Giuseppe Verdi MP3, CDs & Vinyl, Music of Giuseppe Verdi
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Giuseppe Verdi MP3, CDs & Vinyl, Music of Giuseppe Verdi
Giuseppe Verdi: Overview
Giuseppe Verdi: Giuseppe Verdi (b. Le Roncole, 10 Oct 1813; d. Milan, 27 Jan 1901).
Giuseppe Verdi: Italy's greatest composer was born, the son of an inn-keeper, in the village of Le Roncole, near Parma. He revealed a talent for music as a child, and was taught the rudiments of music by the organist of the village church, just opposite the inn. By the time he was ten he was sufficiently advanced for his father to send him to the small town of Busseto, three miles away, for further tuition. Antonio Barezzi, a Busseto merchant, took the lad into his house and gave him a job in his business, and soon the young Giuseppe Verdi was composing marches for the local Philharmonic Society as well as music for the church. In his nineteenth year, aided by Barezzi and by a charitable trust, he left Busseto for Milan, where he hoped to study at the Conservatorium.
The examiners for the Conservatorium refused to bend their rules to admit Giuseppe Verdi, who was four years over the maximum age for entrance, so the young composer instead studied privately with Vincenzo Lavigna, a conductor at La Scala. He made good progress with Lavigna, and after two years returned to Busseto to apply for the post of cathedral organist which had fallen vacant on the death of his ex-teacher, Provesi. The ecclesiastical authorities, however, appointed a rival candidate, and Verdi instead became Director of the Philharmonic Society. He married Margherita Barezzi, the daughter of his Busseto benefactor, and began in his spare time to work on his first opera, Oberto, the libretto for which had been provided by a Milanese journalist, Antonio Piazza. When Oberto was accepted by the impresario Bartolomeo Merelli, for production at La Scala, Giuseppe Verdi, accompanied by his wife and two infant children, returned to Milan.
Oberto was warmly received at its first performance in November 1839, but by this time tragedy had already struck the Giuseppe Verdi family, both of the children having died. While Verdi was at work on his second opera, Un giorno di regno. Margherita died of encephalitis. In a condition bordering on nervous collapse, he completed his comic opera which failed miserably at La Scala (though modern revivals have revealed it to be a quite agreeable opera buffa). Giuseppe Verdi wanted now to give up his operatic career and return to Busseto, but the impresario Merelli had faith in him and persuaded him to undertake a third opera, based on the biblical story of Nebuchadnezzar. Nabucco, staged at La Scala, was an enormous success, critics and public alike realizing that the natural successor to Bellini and Donizetti had now arrived.
Though the line of progress from Nabucco to Falstaff more than fifty years later was to prove anything but a straight one, Giuseppe Verdi's future as a composer was never in doubt after Nabucco. For the next few years, until the masterpieces of his middle-period, he was to turn out operas at the rate, sometimes, of two a year. Most of them are uneven, some of them contain passages which look crude or awkward in score, though rarely in performance; but they are never dull, and they all possess a vivid creative energy which is entirely Giuseppe Verdi's own, owing nothing to his predecessors. Most of these early Giuseppe Verdi operas are now finding their way back onto the stage after years of neglect: I Lombardi, Giovannad'Arco, Attila, II corsaro, and / masnadieri, for example. And some, like Ernani and Verdi's first Shakespeare opera, Macbeth, are great operas by any standard. Giuseppe Verdi was later to refer to his 'years in the galleys' when he was condemned to compose operas in quick succession, but there is none of these early works that one would willingly be without. His early audiences, suffering under Austrian occupation, liked to identify many of the early operas as rallying-cries for a united Italy and Giuseppe Verdi himself was quite willing to be thought of as the composer of the Risorgimento, the liberal political movement for a free and united Italy.
During a visit to Paris in 1847, Verdi revived acquaintance with the soprano Giuseppina Strepponi, whom he had first met in his early days in Milan. They became lovers, and lived together for twelve years before marrying. In 1848 Verdi wrote his one overtly patriotic opera, La battaglia di Legnano, and the following year produced Luisa Miller, based on Schiller's play Kabale und Liebe, the opera which is a kind of transitional work between the youthful excitement of the earlier operas and the maturer voice which speaks from Rigoletto onwards.
The most popular of Giuseppe Verdi's middle-period operas are the three which he produced between 1851 and 1853: Rigoletto, Il trovatore and La traviata. All three are remarkable for their melodic richness, and the first and last are superbly constructed dramatically, as well. Rigoletto, a particularly resilient work, triumphantly survives poor productions and the vain foibles of musically illiterate singers. Conversely, it offers magnificent opportunities to the intelligent interpreter of its title role, a role infused, as is the entire opera, with great humanity, despite its basis in romantic melodrama. Il trovatore's effects are broad and immediate. The wealth of melody, the passionate melancholy of the soprano's music, the almost brutal vigour and pace of the opera, these are merely a few of the ingredients that have ensured its popularity since the day of its first performance. Too popular for its own good, perhaps, since it was for many years a non-favourite with critics who, unimpressed by Giuseppe Verdi's honest directness of purpose, could hear in his score only the death of bel canto. To enlightened ears, however, Il trovatore is the veritable apotheosis of the bel canto opera with its demands for vocal beauty, agility and range.
Only a few weeks separate the premieres of Il trovatore in Rome and La traviata in Venice. The first performance of La traviata was a fiasco, and it was not until a new production was mounted the following year that the opera achieved success. It is a work so well-known today, its melodies so much a part of the experience of most musicians and opera-lovers, that it is difficult to stand sufficiently far away from it to appraise it afresh. It is an opera in which all of Giuseppe Verdi's finest qualities are to be perceived: his technical mastery, his humanity, his psychological penetration and his unerring taste.
Giuseppe Verdi divided the five years immediately following La traviata between his farm at Sant' Agata and visits to Paris, where the Opera had commissioned a new work from him. Les Vepres Siciliennes suffers from its poor libretto, though it contains some of Giuseppe Verdi's most individual music. More successful were Simon Boccanegra, produced in Venice in 1857, though it was not to assume its definitive form until Giuseppe Verdi and Boito revised it twenty-four years later, and Un ballo in maschera (1859), one of Giuseppe Verdi's most elegant scores. After Un ballo in maschera, he began to slow his pace somewhat, preferring to spend more time, either on his farm or in Genoa, with Giuseppina whom he had formally married in April 1859. When, in 1860, the first free Italian parliament was instituted, Giuseppe Verdi reluctantly agreed to stand for election. He was duly elected to the Italian legislative assembly, and served assiduously for five years, though he found political office irksome. He was not entirely lost to opera during this period, however, for he accepted an invitation from Russia to compose a new work for the Imperial Theatre at St Petersurg. He and Giuseppina travelled to St Petersburg for the production of La forza del destino (1862), a sprawling masterpiece which covers a vast canvas, from the personal to the social, in the manner of the 19th-century novel. In other words, it is the opera of a man who has read Manzoni's / promessi sposi. In it, Giuseppe Verdi continued his move away from strict aria form, a move he had begun at least as early as Luisa Miller, towards a greater fluidity and an apportioning of more orchestral and melodic interest to the recitative or arioso passages.
In 1865, Giuseppe Verdi revised his Macbeth of 1847 for performance in Paris, and then set to work on a new opera for Paris. This was Don Carlos, whose French libretto was based on Schiller's German play. The opera was performed forty-three times during the season, so it was certainly no failure, but the Empress Eugenie found it offensive, and some critics professed to detect the influence of Meyerbeer and even of Wagner, much to Giuseppe Verdi's indignation. He had at this time yet to hear a Wagner opera, and, although the formal structure of Don Carlos is that of Meyerbeer's Paris operas, this was virtually a condition of composing for Paris. However, whether there are traces of Meyerbeer in one or two scenes or not, its dark orchestral colouring, its rich, complex musical characterisation and the quality of its melody combine to make Don Carlos one of the most rewarding of operas to encounter in the theatre. Above all, it glows with its composer's humanity, which he was able to breathe into characters who, on the printed page of the libretto, must have seemed to him at first acquaintance to be frigidly formal.
In 1869, one of Giuseppe Verdi's Don Carlos librettists, Camille du Locle, sent him the synopsis of an opera set in ancient Egypt. It had been written by a French Egyptologist, and the Khedive of Egypt was keen to commission Giuseppe Verdi to turn it into an opera to be performed in Cairo at the opening of the Suez Canal. There was, however, not time enough for this, and when the new Cairo Opera House was inaugurated in November 1869, two weeks before the opening of the Canal, the opera performed was Rigoletto. Giuseppe Verdi's Egyptian opera, Aida, had its premiere in Cairo in January 1871. Giuseppe Verdi himself did not travel to Egypt; he stayed in Italy to rehearse the singers for the Milan production which followed shortly after Cairo.
Aida is a remarkable work which has almost become the victim of its own popularity. In a sense, it falls between two Verdian stools, pos-sessing neither the rough vigour of the early works nor the psychological penetration of Otello and Fa/staff. In purely musical terms, however, it is nothing less than a miracle of melodic beauty and imaginative orchestration. Despite many public scenes, it is the most intimate of grand operas, and at its heart one senses Giuseppe Verdi's profound melancholy. The sounds he created are not picturesquely Egyptian: Giuseppe Verdi created his own Egypt just as surely as his beloved Shakespeare did in Antony and Cleopatra. His dramatic use of recurring musical motives is nicely judged, and his balancing of objective description and sub-jective feeling is perfect. Both in its spectacular and its intimate aspects, Aida is a triumph of the creative imagination.
In 1873, the death of the great Italian novelist and patriot, Alessandro Manzoni, whom Giuseppe Verdi had venerated as a saint, led him to the composition of a Requiem Mass in Manzoni's memory. The Mass, first performed in a Milan church in 1874, conducted by the composer who subsequently took it on tour throughout Europe, is an unusual work in that it is written in a musical language closer to the dramatic than to the devotional. But the intention of the agnostic Giuseppe Verdi was to express the emotional meaning and implications of the liturgical text, just as in his operas he was concerned to express the meaning of the words and situations presented to him by his librettists. He is hardly to be blamed for writing with sincerity in his own style. Giuseppe Verdi brought his dramatist's art to the Requiem. Free to reveal something of his own attitude to death, he did not indulge in gentle resignation or joyful anticipation of an afterlife. Giuseppe Verdi's Requiem is a Mass not for the dead but for the living. The intensity and the compassion of his tragic view of the human condition are Shakesperian in stature.
By now Giuseppe Verdi considered himself to have retired from the world of opera. He devoted himself increasingly to his farm, and resisted the attempts of his publisher and others to lure him back to composition. In due course, however, he agreed to collaborate with the much younger Arrigo Boito, first on a revision of Simon Boccanegra, and then, most reluctantly, on an opera to be based on Shakespeare's Othello. He was, however, completely won over by Boito's libretto, and eventually began to work slowly but surely on the music. When Otello at last reached the stage in 1887, the world was able to acclaim another masterpiece by Giuseppe Verdi. In the opinion of many, it was his finest opera. It is certainly an incredibly fresh, youthfully inspired score for a man in his seventies to have created. Giuseppe Verdi's musical language and style are beyond praise. The melody is as glorious as in his more youthful days, but now freed from the harmonic constrictions of his earlier period, and able to range where it will.
After the success of Otello, Giuseppe Verdi and Boito were urged to begin another opera. But Giuseppe Verdi was not to be rushed. He busied himself with various philanthropic concerns, and five or six years were to elapse before he agreed to compose his next opera. In Giuseppe Verdi's eightieth year, 1893, Falstajf had its premiere in Milan, and again the occasion was a triumphant success. There is so much to admire in Falstajf: scoring of chamber-music delicacy allied to a wide, Beethovenian range of orchestral expression, the magical evocation of forest and fancy in the last scene, and the fantastic energy and pace of the entire opera which seems to last no longer than one sudden flash of inspiration.
After the excitement and exhaustion of Falstajf, Giuseppe Verdi returned to his leisurely country life. He toyed with other operatic projects, and even travelled to Paris for the French premiere of Otello, for which he composed ballet music. In 1897, Giuseppina died of pneumonia. Giuseppe Verdi now felt completely desolate, but busied himself with setting up the Rest Home for Aged Musicians in Milan, which still bears his name and is supported by his royalties. He spent the Xmas of 1900 visiting his adopted daughter in Milan. It was there, at the Grand Hotel, that he succumbed to a sudden stroke in January. He was eighty-seven years of age.
Giuseppe Verdi: CDs & Vinyl
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Giuseppe Verdi: MP3
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