“Some encomiasts claim that the soprano Maria Callas did as much for Italian opera as Toscanini or Verdi. The musicologist Philip Gossett arguably has done as much for Italian opera as any of those geniuses.”

I know that it is bad form to quote oneself, but I wrote those words for Newsday in 2004, before I had met Philip Gossett, and they are so far the words that I am most proud of having written.

The conductor and scholar Will Crutchfield, a great Verdian whose words carry far more weight than my own, put matters more precisely.

When some future historian has to describe in a few words the artistic renewal [that ottocento opera] has enjoyed, I suspect two names will be culled from the hundreds who have contributed: Maria Callas for convincing the public that it was worth taking seriously, and Gossett for showing us all what it would mean to do so.

The Robert W. Reneker Distinguished Service Emeritus Professor of Music at The University of Chicago and a Professore ordinario “di chiara fama” at Sapienza–Università di Roma, Gossett is General Editor of The Works of Giuseppe Verdi (The University of Chicago Press and Casa Ricordi of Milan) and of Works of Gioacchino Rossini (Bärenreiter-Verlag, Kassel). His 2006 book, Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera, is the fruit of his decades of scholarship and practical work with such artists as Marilyn Horne, Cecilia Bartoli, Renée Fleming, and Riccardo Muti. Divas and Scholars won the Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society as the best book on music of the year.

Among his many honors, Gossett received the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award. He also holds the Cavaliere di Gran Croce, the Italian government’s highest civilian honor.

I asked Philip Gossett about the state of the art in Verdi studies, and the first part of my interview with him follows.

Continue reading “Verdians: Philip Gossett I” »

Shirley Verrett (b. 1931) died on 5 November.

A superb actress and a singularly beautiful woman, Shirley Verrett, very much in the nineteenth-century manner, sang rôles from today’s soprano and mezzo-soprano repertoires. Her Verdi rôles included both Amneris and Aida, Azucena, Amelia and Ulrica, Federica (Luisa Miller), Preziosilla, Maddalena (Rigoletto), and Desdemona. In the Manzoni Requiem, she sang both the mezzo and the soprano solo parts.

Shirley Verrett was a supreme Eboli on stage and in the great EMI recording of Don Carlo led by Carlo Maria Giulini. She also starred in the historic 1975 La Scala production of Macbeth staged by Giorgio Strehler and conducted by Claudio Abbado. The Deutsche Grammophon recording based on this production belongs in the collection of everyone who cares about opera. While the image quality of the clip offered here is wretched, it does give some idea of Shirley Verrett’s genius as Verdi’s Lady Macbeth. (I believe that the video is from a revival of the Strehler production, c. 1978.) In 1987, she made a film of Macbeth directed by Claude d’Anna, with a soundtrack conducted by Riccardo Chailly.

Learn more about Shirley Verrett.

Mummy-fanciers often moan that “Verdi singing” died in the 1960s (or thereabouts). I beg to differ for two reasons.

First, who among us knows for sure how “Verdi singing” should sound? I, for one, suspect that the supple, refined vocalism of a Pol Plançon or a Mattia Battistini comes closer to what Verdi had in mind than the mid-twentieth-century bawling sometimes held up as ideal. (Mummy-fanciers, I do not claim that all mid-twentieth-century singing of Verdi was bawling, only that some of what is held up as ideal seems to me bawling. See my post on Giuseppe Anselmi for some of Verdi’s views on matters vocal. And, yes, if you counter that someone who admires Battistini and Plançon is not a mummy-fancier but a fossil-groupie, your point is well taken.)

Second, even if one enjoys a muscular style of singing, only a fool would dismiss the past few decades out of hand. A case in point: Giorgio Zancanaro and Samuel Ramey in the Ezio-Attila duet from the prologue of Attila at La Scala in 1990. Riccardo Muti conducts, and the staging is by Jérôme Savary.

Both singers enunciate beautifully and have fine intonation. Zancanaro is uniformly loud (at least as heard on YouTube), but his tone is compact and his upper register free and easy. And Ramey? His is a “golden-age” voice by any standard, and I particularly admire his deft and lively rhythmic touch in the second part of the duet. (He also stalks really well.)

Attila, written for occupied Venice in 1846, is most famous for the rabble-rousing line that Ezio repeats (and repeats) in this duet: Avrai tu l’universo, resti l’Italia a me! (“You will have the universe, but let Italy remain mine!”) It is strange, then, that Verdi felt the need to query the librettist Temistocle Solera on these very verses.

Some people here are complaining about two verses in the duet of the two basses: Avrai tu l’universo Resti l’Italia a me… I know what you mean, but you need to explain it to me clearly in a letter so that I can shove it under the noses of those great talents.

Take note: The duet of the two basses. Verdi’s vocal categories (like Rossini’s and Mozart’s and vocal categories in general before the early twentieth century) are very different from our own. Who, then, can be so blasted cocksure that the loud, brawny, often inflexible voices in favor sixty years ago represent the ideal of “Verdi singing”?

Massimo Mila (1910–1988) was a musicologist, critic, translator, and keen Verdi scholar. An opponent of Mussolini’s regime, he was twice imprisoned for anti-fascist activities.

“Verdi come il padre,” written in 1951 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the composer’s death, remains an enormously compelling examination of Verdi’s art and importance in Italian culture. One can disagree with aspects of Mila’s argument and still come away enriched by the depth, seriousness, and intelligence of his essay.

Continue reading “Massimo Mila on Verdi” »

Senso is a 1954 film by Luchino Visconti. It is based in part on a novella by Camillo Boito, the elder brother of Verdi’s librettist Arrigo Boito.

Camillo Boito was a polymath, an accomplished writer, critic, engineer, and architect. Commissioned by Verdi, he designed the Casa di riposo per musicisti in Milan, the rest home for aged musicians now known as “Casa Verdi.” Verdi bequeathed a large part of his fortune to the Casa and called it l’opera mia più bella, “my most beautiful work.” The tombs of Verdi and Giuseppina are in the Casa’s crypt.

The rôle that Verdi’s music did or did not play in the Risorgimento has been a topic of fierce debate in recent years, and I will return to this subject. For now, though: Senso. The opening scene takes place in occupied Venice in 1866, during a performance of Verdi’s Il trovatore at La Fenice. As Manrico launches into his call to arms, “Di quella pira,” Italians in the audience ready leaflets and tricolor posies for a patriotic demonstration. Austrian officers, apparently immune to the charms of Verdi’s music, look on while cries of Viva l’Italia! and “Foreigners out of Venice!” erupt during the ovation for the tenor.

Two notes:

• I would pay real money to see a tenor stride all the way downstage and attack “Di quella pira” with the, well, cojones of Visconti’s Manrico (sung—but not mimed, I think—by Gino Penno).
• Visconti’s treatment of the Risorgimento in Senso is more jaundiced than this opening scene may suggest. Critics on both the right and the left found fault with the film, though Visconti had watered down his original concept, which was to tell “a story of a mismanaged war, fought by a single class, and ending in disaster.” (That said, the many overlapping layers of “staginess” in this scene—including glimpses of players and stagehands in the wings—may be an early clue that something is amiss.)

Visconti’s 1955 staging of La traviata for Maria Callas at La Scala is remembered as a supreme realization of a Verdi opera. He used music of Verdi to great effect in Il gattopardo (1963), as well.

One last thing: Who makes films like this anymore? Allow me to borrow a phrase that calcio fans will recognize: La CGI, mettila nel c… !

The cabarettista Paolo Conte (1937– ) is one of the world’s great singer-songwriters, the author of such classics as “Via con me,” “Azzurro,” and “Genova per noi.”

While sometimes labelled a jazz musician, Conte always insists that he does not write jazz—that, rather, he writes songs about jazz. Onda Rock offers a superb overview of Paolo Conte’s career (in Italian).

There is another Conte masterpiece about music: “Il maestro.” Onda Rock calls the song “an epic Verdian hymn intoned by a female chorus, repeated by Conte with his usual talent for oblique variations as he pays tribute to one of his own artistic influences.”

Full of affection and irony, more than a touch surreal, “Il maestro” is a beautiful homage to Verdi.

The Maestro is in our soul,
and within our soul he will always remain!
Long live the woman, a beautiful martyr,
who will give him all that he asks.
There is nothing more seductive
than an aroused, nymphomaniac orchestra
enclosed within the mystic gulf
that boils with storms and liberty
whirling in the vortex
in which villages* and cities disappear
in the delirium* of those simpletons
and of the usual crowd that ends up there
to see him conduct
with a perfidy that flogs every vileness…
The Maestro is in our soul,
and within our soul he will always remain!

*Paesi can mean “countries,” “homelands,” or “villages.” In the studio version of the song, which follows, Conte sings “mirage” instead of “delirium.”

Marcello Conati’s Interviste e incontri con Verdi (in English, Encounters with Verdi) is a classic of Verdi literature, engrossing reading for specialists and “civilians” alike.

A second edition of the book, entitled Verdi: Interviste e incontri, was published in Italy in 2000. It includes some recently discovered notes that Arrigo Boito took for a projected biography of Verdi. Conati believes that some of the notes were taken during Verdi’s lifetime, probably after the Falstaff premiere in 1893, and others after Verdi’s death.

I will return to these notes from time to time. For now, I offer you the closing paragraphs as redacted by Conati, in which Boito wrote of people whom Verdi admired and hated.

He admires with boundless enthusiasm the great men of action: Julius Cæsar, Trajan, Napoléon. Alert, courageous, vast minds who bring together genius of action and of leadership; men who dominate, even if they are sometimes scoundrels; creators of grandiose ideas accomplished swiftly and surely.

His adorations: Jesus, Dante, Shakespeare, Pythagoras, [nome ill.]—Tacitus

His admiration for Moses borders on consternation. His rogueries do not disturb the halo of his awesome and divine glory. But he also admires very pure men: Pythagoras above all.

Jesus he sets apart as a G-d, and Verdi’s soul vibrates with emotion before the wise sweetness of the Gospel: He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone; Render therefore unto Cæsar, etc. etc.

He hated and held in contempt lazy people.

I don’t know what “[nome ill.]” means (“illustrious name”?), or whether it refers to Pythagoras, Trajan, or someone else. In Conati’s book, there is no period following “Tacitus.”

Performance practice is a vast and thorny issue, well beyond the scope of a blog post. But I am launching Verdi Duecento with this recording: “Quando le sere al placido” from Luisa Miller (1849) sung by Giuseppe Anselmi in 1907, six years after Verdi’s death. And this recording demands that we listeners think about performance practice.

For my part, I find Anselmi’s interpretation immensely moving. Listen to his way with muto, estatico. No other tenor, not even the sublime Fernando de Lucia (1908), makes us hear a “mute” and “ecstatic” Rodolfo. No other tenor brings this degree of rapture and youthful vulnerability to this aria (which Arrigo Boito reportedly considered Verdi’s most beautiful).

And yet, by today’s standards, many listeners will find Anselmi’s singing bizarre. His intonation can be uncertain, his tone is white and bleaty, and his phrasing sometimes brings to mind a taffy pull.

Would Verdi have approved of Anselmi’s performance? No one can say for sure. Verdi repeatedly and emphatically expressed disapproval of dawdling tempos—though, as John Rosselli points out, he “does seem to have allowed plenty of rubato.”

Rosselli writes that Verdi “often stressed ability to act and to bring out the words, if need be at the expense of vocal beauty.” Victor Maurel, who created Iago, Falstaff, and the title rôle in the revised Simon Boccanegra, was a difficult man with an unremarkable voice. Nonetheless, Verdi treasured Maurel for his dramatic prowess and, above all, his beautiful enunciation.

Rosselli concludes that though Verdi’s vocal writing grew less florid over time, and though “he wanted singers to act by the more realistic standards of the 1880s, [he still expected that] they should sing well by the demanding technical standards of the 1840s.” He points out that Verdi’s preferred Aida (along with Teresa Stolz) was “the lucent, well-tuned Adelina Patti,” who was utterly unlike the foghorns and screamers often cast as Aida today.

I honestly don’t know where this leaves Anselmi, in some respects a patrician artist and in others the kind of over-the-top verista who horrified Verdi. In addition to de Lucia’s performance of “Quando le sere al placido,” I invite you to listen to ones by Aureliano Pertile (1927) and Plácido Domingo (1979). Both are “tidier” than Anselmi’s and, at first hearing, less personal than his. Yet the impassioned Pertile is devastating in his own way, and Domingo—well, I know that Domingo-bashing is fashionable in some quarters, but he seems to me faultless in this aria… albeit a tad generic compared with Anselmi, de Lucia, and Pertile.

What are your favorite performances of this aria?