At the outbreak of war in 1859 Verdi claimed it was only his health that prevented him from enlisting: he was ‘unable to complete a three-mile march’ or ‘stand five minutes of sun’ on his head. Yet he gave a generous donation to wounded soldiers and to families of those who died in battle. As in 1848, he was full of enthusiasm and was prepared to ‘adore’ Napoleon III for his role in the war. Yet he refused a request to write a national hymn after the victory at Solferino, which was just as well because news of the armistice that allowed Austria to keep Venice left him aghast and outraged by the French emperor’s ‘betrayal’.
After the overthrow of the ducal regime in his home city, Verdi was elected a deputy to the new assembly of Parma, which subsequently voted for annexation by Piedmont. He then went to Turin, where he formally presented Victor Emanuel with the results of the plebiscite, and visited Cavour, who was then briefly out of office. Much impressed by the politician, he afterwards wrote him an obsequious letter, hailing him as ‘the great statesman, the first citizen, the man whom every Italian will call the father of his country’.30 He even called him ‘the Prometheus of our people’, by which he presumably meant the titan who brought fire to mankind rather than the trickster of Zeus or the figure chained to a rock while an eagle gnawed his liver. Cavour replied that the letter had moved him ‘very, very much’.
Verdi applauded Garibaldi’s expedition to Sicily, while his wife Giuseppina Strepponi considered ‘Giuseppe of Caprera’ to be ‘the purest and greatest hero since the world was created’. Although reluctant to stand for the new Italian parliament in Turin, the composer allowed himself to be persuaded by Cavour that his presence in the Chamber would ‘contribute to the dignity of parliament in and beyond Italy’ and that it was especially needed ‘to convince our colourful colleagues in the south’, who were so much more ‘susceptible to the influence of [his] artistic genius …’ than northerners. As a deputy, Verdi took an interest in such matters as agriculture and artistic copyright but he played little part in national and political debates. He was content to vote the same way as Cavour so as to be ‘absolutely certain of not making a mistake’. When, soon after taking his seat, he told the prime minister he was thinking of resigning, Cavour said, ‘No, let us go first to Rome.’ ‘Are we going there?’ ‘Yes’, replied the statesman, but he would say nothing definite about the timing, though he assured him it would be ‘soon’. Cavour’s death a few weeks later left Verdi so distraught that he wept at the memorial service he had organized in Busseto. ‘Poor Cavour! Poor us!’31 He remained in parliament until 1865, when he did not seek re-election. He was later appointed a senator.
Official censors and morality-mongers had disapproved of Verdi’s sympathetic treatment of ‘fallen’ women in three operas he wrote in the early 1850s, Lina in Stiffelio, Gilda in Rigoletto and Violetta in La traviata. His neighbours near Parma were even more appalled when the composer came to live in Busseto in 1849 with Giuseppina Strepponi, his mistress for years before she became his wife in 1859. A woman as ‘fallen’ as any of the characters in his works, Giuseppina possessed charm and talent and had combined a career as one of Italy’s leading sopranos with a succession of lovers as well as babies, who had been adopted or left at foundling hospitals. She had produced at least three children by at least two fathers, continuing to sing throughout her pregnancies and giving birth to one baby six hours after a performance.
Giuseppina was happy to live as the mistress of Verdi in Paris or Naples or whatever city he happened to be working in, but she loathed being in Busseto, where the townsfolk refused to speak to her. Verdi came to hate the place too, and after a while they moved out to Sant’ Agata, the farm he had bought in 1848, where he was soon extending the acreage and transforming the farmhouse into an attractive and unpretentious villa. He admitted the countryside was not pretty – it was even ugly – but it was his, where he had been born and where he could now afford to buy. He felt comfortable in the flat Emilian landscape with its fogs, its ditches, its poplar trees and its large fields of corn. It was to him what Caprera was to Garibaldi. He appreciated the solitude, which gave him peace to think, and he liked working in his own fields and living in a place where he did not have to tip his hat to counts and marquesses. At Sant’ Agata he was close to the earth, could call himself ‘a peasant from Roncole’, could even pretend that all he wanted to do for the rest of his life was to plant beans and cabbages and trade livestock in the market at Cremona. Giuseppina, who was sometimes bored there, grumbled at her husband’s mania for getting up at dawn to inspect his trees and crops, to watch the digging of an artesian well or to supervise construction work on the farm buildings. Eventually he agreed to break the monotony of the Po Valley year by making a summer visit to the Tuscan spa of Montecatini and by wintering in Genoa, renting an apartment of the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, which must have been an idyllic place before its grounds were expropriated to build roads, a railway line and a motorway on stilts.
As he grew older, Verdi frequently felt depressed. Pessimistic by nature, he became increasingly gloomy about the future of Italy and even of life itself. When people complained that Il trovatore had too many deaths, his revealing reply was that ‘death is all there is in life. What else is there?’32 At home he was often gruff and grumbly, especially with his wife and servants, and he admitted that Giuseppina was right to call him a bear. Yet while he could be a difficult man to do business with, his conductors and singers adored him, and even the prima donnas did not flounce out. He was innately, if undemonstratively, a kind and generous person. Near his home he constructed a hospital and in Milan he built the Casa de Riposo, a retirement home for impoverished musicians. Throughout his life he gave money to victims of earthquakes and other disasters, and in his will he left large sums to hospitals and schools as well as to individuals, including an annual payment to the fifty poorest people in Roncole.
Verdi’s pace of composition slowed down after 1859. In twenty years he had written twenty-one operas but over the next four decades he produced only five, each of them a masterpiece. He returned to La Scala in 1862 with La forza del destino, went to the Paris Opéra in 1867 for his immense Don Carlos, and in 1871 sent to Cairo his opera Aida, a work often supposed to have been performed at the opening of either the Suez Canal or the Cairo Opera House, though both events had in fact taken place two years earlier. There was then an operatic gap of sixteen years until Otello, though the abstinence did produce the incomparable Requiem, composed in honour of Manzoni, the only man apart from Cavour whom Verdi revered. Although the composer claimed to have retired, Arrigo Boito, his last and ablest librettist, was able to cajole him into writing the great final works, Otello and Falstaff, the old man producing the latter in 1893, his eightieth year. Boito was so skilful in condensing Shakespeare and conflating several minor characters that he made the opera a far finer and funnier work than the original, The Merry Wives of Windsor. People sometimes complain that there are no tunes in Falstaff, but actually there are a great many, only they do not last long enough to become arias.
The acclamation and adulation that greeted the two operas made Verdi mellow and more relaxed and much less like a bear. Yet if he was happier with himself and kinder to his wife, he was still anxious about what he called his ‘troubled patria’, which seemed to him to have been going downhill ever since the death of Cavour. The politicians were now so bad that they just made ‘coglionerie’ (balls-ups) after coglionerie. The composer had been so distraught by Austria’s victories in 1866 and by Italy’s consequent humiliation – receiving Venetia as a gift from Napoleon III – that he even tried to cancel Don Carlos for Paris because he felt it would be embarrassing to be an Italian in France at that moment. Although he recognized that the capture of Rome four years later was ‘a great event’, it left him ‘cold’ because he could not imagine how a modus vivendi could be arranged between ‘Parliament and the College of Cardinals, a free press and the Inquisition, the Civil Code and the Syllabus of Errors’. Verd
i’s concern about a possible break-up of Italy may have been reflected in a revision of Simon Boccanegra in 1881, in which the Genoese protagonist confronts demands for war against the Venetians with the argument that the two great maritime republics share a common patria and must not behave like Cain to Abel.33
The rise to power of Crispi, his near contemporary, briefly persuaded Verdi that Italy had found its saviour. He saluted the prime minister who, so he thought, controlled the ‘destinies of our beloved country’ with such wisdom and energy, and he even sent him a photograph dedicated to ‘the great patriot’.34 Verdi’s strong social conscience welcomed Crispi’s social reforms, but the rest of him was soon disenchanted, particularly with the military and colonial adventurism. How, he wondered, could the government waste so much money in Africa when there was so much poverty in Italy to contend with? Verdi was especially appalled by the advance against the Ethiopians, whom he regarded as ‘in many ways … more civilized than we’. For him Adowa was a salutary defeat for a country ‘playing the tyrant in Africa’.
After Verdi’s death in January 1901, the novelist and senator Antonio Fogazzaro acclaimed the composer as ‘our great unifier’, the man who ‘deserved, more than anyone, to be the symbol of the heroic era of our Risorgimento, because of the mystic fusion of his music [and] the longed-for, prayed-for, unity of the nation’.35 Verdi had for years been hailed as ‘il maestro della rivoluzione italiana’, the artistic herald of the Risorgimento; posthumously he became a hero of school textbooks, the man whose name was taught to generations of children as the symbol of Italian aspirations: ‘Long live Verdi! Long live Victor Emanuel King of Italy!’
Scholarly revisionism has done little to dent the mythology surrounding Verdi’s life and political role. In the BBC’s fine television series on Italian opera, broadcast in 2010, the excellent Antonio Pappano, music director of Covent Garden, was still extolling the maestro for his patriotism and the symbolism of Nabucco. Without doubt Giuseppe Verdi was a great man, a great composer and a great philanthropist, but he was not Italy’s ‘great unifier’. He was not even a great nationalist.
10
Nationalist Italy
LITTLE ITALY
Nations are often accused of being divided into two, of being split into hostile, opposite and even irreconcilable parts. A character in Disraeli’s novel Sybil famously declared that England consisted of two nations, the rich and the poor, whose peoples were so ignorant of each other that they might have been ‘dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets’.1 The Spanish dictator, General Francisco Franco, also divided his country into two: one half was ‘true Spain’, valiant, Catholic and hierarchical; the other was ‘anti-Spain’, composed of liberals, marxists and freemasons, people so infected by the ideas of the Enlightenment and revolutionary France that, even if born on Spanish soil from Spanish parents, they could not be regarded as true Spaniards.
As befits a country of such diversity, the idea of ‘two Italies’ has several variants. The polarity between secular Italy and religious Italy goes back a long time, and that between town and country is even older. Yet the standard division is of course that between the north and the south. Sometimes this is mentioned simply to illustrate different degrees of wealth and economic development. More usually it comes with nuances and insinuations about race and lifestyle and habits of thought. Putting most of the clichés into a single sentence, many northern Italians today would subscribe to the view that the real division is one between a civilized, hard-working, law-abiding, European north and a backward, Arabized, idle and violent Mediterranean south. A century ago, a young nationalist intellectual, Giuseppe Prezzolini, claimed there was ‘an Italy of deeds and an Italy of words, one of action, the other of chatter and drowsiness, one Italy in the office, the other in the parlour’.2 As the editor of La Voce, a review that defined itself as ‘militantly idealist’, Prezzolini became a creator of another Italian divide, between those who supported and those who detested Giovanni Giolitti, the statesman who was prime minister four times between 1892 and 1914 and again for a year from the summer of 1920. Prezzolini disliked the dominant politician of the day so much that a special issue of his publication was called simply ‘Abbasso Giolitti!’, ‘Down with Giolitti!’
La Voce’s target was a clever and pragmatic liberal from Piedmont, an empiricist, an administrator, a believer in measured progress. Giolitti was not a great visionary but he was a great reconciler, which is what Italy needed at the start of the twentieth century. The previous decade had ended with a series of dreadful events – martial law in Sicily, colonial defeat in Africa, and bread riots causing at least eighty deaths in Milan – that culminated in the assassination of King Umberto by an anarchist at Monza in the summer of 1900. The atmosphere of the epoch reinforced Giolitti’s belief that the country needed social peace more than political reform just as it needed economic growth more than colonial adventures. Although he had stressed the importance of ‘beautiful legends’, he had done so for political reasons, not because he had much time for heroes or ideals or for attempting the task of turning Italy into a Great Power. Prosperity, he believed, would do more for national unity than expeditions to Eritrea. In the years before the Great War, when Giolitti was the most powerful politician even when he was out of office, national income increased by more than 50 per cent. Agricultural wages rose, the industrialization of the north-west took off and, owing to a determined government campaign against malaria, mortality rates were reduced.
Giolitti believed that the wealth gap in Italy was wider than in other countries and blamed the rich for provoking class conflict by making the poor pay high taxes on salt and cereals while they themselves were unwilling to levy a tax on wealth. Like his ally and predecessor as premier, Giuseppe Zanardelli, he insisted on remaining neutral during strikes, a stance that earned him the enmity of conservatives. When one aristocratic landowner from Mantua complained that, in consequence of a strike, he – ‘a senator of the realm’ – had been forced to drive his own plough, Giolitti’s response was to suggest he did this more often because he would then understand what a tiring job it was and perhaps pay his labourers better.3 Instead of dealing with strikes by sending in the army, as earlier premiers had done, he let them succeed or fail of their own accord. As a determined social reformer, he also reduced food taxes and introduced legislation on working conditions in factories.
Giolitti was a unifier who understood that national unity could not be achieved simply by repeating old formulas combining ideas of patriotism, conquest and self-sacrifice. It required the inclusion of groups that had not existed in 1861 such as political Catholics, who from 1904 began to participate in elections and whom he helped to incorporate into the body politic. More controversially, he reached out to the radical Left, to a collection of socialists, radicals and republicans, who at the polls in 1900 had succeeded in electing nearly 100 deputies to the Chamber. To the fury of the Right, Giolitti was prepared to go far to accommodate the socialists, not only by introducing social reforms but also by inviting them to join his governments. Moderates in the Socialist Party were tempted to cooperate but they invariably came up against the intransigence of dogmatic colleagues who refused to consider anything other than revolution; their inflexibility later did much to assist the rise to power of Benito Mussolini. In 1900, after the assassination of King Umberto, most socialist (and republican) deputies failed to attend the funeral or send condolences to the royal family or even turn up for the new king’s coronation oath in parliament. In 1912 the party expelled its most talented reformist leaders principally because they had gone to the Quirinale Palace to express sympathy with Umberto’s successor, Victor Emanuel III, after he had survived an attempt on his life. The socialists preferred to threaten revolution and preserve their ideological purity rather than collaborate with Giolitti and take some responsibility for running the state. Their history for thirty years from 1892 is one of schism and expulsion, a period that saw the departur
e from the party of syndicalists, anarchists, reformists and communists.
Despite the refusal of the socialists to play a constructive part in national life, the period of Giolitti’s ascendancy was a hopeful one, a time of civic progress, of relative prosperity and, with the enlargement of the franchise, of greater political participation. In fact it provided the best opportunity Italy ever had of becoming a successful, liberal nation-state. Yet few contemporaries were able to recognize this. The liberal philosopher Benedetto Croce later hailed it as an epoch of affluence and liberal ideas, but at the time he was a haughty critic. So was Piero Gobetti, another liberal, and so too was Gaetano Salvemini, a radical who condemned Giolitti as a dictator and as minister of the mala vita (criminal life) because, like most of his predecessors, he acquired his parliamentary majorities with the use of corruption and sometimes force, especially in constituencies in the south. Although Salvemini, like Croce, later admitted that his criticism had been excessive, it was by then too late. The calumnies that assailed Giolitti from the Left as well as the Right did much to damage the credibility of the liberal regime and weaken it to the extent that it could later be overthrown without difficulty by Mussolini.
The prime minister’s most vocal and virulent opponents were on the Right, men who loathed Giolitti because he had abandoned the project of making Italy great in favour of making it prosperous. They derided his idea of Italy as ‘Italietta’ (‘little Italy’), a place of bourgeois values, of citizens aspiring to leisurely lives with domestic servants and seaside villas at Viareggio or Posillipo. Giolitti’s most eloquent critics were the nationalists, a group of bellicose intellectuals who transformed themselves into a political party in 1910 and won seats in parliament three years later. Disappointed by the results of the Risorgimento and the national humiliations that had followed, they shared the frustrations of Carducci, the poet who had lamented that ‘the epoch of the infinitely great’ had been succeeded by ‘the farce of the infinitely small, the busy little farce of ponderous clowns’.4 Petulantly, they scoffed at democracy and liberalism – and even at the notion of individual liberty – because these had failed to make Italy a real state or Italians a real people. What the country required was strength and discipline sufficient for conquest and expansion and economic development. Still talking about the need to avenge Lissa, a battle fought before most of them had been born, they preached violence, glorified war and demanded an empire that included Libya, Corsica, Dalmatia and dominance in the eastern Mediterranean. Among the benefits of warfare listed by Giovanni Papini, an essayist and friend of Prezzolini, was the fact that corpses made better and cheaper fertilizers than chemicals. ‘What beautiful cabbages’, he reflected, could be grown in a field where hundreds of soldiers had been killed.
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