1813–1901 · Romantic
Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901) was an Italian composer whose operas became the culmination of Italian opera in the nineteenth century. He wrote Rigoletto, Il trovatore, La traviata, Aida, Otello and Falstaff, as well as a Requiem. On our site his music is represented by the vocal piece In solitaria stanza for voice and piano.
Giuseppe Verdi was born in October 1813 in the village of Le Roncole, not far from Busseto. His father, Carlo, kept a village inn, and his mother, Luigia Uttini, was a spinner. The boy helped during Mass in the village church and learned musical notation and the organ from Pietro Baistrocchi. His parents gave him a spinet, which Verdi kept for the rest of his life. When Baistrocchi died, the eight-year-old Verdi took over as the church's paid organist.
The boy's musical gift caught the eye of Antonio Barezzi, a well-off Busseto merchant devoted to music. On his advice the ten-year-old Verdi moved to Busseto to study, and on Sundays he went to Le Roncole to play the organ at Mass. His composition teacher was Ferdinando Provesi, one of the leaders of the Busseto Philharmonic Society.
Provesi taught his pupil more than counterpoint: he also awakened in him a taste for serious reading. Verdi became absorbed in Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe and Schiller, and Alessandro Manzoni's novel The Betrothed became one of his favourite works. Later he recalled that as a teenager he had composed many marches for band, small symphonies, piano concertos and variations that he played himself at concerts, and also serenades, cantatas and church music.
To continue his education Verdi went to Milan, but the Conservatory did not accept him. The reasons given are his modest piano playing and age limits. Barezzi's help led to private lessons with Vincenzo Lavigna, a former musician of La Scala. On Lavigna's advice Verdi subscribed to performances there and heard operas by Rossini and Bellini.
Verdi began taking private lessons in counterpoint and went to operas and concerts. Mixing with Milan's high society convinced him to think seriously about a career as a theatre composer. Through Lavigna he joined a society of amateur singers directed by Pietro Massini. In 1834 Verdi was often there and soon took charge of rehearsals and played continuo; Massini suggested that he compose a first opera, with words by the journalist Antonio Piazza.
In Busseto Verdi gave music lessons to Barezzi's daughter Margherita. The two fell in love and married on 4 May 1836. They had two children, Virginia Maria Luigia (26 March 1837 to 12 August 1838) and Icilio Romano (11 July 1838 to 22 October 1839). Both children died in infancy, and on 18 June 1840 Margherita died, aged 26, of encephalitis. Verdi was devastated by these losses.
His first opera, Oberto, Conte di San Bonifacio, was staged at La Scala in Milan in November 1839. Critics approved of it, and the theatre's impresario offered the composer a contract for new operas. The second work, the comedy Un giorno di regno, was a failure. The next opera was Nabucco, whose libretto the composer Nicolai had earlier rejected.
Nabucco was premiered at La Scala on 9 March 1842 and was a great success that established Verdi's reputation as an opera composer. In less than three years the opera had reached Vienna, Lisbon, Barcelona, Berlin, Paris and Hamburg. It was followed by I Lombardi alla prima crociata in 1843 and Ernani, after a play by Victor Hugo, in 1844. In 1847 Verdi reworked I Lombardi for the Paris Opéra, and the opera, renamed Jérusalem, was staged on 26 November 1847. It was his first work in the grand opera style.
Rigoletto was written after Victor Hugo's play Le roi s'amuse. The censors demanded changes to the libretto, and while working on the opera the composer several times meant to abandon it. The king in the story was replaced by a duke, and the first production, in Venice in 1851, was a tremendous success. Verdi expected the duke's tune La donna è mobile to become a hit, so he left it out of the orchestral rehearsals.
Next came Il trovatore, which Verdi wrote under an agreement with the Rome opera company for January 1853, and La traviata. The libretto of La traviata draws on The Lady of the Camellias by Alexandre Dumas fils; Verdi saw the play in Paris in February 1852 and at once began to compose. The premiere in March 1853 was a failure, but after some rewriting the opera was staged successfully across Europe over the next two years. These three operas cemented Verdi's fame as a master of opera.
In May 1848 Verdi signed a contract covering land and houses at Sant'Agata (Busseto) that had once belonged to his family. There he built his own house, finished in 1880 and now known as the Villa Verdi. From 1851 until his death the composer lived at Sant'Agata. He was glad to be back there, and in February 1856 he wrote of a complete abandonment of music and a little light work with farming and horses.
In his early operas Verdi showed sympathy for the Risorgimento, the movement for the unification of Italy. Va, pensiero, the chorus in Nabucco (1842), along with comparable choruses in his later operas, matched the spirit of that movement, and the composer himself came to be regarded as a representative of its ideals. The music historian Philip Gossett notes that during the nineteenth century legends began to spread that magnified and overstated such feeling. In 1848 the nationalist leader Giuseppe Mazzini asked Verdi to write a patriotic hymn, and the composer agreed. In 1859 in Naples the slogan Viva Verdi began to be read as 'Long live Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy'. For a short time Verdi was also an elected politician.
In the years that followed Verdi wrote, among other works, Les vêpres siciliennes for the Paris Opéra, Simon Boccanegra, Un ballo in maschera and La forza del destino, which the Imperial Bolshoi Kamenny Theatre in St Petersburg commissioned in 1862. Aida was commissioned from him by the Egyptian government. At first the composer refused, but in Paris the offer was repeated through du Locle. Verdi then read the scenario and liked it. The opera was staged in Cairo in 1871 with enormous success.
In 1869 Verdi composed the Libera Me for a Requiem in memory of Gioachino Rossini, whose other movements were written by other Italian composers. In 1874 he wrote his own Requiem on the death of the writer Alessandro Manzoni and included in it a reworked version of the Libera Me. Next came Otello, after Shakespeare, staged in Milan in 1887. Its music is continuous and not divided into arias and recitatives, an innovation that appeared under the influence of Wagner's operatic reform.
Verdi's last opera was Falstaff, a comedy after Shakespeare. The composer and librettist Arrigo Boito wrote the libretto from The Merry Wives of Windsor in Victor Hugo's French translation. It was first staged in 1893. The score is closer to Wagner's Meistersinger than to the comic operas of Rossini and Mozart, and it ends with a fugue for seven voices in which Verdi shows his command of counterpoint.
On 21 January 1901 Verdi suffered a stroke in a hotel in Milan. He was paralysed and grew weaker every day. Six days later, early in the morning of 27 January 1901, the composer died. At first he was buried in the Monumental Cemetery in Milan, but a month later his body was moved to the rest home for retired musicians that Verdi himself had founded. That home is also in Milan.
Verdi was above all an opera composer: his work is the culmination of nineteenth-century Italian opera. He began with Oberto (1839), Un giorno di regno (1840), Nabucco (1842), I Lombardi (1843) and Ernani (1844). Then came I due Foscari (1844), Giovanna d'Arco and Alzira (both 1845), Attila (1846), Macbeth and I masnadieri (both 1847), La battaglia di Legnano and Luisa Miller (both 1849) and Stiffelio (1850). I Lombardi has a second version, Jérusalem (1847), Macbeth one from 1865, and Stiffelio one titled Aroldo (1857).
The middle of his career brought Rigoletto (1851), Il trovatore and La traviata (both 1853), the three peaks of that period. His later works include Les vêpres siciliennes (1855), Simon Boccanegra (1857, second version 1881), Un ballo in maschera (1859), La forza del destino (1862) and Don Carlos (1867, second version 1884). After them came Aida (1871), Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893).
Besides operas, Verdi left sacred music, vocal pieces and a string quartet. He wrote a Messa Solenne in E-flat major (1835), six romances to poems by various poets (1838), an album of romances (1845), Suona la tromba for male chorus and orchestra to the words of Goffredo Mameli's hymn (1848), the cantata Inno delle nazioni (1862) and a Requiem (1874). For the Requiem in memory of Rossini he composed the Libera Me in 1869. In 1880 came the Pater Noster for five-part chorus and the Ave Maria for soprano and string orchestra, both to words by Dante, and in 1892 the Four Sacred Pieces.
Verdi was influenced by Rossini, Bellini, Meyerbeer and above all Donizetti. The influence of Wagner is noticeable in Otello and Falstaff. To express the feelings of his characters and the drama of the action, Verdi relied chiefly on melody. In solo numbers his harmony is often deliberately austere, and the orchestra sounds like one accompanying instrument. Yet he also made orchestral discoveries: in Rigoletto the strings rise in a chromatic scale in the Monterone scene, and a chorus behind the scenes depicts an approaching storm. Some passages in Aida point to the composer's acquaintance with the music of Glinka.
Verdi was the first composer to look specifically for subjects that best suited his gift. He worked closely with his librettists and removed unnecessary details and superfluous characters from the story. What remained were characters boiling with passion and scenes rich in drama. His bold devices were so instantly recognisable that other composers did not dare borrow them.
On the site Verdi is represented by the sheet music of In solitaria stanza for voice and piano. This edition is at the advanced level. Among Verdi's early works are romances to poems by various poets: six romances from 1838 and an album of romances from 1845.