in Paris.
The Pursuit of Italy Page 22