VERDI’S GRIP
OPERA AS POPULAR ART
According to
The Guinness Book of Records
, Vincent La Selva, a native of Cleveland, Ohio, is the only man ever to have conducted all twenty-eight operas of Giuseppe Verdi in chronological order. La Selva runs a company called New York Grand Opera, which, in the years leading up to the hundredth anniversary of Verdi’s death, in 2001, presented the composer’s entire canon, on an outdoor stage in Central Park, free of charge. The cycle began in 1994, with a boisterous rendition of
Oberto
, and ended seven years later, with
Aida, Otello
, and
Falstaff.
I saw the
Otello
on a sticky night in July. Several thousand people were on hand, and several hundred others were trying to get in. A policeman was shouting, “No more seats! No opera!” There was a lot of pushing and pleading, as at a rock show. “My name has to be on the list,” said a youngish man in an Atari shirt. Many people ended up camping out on the grass, listening to the music as it wafted over the loudspeakers. Verdi has not lost the mass appeal that brought forth hundreds of thousands of mourners on the day of his funeral, in 1901.
During the Verdi anniversary season, I saw nine productions of the composer’s operas, in the major New York houses and at two venerable Italian theaters. Perhaps surprisingly, the Central Park
Otello
is the one that has stayed longest in my mind. It was by no means the best-sung Verdi of the season; needless to say, the Metropolitan Opera and the Teatro alla Scala of Milan fielded far starrier casts. Nor were the acoustics satisfactory. The singers had microphones clipped to their costumes, and every few minutes one of them would let out a mechanical squawk or disappear from the mix. During the Homage Chorus, in Act II, the mandolin was deafening and the chorus was inaudible. But the production had a fine, pearly-voiced Desdemona in Judith Von Houser, and an idiomatic
conductor in La Selva. This was Verdi 101, stripped of directorial brainstorms and conductorial ego trips. By the end, I had forgotten about the tackiness of the scenery and fallen under Verdi’s spell.
The appeal of Italian opera is difficult to put into words, but it has something to do with the activation of primal feelings. Operatic characters have a way of laying themselves bare, and they are never more uninhibited than at the climax of a Verdi tragedy.
Otello
is a crescendo of anger; yet the ultimate moment of the opera, during which Central Park fell silent, is a surpassingly lyrical one. When Otello kills Desdemona, the act is framed by two repetitions of the “bacio” motif—a nine-bar theme that first appears in Act I, when husband and wife trade kisses (
“un bacio
…
un bacio
…
ancora un bacio”
)
.
It is an enchanting object, but from the outset it has carried a tinge of sadness, its ecstatic phrases pinned on a chromatic descending bass. By the end, it has become a token of Otello’s insanity. His love for Desdemona was, he says, a “mirage”—not because she betrayed him but because he never saw her as a real person. His note-for-note recapitulation of the love music marks the point at which he chooses the mirage over life itself. All the orchestra can offer, by way of a final statement, is three soft, black chords. “Fall down the steps,” Verdi writes. Edward Perretti, the tenor singing Otello, followed the instruction exactly. Everyone shuddered.
Vincent La Selva’s
Otello
was an unexpectedly haunting experience, because it put the drama first. It had no star singers, and, unlike so many modern productions, it made no attempt to deconstruct or recontextualize the story. In this sense, it gave an approximate sense of how generations of operagoers—especially those outside Milan, New York, London, and other capitals—got to know the composer. These days, millions see Verdi each year around the world, yet for a number of years the business of staging the operas has been suffering through an apparent crisis. Devotees ask where the great Verdi singers have gone, and when they are not lamenting the dearth of right-sounding voices they are deploring the excess of wrongheaded directors. We love Verdi more than ever, but we struggle to understand him: the glib irony of our age is at odds with his raging sincerity. One prominent director has been quoted as saying, “Nobody comes to Verdi for the plots.” More likely, people come to Verdi because he meant every word.
In the nineteenth century, German musicians often described their art in idealistic terms, as a lofty pursuit above the crowd. E.T.A. Hoffmann, in an essay on Beethoven, asked the public, “What if it is entirely
your
fault that the composer’s language is clear to the initiated but not to you?” Verdi, despite his reclusive habits and porcupine personality, saw no shame in the pursuit of public adoration. “The box office is the proper thermometer of success,” he remarked. He also said, “You have to be wall-eyed, with one eye on the public and one on art.” He would probably have endorsed Leopold Mozart’s instruction to his son, that “in your work you think not only of the musical cognoscenti but also of the listeners who are unmusical.” But the real model was Shakespeare, who succeeded in thrilling both the groundlings and the connoisseurs. Even if Verdi had never written
Macbeth
,
Otello,
and
Falstaff
the comparison would have been made.
For a glimpse of Verdi’s two-faced nature, one need only look at his catchiest tune, “La donna è mobile,” which has sold vast quantities of pasta in television commercials. It appears at the beginning of Act III of
Rigoletto
. More than a pretty melody, it is packed with double meanings, some of them quite ugly. The irony of the aria is hinted at in the opening bars, as the players stop and start again, like actors clearing their throats. The first line translates as “Women are fickle,” but the sentiment is less than straightforward, being the rationalization of a fickle Duke who uses women for amusement. Gilda, who has fallen for the Duke, overhears the song, grasps its meaning, and is plunged into despair. Rigoletto, her father, plots revenge, forgetting for a while that he himself facilitated the Duke’s adventures and was cursed by one of his victims. At the end of the night, an assassin hauls out a sack that is supposed to contain the Duke’s corpse. Just as Rigoletto bends over it, a familiar tenor is heard singing a familiar air offstage—“La donna è mobile.” So whose is the body in the bag?
Maledizione!
A chirpy ditty becomes the knife-edge of the curse that cuts Rigoletto down.
In old age, Verdi was hailed as a man of the people, a self-taught peasant genius. Modern biographers have pointed out the many ways in which this image departed from the facts. His father, a small-time innkeeper and landowner, was, if not rich, prosperous enough to be able to give his son a thorough musical education, and the young man had the help of many aristocratic friends. In later years, as the composer amassed profits
from his operas, he filled rather too well the role of the hard-hearted landlord. Yet the peasant image retains a conceptual truth. Verdi had a fundamentally earthy nature, a preference for action over theory. His ear for popular melody was inborn. As with Mozart, his ability to produce hummable tunes—“La donna è mobile,” the Anvil Chorus from
Il trovatore
, the Triumphal March from
Aida,
and dozens of others—was so fecund that he could use them as background decor, as bait for unsuspecting ears.
Verdi was born in 1813, outside the town of Busseto, in the province of Parma. In his youth, he seemed destined to become Busseto’s musical director, following his teacher, but clerical elements had their favorite and put roadblocks in his way. Others loudly backed Verdi’s cause. As Mary Jane Phillips-Matz recounts, in her epic biography of the composer, there were fights in the streets, shouting matches, libelous sonnets, obscene songs, and a near-brawl in church. The uproar was out of proportion to the unobjectionable church compositions and student pieces that constituted what we know of Verdi’s output at the time, but music was serious business in Italian towns. Eventually, the clerics gave in and offered Verdi the job, but his attention soon moved elsewhere. His talent drew the interest of the manager of La Scala, and also of two leading singers, the baritone Giorgio Ronconi and the soprano Giuseppina Strepponi. In 1839, La Scala staged Verdi’s first opera,
Oberto
, with considerable success. After a traumatic period that saw the failure of a comic opera,
Un giorno di regno,
and the sudden deaths of his wife and two of his children, Verdi scored an outright hit with the blood-and-thunder biblical drama
Nabucco
, in 1842. From then on he was the de facto chief of Italian opera.
Throughout the 1840s, Verdi worked hard to maintain his position. In those ten years he produced thirteen operas—among them
I lombardi, Ernani, Attila
, and
Macbeth
—and captivated the public with one spine-tingling tale after another. John Rosselli, the author of the best short life of Verdi, says of these works, “The dominant mood is of heroic, slightly crazed grandeur, interspersed with lightning discharges of energy.” Stage by stage, Verdi asserted his personality; the measured splendor of Rossini and Donizetti gives way to hurtling scenes, hotly expressive vocal writing, an increasingly feisty orchestra, choruses of brutish force, and endings that arrive with guillotine speed. Verdi was speaking straight to the crowd, and he became not only a popular icon but also something of a national symbol, notably in the years leading up to the revolutions of 1848 and the
short-lived Roman Republic of 1849. After one of the first performances of
Macbeth
, in Florence, a giddy crowd unhitched horses from the composer’s carriage and pulled him back to his hotel. Certain choruses served as cues for patriotic displays.
La battaglia di Legnano,
the most blatantly nationalist of Verdi’s operas, had its premiere in Rome two weeks before the proclamation of the republic, and the ovations were all but indistinguishable from the demonstrations.
Yet Verdi’s role in the Risorgimento has been exaggerated. On at least two occasions in 1848 he was, in fact, criticized for choosing exotic subjects that seemed remote from the concerns of the day. Just as the revolution crested, he turned inward, expanding the psychological dimension of his art. Between 1847 and 1849, he lived mainly in Paris, where he carried on an affair with Strepponi—his devoted, often thankless companion for more than four decades thereafter—and absorbed new theatrical ideas. He emerged with a taste for more intimate scenarios, especially those in which private passions went against the social grain. (Parochial disapproval of his arrangement with Strepponi, whom he did not marry until 1859, may have heightened that interest.) In
Luisa Miller
, a soldier’s daughter and a count’s son fall in love and run afoul of the social order; in
Stiffelio
, a Protestant minister decides to forgive his errant wife after reading the biblical verse “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” These operas set the stage for
Rigoletto, Il trovatore
, and
La traviata
, the trifecta of 1851—53, in which the passions are not only romantic but familial: Rigoletto tries to shield his daughter from the Duke; the Gypsy Azucena broods over the loss of her infant son; and the courtesan Violetta (“La traviata” means “the wayward woman”) forsakes her lover at the behest of his status-conscious father. The escalation of emotion goes hand in hand with a change in the musical line; in
Traviata
, Verdi de-emphasizes bel-canto finery, instead favoring a more direct, impulsive style of delivery.
As the 1850s gave way to the ’60s, Verdi edged back into the political sphere, but he no longer dealt in obvious symbols of Italian glory. Instead, struck by the sprawling historical spectacles of French grand opera, he produced a series of works—
Les Vêpres siciliennes
,
Simon Boccanegra, Un ballo in maschera, La forza del destino
, and
Don Carlos
—in which stately tableaux are shot through with a deepening pessimism. Fate is now hammered out by earthly monsters of authority, the worst of them being the
Grand Inquisitor, in
Don Carlos.
The opera tells of love and intolerance in Philip II’s Spain, and the supremely pitiless Inquisitor lets us see the wholesale corruption of Christian teachings by the politics of power: when Philip asks how he can justify the killing of his son—the rebel prince Carlos—the Inquisitor replies, in an icy, nearly monotone line, “God sacrificed his own to save us all.” The orchestra plays a string of major triads around that pronouncement (B major, G major, E major, C major), but the sequence defies harmonic logic and produces a sulphurous atmosphere. Throughout his later operas, Verdi grew ever more daring in his musical language, not so much by introducing dissonances as by treating simple chords with cavalier freedom, as if he were throwing dice.
Following
Aida’s
triumph, at a gala premiere in Cairo, Verdi seemed prepared to retire from opera. In 1873, he produced a string quartet, the following year a Requiem that sounded like a summing up. But, in a benevolent conspiracy, the publisher Giulio Ricordi and the composer and author Arrigo Boito brought the old man back into the game, using Shakespeare as the lure.
Otello
and
Falstaff,
based on finely crafted librettos by Boito, consolidate with unwavering skill everything that has come before: bel canto, Romantic theater, French grand opera, morsels of Wagnerian leitmotif-work and orchestration. The economy of the writing becomes severe: melodies that another composer might have milked for an evening appear for a few seconds and then are gone. The seventy-something Verdi seems almost to be taunting his colleagues.
Falstaff
ends with a virtuoso fugue on the line “All the world’s a joke.”