Giuseppe Verdi

“ The most important and valuable writings respecting Verdi, however, are, as might be expected, in the Italian language. Among these are—
Sketches of the Life and Works of Giuseppe Verdi (Bermani) , 1846; Studies upon the Operas of Giuseppe Verdi (Basevi) , 1859; Biographical Notes on Giuseppe Verdi, followed by brief analyses of "Aïda" and the "Requiem Mass" (Perosio) , 1875; Critical Musical Essay on "Aïda" (Peña y Goñi) , 1875; Considerations on the actual State of Musical Art in Italy, and the artistic Importance of "Aïda" and the "Requiem Mass" (Sassaroli) , 1876 ”

“ Giuseppe Verdi was born in Roncole, Italy, October 10, 1813.
2. He began to learn the Spinet when he was seven years old.
3. The Spinet is an early form of the piano.
4. Among the great composers who were alive when Verdi was a little boy were: Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz and Schumann.
5. He became organist at Roncole when he was ten years old (1823) .
6. He went to school in Busseto and lived with a cobbler.
7. After a time he studied in Milan.
8. But not at the famous Milan Conservatory, for he was told there that he had no special talent for music.
9. Verdi wrote thirty operas. ”

“ Giuseppe Verdi
The picture on this page is of the house wherein a great composer was born. Of course, one is not born a great composer. He has to become that. So, at the moment this story begins there is, within this house, a little boy quite like any other boy. He loved to play and to make a noise and to have a good time. But most of all—what do you think he loved?
A hand organ.
VERDI'S BIRTHPLACE
Whenever the organ man came into the village of Roncole, in Italy (where Verdi was born, October 10, 1813) , he could not be kept indoors. ”

“ What will he become? This is the question, pregnant with blissful uncertainty, which nearly every decent parent has to ask himself of a young hopeful. Doubtless Verdi senior applied the interrogatory to himself respecting Giuseppe, but it has not transpired that the subject of the inquiry furnished much solution to the problem, beyond the fact that he was always overcome when he heard street-organ music. No sooner did an organ-grinder appear in Roncole, with his instrument, than young Verdi became an attentive auditor, following the itinerant musician from door to door until fetched away. ”

“ His best songs are among the most popular to emerge from Italy. The most famous and the most moving emotionally is without question “Addio” (“Goodbye, Forever”) . Almost as popular and appealing are “Ideale” (“My Ideal”) , “Marechiare,” “Mattinata,” “Segreto,” “La Serenata,” and “Vorrei morire.”
326 Giuseppe Verdi
Giuseppe Verdi, the greatest of the Italian opera composers, was born in Le Roncole, Italy, on October 10, 1813. He demonstrated such unmistakable gifts for music in his boyhood that his townspeople created a fund to send him to the Milan Conservatory. In 1832 he appeared in Milan. ”

“ Better still he helped the boy in every way he could until he was sixteen years old. By that time our little Giuseppe was grown to be quite a man. His friend, whose name was Ferdinando Provesi, was proud of him, for already he was becoming a master. He played the cathedral organ at times; he conducted the Philharmonic Orchestra; he led its rehearsals, and he composed music for its concerts.
PROVESI
So you see—all the wonderful operas that were to come were already on the way!
[Pg 8] It has been written that Provesi was the first person to see and understand Verdi's real genius. ”

“ The career of Verdi is in many ways the most remarkable in musical history. None other covers such an extended period of productive activity; none other shows such a very gradual and constant development; none other delayed so long its full fruition. Had Verdi died or stopped writing at the same age as did Mozart, Beethoven, Weber, Schubert, or Schumann—to mention only a few—his name would be to us merely that of a delightful melodist whose genius reached its fullest expression in Rigoletto and the Traviata. He would rank perhaps with Rossini and Donizetti—certainly not higher. ”

“ No one could be more refined than he in musical expression; no one could be more seemingly brutal. The glowing words that he wrote concerning Verdi in the Revue Nationale show his one prevailing thought: “Let us then be frank and true; let us not demand of a great artist qualities which he lacks, and let us profit from the qualities which he possesses. ”

“ We all remember his thoughtful countenance and well-shaped head, with its finely-chiselled features, and dark eyes full of the fire of genius, the whole set off with a liberal gift of hair on the head and face. The slender build and highly-strung temperament at once arrest the eye; nor can we fail to be attracted by the tidily-attired exterior of the master. Verdi is best seen under the ordeal of some operatic triumph. Then through all the excitement he remains what he is—a quiet, calm, modest gentleman, one of those intellectual giants who scorn to trade upon their greatness. ”

“ Think of the twenty-five and more operas he made before he reached Aïda! To be sure, there is a suspicious resemblance between his melodies, his characters, his situations; there is always the blood-curdling story of intrigue,—political, passionate,—with its elopements, loves, cutthroat conspirators, booted chorus, and its orchestral tremolo. We get the dime novel set to music, the inartistic glorification of the melodrama. Verdi needed money, love, fame, easily gained, and being a much more industrious man than Rossini he contrived to turn out in forty years twice as many musical pot-boilers. ”

“ This unpretentious spot of Italian soil was to prove the cradle of the revolutioniser of Italy's national music-drama. To-day it is incontrovertible that in Verdi's music, especially in his later writings, there is far more than could ever have been expected of any Italian master. His melody is the pure chastened current of the sunny South, and no one of his countrymen has written loftier operatic music than that in Aïda and Falstaff. ”

“ What then is the key to this anomalous state of things, wherein it is found that Verdi's defenders, amongst writers, are so few, and his partisans still more rare, and still Verdi is not shelved? Is it that amongst opera frequenters there is a fiat in his favour, which is sufficiently strong to maintain his name in the repertory? Or is it that the general body of amateurs feel that the dead-set against the only composer left in Italy is based on prejudice, intolerance, and injustice? ”

“ It is not difficult, even if it be premature, to deliberate upon Verdi's probable place in, and influence upon, musical art. His labours, exemplified in such dramatic-music masterpieces as Aïda, Otello, and Falstaff, prove incontestably that perfected Italian opera, of such workmanship as these operas, crowning the later years of their great composer's life, can be, and is, a more refined art-production than either the most advanced or the least extravagant of the operatic models championed by Wagner, or any other reformer of the lyric drama. ”

“ His other works up to this time were a string quartet, written at Naples and performed in the composer's own house, in April, 1873; a "Pater Noster" for two sopranos, contralto, tenor and bass; and an "Ave Maria" for soprano and strings. Both these last-named works were given for the first time at La Scala, April 18, 1880. Verdi was now sixty years of age, and could well afford to rest on his laurels. He had worked industriously and had reached a time of life when the inventive faculties begin to show signs of exhaustion. ”

“ He is the man for strong situations; they call out of him the accents of a master. And what beguiles us and carries us off our feet, what has made, and continues to make the fascination of this sublime peasant-art is not—and this should be carefully noted—the charm and eloquence of the beautiful melody of the Italian type unfolded with prehensile and vigorous energy. True, that charm and eloquence of melodic line are possessed by Verdi. ”

“ When count is taken of the quality as well as of the quantity of Verdi's achievements, these must be confessed well-nigh miraculous. The list of his operas is an epitome, one might say, of the development of operatic music. Trace the steady march of his genius from the period of I Lombardi to Otello, remember the successive stages typified by Trovatore, Ernani, Rigoletto, Aïda,—each a masterpiece after its kind,—and you find yourself in the presence of a man who has never swerved from the search after the highest ideal. ”

“ A spirit of antagonism to Italian art still reigns, and throughout it seems to ring out the old familiar theme, that no good thing could come out of Italy. Nor could it have greatly served Verdi's art-progress.
"Il Trovatore," to quote a few of its strains, "though it exhibits Signor Verdi in his best [Pg 124] holiday attire, is hardly destined to raise him in the estimation of real judges.... The kind, and degree of merit, the direct influence of his music, and its chance of outliving an ephemeral reputation are questions apart.... He is neither a Rossini, nor an Auber, nor a Meyerbeer ”

“ Verdi's energies have not been confined to music. An ardent patriot, he has displayed the deepest interest in the affairs of his country, and taken an active part in its tangled politics. After the war of 1859 he was chosen a member of the Assembly of Parma, and was one of the most influential advocates for the annexation to Sardinia. Italian unity found in him a passionate advocate, and, when the occasion came, his artistic talent and earnestness proved that they might have made a vigorous mark in political oratory as well as in music. ”

“ Nature may have denied to him those gifts of colour and glow which are the wings of music, and lacking which, he may remain for ever a mathematical musical machine, too many of whom, loaded with academical degrees and distinctions, and the consequent array of scholastic millinery, have been given to the world.
Verdi's ambition was to become a successful opera composer, but ere he could succeed, there were branches of study which could only be mastered in an establishment such as the Conservatoire at Milan. ”

“ Fearlessly the purists persisted in their charge that the work was purely secular and operatic in style. Other alleged defects of the mass were subsequently discovered. For instance, one writer declared that "there are more than a hundred mistakes in the progression of the parts." Was all this true?
When, at the age of sixty-one, Verdi surprised the musical world (which, up to that time, had known him only as an opera composer) with a composition for the Church, anxiety was great to catch the ravishing melodist as a creator of ecclesiastical music. ”

“ That Verdi is one of the most popular opera composers of his time must be freely conceded. That he is a great musician in any exacting sense of the word cannot be so readily granted. He has been in no sense an innovator, and as far as his influence on opera is concerned, he leaves it where he found it, except inasmuch as he has followed the changes that the musical development of his time has made in every branch of the art. ”

“ And yet it is more important as a manifestation of the composer's capacity to receive and to adopt new impressions in his extreme old age, than it is as a work of art. In other words, its value is of a personal rather than of a general nature, and Verdi remains to the end a great opera composer of world-wide popularity, who has exercised no influence and made no impression on the art of which he is so brilliant a representative. ”

“ From present indications it would appear that Verdi is destined to be the last of the long line of Italian opera composers whose theories were those of the old school, more or less modified in respect to style or fashion, as time passed. He has had no imitators and he will leave no disciples. ”

“ In closing this estimate of Verdi as a composer of opera, we may add that even in his most absolute departure from the traditions of Italian opera, as he found them, he has remained essentially Italian. It has been argued that in his later works he falls under the sway of Wagner; but this, we think, would be difficult to demonstrate. He may not have remained uninfluenced by the German master's theories regarding the character of opera librettos, but musically, he is always a true son of his native land. His younger Italian contemporaries have far outrun him as reformers. ”

“ There is no need to ask "Who is Verdi?" He is that Italian master who has put a girdle of melody literally round the world. Not to the accomplished musician, the cultured amateur, the plodding student, and the happy home musical circle is he known only, but, to take England alone, he is familiar by name [Pg 224] and tune to thousands of the poorest and lowest, whose only music is the street organ, and whose main musical literature is the opera-house announcements on the theatre doors and public hoardings. ”

“ Every one has not got the prestige of a Wagner, and even he had to fight a fearfully uphill battle, and only reaped the full fruits of his labours at the end of his career.
The taste of the public is little by little coming round to the "lyrical drama" as distinct from the opera, and composers are but following the tendency of the age. The transformation of style that has led Verdi to rise from "Trovatore" to "Otello" is there to attest it. ”

“ It is a grim commentary upon the usual way of managing the things of this life, to witness a man who has made melody for the whole world for now over half a century being refused an entrance scholarship at the training institution of his own land! It is a fact, nevertheless, that Verdi was actually denied admittance to the Conservatoire di Musica of Milan, on the ground of his showing no special aptitude for music! ”