Viva Verdi!

 

Giuseppe Verdi 

I think Giuseppe Verdi understood drama and the theatre better than many opera composers. He had a liking for Shakespeare.

Nabucco, was Verdi's first great success, and nobody had ever heard anything quite like it. This opera launched his career. The poor man had lost his wife and children and was absolutely devastated and was at the point of giving up. His two previous operas - Oberto and Un giorno di regno, had not been a great success. After Nabucco, he went on to compose another twenty-five operas which are categorized as his early, middle, and late period.

More than half of these operas have been the staples of the international operatic repertoire, since their first production. By all accounts, Verdi wasn't an easy man to get on with and he could be quite tetchy. He didn't try to ingratiate himself with people, but he had a deep integrity.

His second wife, the opera singer, Guiseppina Streponi, did say that she prayed every time he finished an opera that it would be his last one, because he was hell to live with. The creative process must have been a strain on Verdi. Yet she sang in some of his operas and sang some of the music, before anybody else had ever heard it.

He was once asked by an Italian politician how he went about composing an opera. Verdi said the idea was complete in his head to begin with, but the problem was getting it down fast enough.

Verdi's music was very much tied in with Italian nationalism and the Risorgimento, the idea of Italian unification. In Verdi's opera, Attila, Ezio's famous line to Attila, “You can have the universe, but leave Italy for me", would send theatre audiences wild. Even his surname (VERDI) was used as an acronym for "Vittorio Emanuele. Re D'Italia." Some Italians even wanted the "Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves", Va, pensiero, to be the Italian national anthem.

Before he died, Verdi donated all the royalties from his operas to the construction of a retirement home (Casa Verdi) in Milan, for retired old singers "not favoured by fortune." Built in 1899, it's still going to this day. Verdi's grave can be found there.