Review: The Story of Giuseppe Verdi

My desert-island book about Verdi is Gabriele Baldini’s Abitare la battaglia: La storia di Giuseppe Verdi (in the handsome English translation by Roger Parker, The Story of Giuseppe Verdi: Oberto to Un Ballo in Maschera).

Baldini was neither a trained musician nor a Verdi scholar. He was a professor of English literature, a specialist in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. He died in 1969, before completing Abitare la battaglia. Though long in print in both English and Italian, the book is not so well known as it deserves to be, in part because some specialists look down upon Baldini’s “amateur” approach to Verdi and his operas.

That said, I recently shared Abitare la battaglia with a professional musician who is both a deep reader and a celebrated Verdian. His response: Baldini è un genio.

Baldini’s approach to Verdi and his operas is eccentric and blessedly unconcerned with received truths. He demolishes the lingering and deeply offensive myth that La traviata is somehow “about” Giuseppina Strepponi, who had had notorious love affairs (and illegitimate children) before she became Verdi’s partner. Baldini quotes Verdi’s famous letter to his benefactor Antonio Barezzi and observes, rightly,

…it is clear that, even knowing about Giuseppina’s past, [Verdi] saw nothing to atone for, either in the past or present… [T]he accent on her “fortune quite sufficient for all her needs” makes it clear that he did not dream of regarding her as a kept woman and that no one would have been able to consider her as such.

Baldini sums up the situation of Verdi and Giuseppina in Busseto with the kind of wise cynicism that is, alas, too uncommon in the dull, earnest Anglo-Saxon world.

It is also clear that the Bussetani’s main complaint was that Verdi did not show himself more frequently, and always remained apart; in some hidden way they were reproaching him for not introducing Giuseppina, who would have brought a little excitement into their sleepy provincial lives. This wish was unconscious: the tragedy was basically a comedy, with some delightful ramifications.

Baldini frequently insists that, in opera, “the drama which occurs on stage” is “the ‘musical action,’ not the events of the libretto.” Thus, for him, the story of Ernani is “a youthful, passionate female voice… beseiged by three male voices, each of whom establishes a specific relationship with her.” He sees Il trovatore, pace you dear souls who go to the opera seeking “reason” and “verisimilitude,” as

…the perfect musical libretto, a text which fully allowed for the musical life of its characters and for that alone; essentially a phantom libretto, which became completely engulfed by the music and, once the opera was finished, disappeared as an individual entity. The libretto of Il trovatore did in fact disappear, and nobody has ever succeeded in tracing it.

Baldini’s knowledge of Shakespeare enriches his work and leads to some surprising conclusions. He writes of Macbeth that “this recreation of Shakespeare is much more vigorous and powerful than Otello, which was watered down by Boito’s preciosity.” He argues that Azucena is the character closest to “the unattained ideal of King Lear.” And in his chapter on Un ballo in maschera, the last that he completed, Baldini presents the page Oscar as akin to Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Ariel in The Tempest.

Baldini considers Ballo Verdi’s “major work, his masterpiece and central experience.” I think that the term “masterpiece” applies to Baldini’s chapter on Ballo, as well. I know of very few formal works of criticism that manage to rival the masterpieces that they examine, and I think that this chapter belongs in that select group.

Baldini examines the “extraordinary, very deliberate equilibrium” between darkness and light in Ballo. The unreason of eros (present here as in no other Verdi opera) and the destruction that comes in its wake are set against the ludic, urbane culture of Gustavo’s court. The effervescent Oscar stands in contrast to Ulrica, who consorts with the “King of the abyss.” Renato’s quest for revenge and the conspirators’ resentment are the converse of Gustavo’s grace, a light they cannot dim even as they deal him death. Baldini writes of Gustavo:

Together with Rigoletto, Violetta, and Azucena, I would call him Verdi’s richest, most complete character, and although he is the most whimsical, even cynical, he is also the most responsible and generous. The pulse of life seems more vital in him than in the others, but this also occurs through the freedom with which he spends it. He is the character most happily alive, and also most unwilling to die, yet he accepts both as natural human conditions, and merely seeks to explore them to the last. When he dies, his joyous ghost remains, his laughter, his warm embrace, his mercy: Oscar remains.

Alberto Moravia, in his essay “La volgarità di Giuseppe Verdi,” called Verdi an anachronism, a brother in spirit to Shakespeare and a man of Renaissance values who lived in the nineteenth century. Something of the spirit of Pico’s Oratio does seem to inform Ballo as elucidated by Baldini: “It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.” (The Oratio, which Shakespeare definitely knew and Verdi may have known, would represent another point of contact between the two geniuses.)

The clip is from the 1990 Salzburg Festival staging of Un ballo in maschera. It was to have been conducted by Herbert von Karajan, who led a magnificent Deutsche Grammophon recording of Ballo in preparation for this production. Karajan died, though, before Ballo opened, and Sir Georg Solti led the Salzburg performances instead. I chose this clip for two reasons—a thrilling scene change (seriously!), and the Oscar of Sumi Jo, a portrayal of such intelligence and bewitching charm that it spoils all others for me. Anyone mistaken enough to believe that Oscar is not a major Verdi character needs to read Baldini and see and hear Sumi Jo’s masterful interpretation as quickly as possible.