“I am an arrogant and impatient listener,” Benjamin Britten wrote, “but in the case of a few composers, a very few, when I hear a work I do not like I am convinced it is my own fault. Verdi is one of these composers.”
George Gordon, Lord Byron, died on 19 April 1824 at the age of 36. He had contracted a fever in Missolonghi fighting in the Greek War of Independence (Ελληνική Επανάσταση) against the Ottoman Empire.
Two of Verdi’s operas, Il corsaro and I due Foscari, are based on works by Byron. (By the way, Donizetti also wrote two Byronic operas.)
Today’s selection is an excerpt from Act II of I due Foscari, “Nel tuo paterno amplesso.” This 1980 or 1981 performance is untidy but features some splendid singing by Carlo Bergonzi as Jacopo Foscari and Renato Bruson as his father Francesco. Margarita Castro-Alberty portrays Lucrezia, and Eve Queler conducts.
P.S. Regular blog posts should resume now, though there are server problems and I sometimes cannot upload or save files. Also, I covered New York City Opera’s 2012–2013 season announcement for The Classical Review.
“The voluntary servitude I consecrated to that just, most noble, and truly great man is the act of my life that gives me most satisfaction.”
So wrote Arrigo Boito of his work with Verdi. Boito was born on 24 February 1842, and he died in 1918.
Boito’s marvelous writings about Verdi are quoted in many of this blog’s posts. While most scholars agree that we “owe” to the immensely tactful and patient Boito Verdi’s last operatic masterpieces, Otello and Falstaff (plus the Boccanegra revision), Boito’s reputation as a librettist has been on a downswing for several decades.
Gabriele Baldini compared Boito with the once-maligned Francesco Maria Piave:
The meeting with Piave was far more important to Verdi’s artistic formation than the one with Boito… and the reason for this is quite simple: working with Piave was Verdi’s first opportunity to work with himself… [Piave’s] libretti are in fact those best suited to Verdi’s music—even from a literary point of view they are much finer, in the sense of being better finished, than Boito’s—simply because, in detail as well as in general shape, Verdi himself composed them. Furthermore, Piave was undoubtedly much more intelligent than Boito in artistic matters. Boito was an artist and a man of letters, but he never fully understood Verdi and so continually tried to bend him towards his own ideas. Piave, with profound critical insight, immediately appreciated the situation, and simply let libretti fall into Verdi’s lap…
In honor of Boito’s birthday, here are words and music by him: “Ave, Signor!” from Mefistofele (1868, rev. 1881 and several other times). Ildebrando d’Arcangelo is the Dark Lord, and Riccardo Muti conducts this 2005 performance from Ravenna.
Incidentally, if you click through and watch the video on YouTube, you can have fun wading through the heart-rending laments by the passatisti. I mean, for Pete’s sake, I saw and heard Samuel Ramey in this rôle at New York City Opera, San Francisco, and the Met; and he was wonderful; and why on earth should this keep anyone from enjoying the admirable D’Arcangelo?
Happy birthday to Falstaff, which had its world premiere 119 years ago today!
Today’s musical selection features Tito Gobbi not in the title rôle (which he also sang superbly) but as Ford in the great jealousy scene from Act II, Scene 1: “È sogno o realtà?” Tullio Serafin conducts this performance from 1941. The clip also allows us to hear a bit of Mariano Stabile’s Falstaff, a legendary interpretation.
Though he had been grumbling about his supposed decrepitude since the 1880s, Verdi was saddened to bid farewell to the theatre after the Falstaff premiere. Gruff and laconic as he was, he opened his heart to Emma Zilli, the first Alice Ford, several months after the memorable night.
Do you remember the third Falstaff?!!! I took my leave of you all; and you were all somewhat moved, especially you and Pasqua. Imagine what my greeting implied, since it meant: “We will never meet again as artists!!” It is true that we saw each other after that, in Milan, in Genoa, in Rome; but memory carried us back always to that third evening, which meant: Everything is finished! Lucky you who still have such a long career ahead.
Verdi confessed to his publisher, Giulio Ricordi, that he could hardly bear to think back on the premiere and the period leading up to it:
Otherwise, I will fly to Milan in a balloon to beg my dear Merry Wives and Big Belly and the Men to start rehearsing again!! It was just exactly two months ago today, the third, that we had the first rehearsal!!! Everything ends!! Alas, alas! too sad!! This thought is too sad!! It is all Big Belly’s fault. What madmen!! Everyone… He, You, You, You, You. Everything on earth is a joke.
Mary Jane Phillips-Matz, in her magnificent biography of Verdi, describes the night of Falstaff’s premiere.
When [Verdi, Giuseppina, and librettist Arrigo Boito] got to the Grand Hôtel de Milan, they were greeted by the same pandemonium that had reigned after Otello. Dignitaries waited inside the lobby; the flower-decked salon of the composer’s suite was decorated with a bronze wreath, a gift of [the hôtel proprietor] Spatz, who had had many of its leaves engraved with the names of Verdi’s operas but had left some of them blank!
…An unidentified writer who was with [the party] reported that the composer was “happy and satisfied: his beautiful face was bright with a smile. Verdi gladly received the congratulations of his friends, and did not forget anyone who was there…” Nowhere is there a hint that the composer ever showed fatigue or exasperation during the taxing month before the Falstaff première. Indeed, several men of science published articles on his extraordinary physical strength, energy, and soundness of mind.
Still, despite Verdi’s vigor, despite his having created in Falstaff “a new art, music, and poetry” (as Peppina wrote), “an extremely new art form” (in Boito’s words), everything really was finished.
I hear time’s dreadful march in nearly every measure of this swiftest of operas: in the gossamer of Nanetta and Fenton’s love music; in the luxuriant (but oh-so-fleeting) sensuality of Falstaff’s “Ber del vino dolce e sbottonarsi al sole”; even in “Quand’ero paggio”—blithe and tripping, but evoking a slip of a boy whose “green April” and “glad May” will never return. Julian Budden writes that much of Falstaff is “instinct with… lacrimae rerum” and an “underlying melancholy.”
And the fugue! That triumphant joke at the expense of the conservatory professors and “quartettists” who had heaped scorn on Verdi’s abilities; that wrenching suspension, dreadful pause, and dizzying look into the abyss—Tutti gabbati! (“We are all deceived!”)—before the laughter returns and merry brass flourishes bring to an end the operatic career of this most humane and great-hearted artist.
Budden closes his three-volume study of Verdi’s operas thus:
By his eightieth year [Verdi] knew that nothing in this world can be taken for granted and that “Man is born to be made a fool of.” That he was no mere destructive cynic; that, if no orthodox Christian, he thought seriously on first and last things we know from the Requiem and the Quattro Pezzi Sacri that were his last compositions; but the final message of the secular Verdi is one of tolerance, comprehension and humour. If we cannot all agree we can at least laugh with each other and at ourselves. It is a message of hope.
Verdi died in Milano on 27 January 1901. He had suffered a stroke on 21 January in his apartments at the Grand Hôtel.
Arrigo Boito described Verdi’s death to Camille Bellaigue in a beautiful letter:
Verdi is dead; he has carried away with him an enormous measure of light and warmth. We had all basked in the sunshine of that Olympian old age.
He died magnificently, like a fighter, formidable and mute. The silence of death had fallen over him a week before he died.
Do you know the admirable bust by Gemito? That bust, made forty years ago, is the exact image of the Maestro as he was on the fourth day before the end. With head bowed on his breast and knitted brows he looked downwards and seemed to weigh with his glance an unknown and formidable adversary…
His resistance was heroic. The breathing of his great chest sustained him for four days and three nights. On the fourth night the sound of his breathing still filled the room, but the fatigue… Poor Maestro, how brave and handsome he was, up to the last moment! No matter; the old reaper went off with his scythe well battered.
My dear friend, in the course of my life I have lost those I have idolized, and grief has outlasted resignation. But never have I experienced such a feeling of hatred against death, of contempt for that mysterious, blind, stupid, triumphant, and craven power. It needed the death of this octogenarian to arouse those feelings in me.
He, too, hated it, for he was the most powerful expression of life that it is possible to imagine.
Verdi’s first funeral on 30 January was simple, in accordance with his wishes: “two priests, two candles, one cross.” He wanted no flowers, so his adopted daughter Maria Carrara Verdi and her daughter Peppina placed palm fronds in his coffin. Mary Jane Phillips-Matz tells us that a second-class hearse transported his remains. Verdi may have gone to eternal rest with the score of the Te Deum beneath the pillow in his coffin; this was family tradition.
Some of the earliest surviving Italian film footage documents his state funeral on 27 February 1901, when his remains and those of Giuseppina were moved to the crypt of the Casa di riposo, where we can pay our respects to them today. (The crypt is always my very first stop whenever I visit Milano.)
There is a YouTube clip of an elderly Milanese lady who saw Verdi’s funeral as a little girl.
It is said that a country priest sent a telegram to the Grand Hôtel upon learning of Verdi’s death. It read: La Vergine degli Angeli vi copra nel suo manto. This selection from La forza del destino was sung the day of Verdi’s state funeral; here it is in one of the greatest recordings ever made of Verdi’s music (or anyone else’s), sung by Rosa Ponselle and Ezio Pinza in 1928.
Of course, “Va, pensiero” from Nabucco was sung at the state funeral, too. Here is an historic performance from several months ago led by the great, the immense, Riccardo Muti. Background here. I dare you to try to watch this with a dry eye.
The final words of Mary Jane Phillips-Matz’s magnificent Verdi biography:
To the world, as to the nation he helped to found, Verdi left an enduring legacy of music, charity, patriotism, honour, grace, and reason. He was and remains a mighty force for continuing good.
Il trovatore had its world premiere at the Teatro Apollo in Rome on 19 January 1853.
Verdi finally encountered 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 trovatoredid in fact disappear, and no one has ever succeeded in tracing it… Even if this miraculous libretto was given to Verdi like a gift, he must have been searching, though unconsciously, for this elusiveness. — Gabriele Baldini, The Story of Giuseppe Verdi
“Abietta zingara” sung by Ildebrando d’Arcangelo as Ferrando with Sir Antonio Pappano conducting
To the world, as to the nation he helped to found, Verdi left an enduring legacy of music, charity, patriotism, honour, grace, and reason. He was and remains a mighty force for continuing good. Mary Jane Phillips-Matz, Verdi: A Biography
Viva l’Italia!
Se noi uccidiamo la cultura su cui è fondata la storia dell’Italia, veramente sarà la nostra patria bella e perduta. Il maestro Riccardo Muti
