Giuseppe Verdi
"To copy reality may be a good thing, but to invent reality is better, much better." — letter to Clarina Maffei, 1876
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
Those close to him ⏳🌊
- PatronAntonio Barezzi
His father-in-law and the staunchest supporter of his life.
- FamilyMargherita Barezzi
His first wife, who died young along with their two children.
- FamilyGiuseppina Strepponi
A soprano, she became his lawful wife after many years as his companion.
- AdmirationGioachino Rossini
Verdi revered him as an elder composer and, after his death, conceived a requiem in his memory.
- RivalryRichard Wagner
The two were often compared as contemporary reformers of opera, yet they never met.
- FriendshipArrigo Boito
Overcoming an early falling-out, the two reconciled, and Boito became the librettist of the late masterpieces.
I. The innkeeper's son of Le Roncole · 1813–1823 (age 0–10)
(The inn) He was born in October 1813 in Le Roncole, a small village then in the Taro department of Napoleon's First French Empire (today the province of Parma, Italy). His father, Carlo Verdi, kept an inn and general store at the edge of the village, and his mother, Luigia Uttini, helped make ends meet by spinning. He was the eldest son of a rural shopkeeping family, neither prosperous nor poor. (War) Not long after his birth, the fire of the Napoleonic Wars reached the village. The story goes that when Austrian-allied troops swept through Le Roncole, his mother saved their lives by carrying the infant Verdi up into the church bell tower. Biographers disagree over whether it really happened, but this much is certain: his childhood began in the shadow of war. (The organ) From the age of about seven he was captivated by the sound of the village church organ. In old age Verdi himself recalled being scolded during Mass because, lost in the organ's playing, he failed to answer the priest's call. It was around this time, too, that he began his first music lessons with the parish organist, Pietro Baistrocchi. (The spinet) Recognizing his son's gift, Carlo found him a secondhand spinet (a small keyboard instrument). A receipt still survives showing that the instrument maker Stefano Cavalletti repaired its broken parts without charge—a kindness, it is said, toward the boy's eagerness. The instrument was later displayed in a museum in Milan, and Verdi treasured it all his life.
II. Barezzi of Busseto · 1823–1832 (age 10–19)
(Patronage) At about ten he was sent to the nearby town of Busseto for a better education. There he caught the eye of Antonio Barezzi, a merchant in groceries and spirits and an amateur musician. Barezzi gave the boy room and board and paid for his musical training; he would remain Verdi's staunchest supporter for life and later become his father-in-law. (The Philharmonic) He studied composition and counterpoint with Ferdinando Provesi, organist of Busseto Cathedral, while playing and conducting in the Busseto Philharmonic Society, of which Barezzi was president. By around fifteen his skill was already recognized enough that he was writing overtures and marches for the society's events. (Setback) In 1832, seeking wider waters, he applied to the Milan Conservatory and was turned down. The reasons given were that he was too old (eighteen), that his piano technique did not meet the conservatory's standards, and that he fell afoul of the quota for students from outside the region. The rejection was talked about for years, and Verdi himself, after his success, would mention it calmly. (Apprenticeship) Instead of the conservatory, he took private lessons in counterpoint and dramatic music from Vincenzo Lavigna, a composer who had worked at La Scala. Lavigna taught him the ways of Milan's operatic world, and in his spare moments Verdi attended performances at La Scala, absorbing the currents of Italian opera of the day—the works of Rossini and Donizetti.
III. Marriage and repeated loss · 1833–1840 (age 20–27)
(Homecoming) In 1835 he returned to Busseto and, after a long struggle over the post of local music director, became the town's music master (maestro di musica). Because the cathedral and the Philharmonic Society backed different candidates, the appointment was hard-won, and it left Verdi with a lasting bitterness toward small-town factional quarrels. (Marriage) In 1836 he married Margherita, the daughter of his patron Barezzi. The next year their daughter Virginia was born, and the year after that their son Icilio, and they seemed to have built a happy home. (Loss) But Virginia died in 1838, just past her first birthday, and Icilio died in 1839, also in infancy. In 1840 his wife Margherita, too, died suddenly of encephalitis. In barely two years he had lost his entire family. Verdi seldom spoke of this period afterward, but the letters he sent to friends reveal a deep despair. (Failure) As fate would have it, these tragedies coincided with his first steps as a composer. His first opera, Oberto, was received respectably at La Scala in 1839, but the comic opera Un giorno di regno (1840), commissioned and written while his wife lay dying, failed disastrously. Looking back, Verdi later said he vowed then never to compose again.
IV. Nabucco and revival · 1841–1842 (age 28–29)
(Persuasion) Bartolomeo Merelli, the impresario of La Scala, persistently pressed Verdi, who had sworn off composing. Merelli all but forced into his hands the libretto of Nabucco, which another composer had abandoned. Verdi recalled that, reluctant, he went home and flung the libretto open at random, and his eyes came to rest on the words of a chorus. (Lament) It was the chorus sung by the Hebrews, carried captive to Babylon, as they long for their lost homeland: "Go, my thought, on golden wings." He said he saw in it his own plight—a man who had lost his whole family and with it any peace in life. (Success) Premiered at La Scala in March 1842, Nabucco was a great success. The soprano Giuseppina Strepponi won praise as Abigaille, and the production marked the beginning of their relationship as well. Overnight, a composer who had known only failure became the most talked-about name in Italy. (Interpretation) The chorus of the captive Hebrews was later widely understood as an allegory of Italians under Austrian rule. Recent scholars, however, are cautious about whether such a political reading was clear from the premiere—the myth, they argue, was most likely layered on over decades. Even so, it is true that the melody later became a symbol of the Risorgimento, the movement for Italian unification.
This is the very scene on which Verdi, having lost his whole family, let his eyes rest in a libretto opened by chance—the piece that announced his return.
- It begins with the whole chorus singing a single melody in unison, so that it sounds less like one person's lament than an elegy for an entire people.
- The words are those of the captive Hebrews, longing for their lost homeland and wishing to fly there on golden wings.
- Follow the line as it rises from a low murmur into a swelling crescendo, and you can feel restrained grief slowly well up into overwhelming emotion.
- In Italy today it is often sung spontaneously at public events, like an unofficial national anthem—and this is the very passage from which that melody comes.
V. The 'galley years' · 1842–1853 (age 29–40)
(Prolific years) Verdi himself called the decade or so after Nabucco his "years in the galleys." Hounded by theaters demanding two or three operas nearly every year, he turned out one work after another, such as Ernani and Macbeth. He later complained that the overwork of that time had eaten away at his health and nerves. (Strepponi) His relationship with Strepponi, who had sung Abigaille in Nabucco, deepened around this time. The two began living together without marrying, which caused a great scandal in conservative Busseto. The town looked with particular harshness on Strepponi, who had borne children out of wedlock in the past, and even Verdi's parents are said to have disapproved. Verdi paid no heed and stood by her. (Censorship) Rigoletto (1851) was based on a play by Victor Hugo, but the censors of Austrian-ruled Lombardy–Venetia objected to its insult to a sovereign and forced changes to the setting and to the characters' rank. Verdi fought back fiercely but in the end conceded some points and brought the premiere to success. (Camellias) La traviata (1853), based on the novel by Alexandre Dumas fils, portrays an impossible love with a society courtesan. Many see in it a reflection of his own situation with Strepponi, unmarried and scorned by society. The premiere failed, partly because the lead soprano's figure seemed ill-suited to a role dying of consumption, but a revival the following year was a great success.
The song of a capricious duke in an opera completed in a battle with the censors—and the melody most sung in the streets of its day.
- Carried on a jaunty triple-time rhythm, the melody has you humming the moment you hear it—yet the Duke who sings it is mocking the fickleness of women, and an irony lies hidden between the words and the music's gaiety.
- Worried that the song would catch on in the streets before the performance and blunt its dramatic effect, Verdi is said to have kept the words secret from the singers and orchestra until the day before the premiere.
- In Act 3, the moment when this melody drifts back to Rigoletto from beyond the sack holding his daughter's body—where a comic song turns into the foreshadowing of tragedy—is a scene directors take special care over.
- Tradition calls for the tenor to toss off the high notes lightly and with swagger; many critics say that sung too heavily, the Duke's frivolity falls flat.
An opera about love and social stigma, mirroring his life with Strepponi, unmarried and under the public gaze.
- The Act 1 prelude is played by high strings alone, as if foreshadowing the fragile breath of the consumptive heroine, Violetta.
- In "Sempre libera," she pursues pleasure in dazzling, finely broken ornamentation (coloratura), until the tenor's voice whispering of love intrudes from afar and exposes the fissure within her.
- In Act 3, "Addio del passato" moves at a slow tempo over only a thin string accompaniment, so that the resignation of approaching death is felt like breathing.
- The story that at the premiere a well-built soprano played the consumptive heroine and drew laughter from the audience is famous, and debates over casting and the role's credibility continue to this day.
VI. The landowner of Sant'Agata · 1848–1874 (age 35–61)
(Farm) In 1848 he bought a farm at Sant'Agata, near his hometown of Busseto. He made it his home for the rest of his life and threw himself into farming, enlarging the estate and designing its irrigation channels himself. His letters to friends spoke more of grain yields and livestock than of opera. He called himself "a farmer above all." (Deputy) He rose to become a symbolic figure of the Italian unification movement, the Risorgimento. Because his surname matched the initials of "Vittorio Emanuele, King of Italy," the slogan "Viva Verdi" served as a kind of code for supporting unification. At the urging of the statesman Cavour, he was elected in 1861 to the first Chamber of Deputies of unified Italy, but he showed little interest in parliamentary work and served out his term largely in silence. (Marriage) In 1859 he at last formally married his longtime companion Strepponi, silencing the gossip around them. In the same period, when Gioachino Rossini died (1868), Verdi proposed that Italy's composers jointly write a Requiem in his memory. The collaboration never came to pass, but the section Verdi had taken on later became the seed of a work of his own. (Aida) In 1871 he composed Aida on a commission from the Cairo opera house in Egypt. It was a grand epic set in ancient Egypt, yet Verdi himself skipped the premiere and stayed at Sant'Agata tending his farm. When Alessandro Manzoni died in 1873, Verdi expanded part of his Rossini Requiem plan into a complete Requiem and dedicated it to the writer he had so deeply admired.
A grand work written on commission from Cairo — yet Verdi skipped the premiere and was back at Sant'Agata minding his farm.
- In the passage where long, straight trumpets built especially for the piece (the Aida trumpets) answer one another from either side of the stage, Verdi's intent to push the brilliance of the brass to its limit is unmistakable.
- This spectacle of massed choruses, dance and procession is marked by the exotic color it takes on from Egyptian-flavored melodies and percussion rhythms.
- Heard against the quiet duet on the banks of the Nile that follows this vast public scene, it makes all the clearer how Verdi alternated grandeur with intimacy.
- It is a melody so familiar to the public that it is still often quoted at coronations, sporting events and the like.
Written in honor of Alessandro Manzoni, a writer he revered, the work was completed from music originally conceived in memory of Rossini.
- The instant the chorus and full orchestra erupt together at the opening, the blows of the bass drum deliver the terror of the oncoming Day of Judgment as a physical shock.
- The conductor Hans von Bülow sneered that the piece was "an opera in ecclesiastical robes," and indeed its dramatic solos and ensembles carry over his operatic idiom intact.
- In the "Recordare" ("Remember"), the soprano and mezzo-soprano voices twine gently around each other, sounding a mood of supplication that contrasts with the storm of the preceding Dies irae.
- In the closing "Libera me" ("Deliver me"), the passage in which the soprano sings alone, almost unaccompanied, is counted among the most demanding moments for any singer.
VII. Boito, and the final years · 1879–1901 (age 66–88)
(Reconciliation) Verdi was at first on poor terms with the young composer and poet Arrigo Boito. In an 1863 ode by Boito, a line mocking the staleness of Italian opera was read as aimed at Verdi, and the two kept their distance for years. They were reconciled in 1879 through the mediation of the publisher Giulio Ricordi, and Boito went on to write the librettos for the masterpieces of Verdi's last years. (Otello) In 1887, sixteen years after Aida, Verdi produced Otello to a libretto Boito adapted from Shakespeare's Othello. Breaking away from the traditional structure built on self-contained arias, it was a tightly knit music drama whose dramatic flow never falters, and critics hailed it as the summit of Verdi's art. At a time when Wagner was reshaping the form through his music dramas, Verdi had in effect offered a different answer to the same problem, grounded in the tradition of Italian opera. (Falstaff) In 1893, nearing eighty, he completed Falstaff, the only successful comedy of his career, based on another work by Shakespeare. It avenged, half a century on, the failure of his 1840 comedy. The opera closes with a fugue in the final scene (a chorus that piles up like a round), singing that "all the world's a jest." (Death) In 1897 his wife Giuseppina died. Verdi founded, with his own money, a retirement home for musicians in Milan, the Casa di Riposo per Musicisti, which he called his "finest work." On January 27, 1901, he died of a stroke at the Grand Hotel in Milan. Throngs of citizens joined the funeral procession, and a month later, when his remains were moved to the Casa di Riposo, the crowd is said to have spontaneously sung 'Va, pensiero.'
Created with Boito after the two set aside their long feud, this setting of Shakespeare's tragedy broke sixteen years of silence.
- The moment the curtain rises, a crowd's chorus surges amid a storm as they wait for Otello's ship to reach the harbor, and Otello comes ashore with "Esultate!" — a structure that sustains tension without pause, unlike his earlier works.
- Because it all but abandons the traditional self-contained aria, letting speech and song flow on unbroken, it is often compared with Wagner's music dramas, yet its melodic roots remain thoroughly Italian.
- Desdemona's "Willow Song" and "Ave Maria" paint the resignation of a woman who senses her death in low, simple melodies, standing in contrast to the violence of the drama as a whole.
- The role of Otello, which demands both vocal power and dramatic force, is counted among the most formidable in the tenor repertoire, and who sings it becomes the talk of every production.
Completed when he was nearly eighty, it was the only successful comedy of his life, reversing a failure from half a century before.
- The whole opera unfolds in a rapid back-and-forth of short lines and witty phrases, so that in place of leisurely arias, the rhythm of conversation itself becomes the music.
- In the final-scene fugue (a chorus in which one voice after another enters on the same tune, like a round), "Tutto nel mondo è burla" ("All the world's a jest"), the entire cast joins in one by one, building layer upon layer, and it sounds like the laughter of an old composer who has made his peace with life.
- The orchestration is pared down to something light and nimble, in sharp contrast to the heavy drama of Otello.
- The passage in which the strings dart back and forth to depict the flustered Falstaff in a panic is known among players as a tricky stretch to keep together.
Lesser-known stories
Verdi's rejection by the Milan Conservatory is often retold as the legend of 'judges who failed to recognize genius,' but the actual records cite an age limit (applicants from outside the region had to be fourteen or younger) and specific criticisms of his piano technique, so it was not simply a tale of prejudice. Ironically, after Verdi's death the conservatory was renamed in his honor as the 'Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory.' A receipt still survives showing that Stefano Cavaletti, the craftsman who repaired the secondhand spinet Verdi's father had found for him, refused to accept payment. It is a small testament to the hopes a family of modest means placed in their son's talent, and the instrument is still preserved in Milan. Verdi amassed considerable wealth in his later years but never flaunted how he spent it. He paid out of his own pocket to build a hospital in Villanova sull'Arda, near Sant'Agata, and poured nearly his entire fortune into founding the retirement home for musicians in Milan. He is said to have preferred handling these matters quietly rather than boasting of them. Even at the height of his fame, he often stayed away from the premieres of his own works. He did not attend the Cairo premiere of Aida, and in many letters to the publisher Giulio Ricordi he confessed his discomfort with applause and public attention. In contrast to being exalted as a symbol of unified Italy, he himself chose to step back behind the stage.
Glossary notes 📚🔎
Opera
(Meaning of the word) Opera comes from the plural of the Latin opus, meaning 'work.' The name carries the sense of a 'total work' that brings together song, acting, orchestral music and stagecraft. (In music) A music drama that tells its story with all of its lines sung. Singers convey emotion through song instead of speech, while the orchestra provides both accompaniment and dramatic effect. It is somewhat like a musical, a play with musical accompaniment, but in opera nearly every line is sung. (Elsewhere) In everyday speech, the word opera is also used figuratively for an exaggerated, dramatic situation. Calling an outlandish melodrama a 'soap opera' is one example.
Aria
(Meaning of the word) From the Italian word for 'air' or 'melody.' It refers to the moment in an opera when a character pauses to pour out their feelings at length in song. (In music) Unlike recitative, which moves the plot along, an aria halts the dramatic flow so that a single character's emotions can unfold in concentrated form. Think of a school play where the dialogue stops and one person steps forward to sing a solo.
Recitative
(Meaning of the word) From the Italian verb meaning 'to recite.' The name directly conveys its role as the part where lines are delivered half sung, half spoken. (In music) Rather than bringing out a clear melody as an aria does, it sets notes close to the rhythm of speech to move the story along quickly. Think of it as the stretch between a play's spoken scenes and its sung ones — the part that drives the story forward.
Concerted number (ensemble)
(Meaning of the word) Jungchang (重唱) means 'singing (唱) in layers (重),' referring to two or more people singing different melodies and words at the same time. In Western music the French word ensemble, meaning 'together,' is used as is. (In music) A scene in which several characters sing their own thoughts simultaneously yet blend musically into a single whole. It is like a classroom where different groups shout their own chants at once, and somehow the whole thing sounds like a single sound.
Requiem
(Etymology) From the Latin requies, 'rest.' The name comes from the opening words of the Mass for the dead: "Grant them eternal rest." (In music) A large-scale choral work in the form of a Mass, written in memory of the departed. Verdi's Requiem drew criticism for being too dramatic for church music, because he carried over wholesale the idiom he had honed as an opera composer.
Bel canto
(Etymology) Italian for 'beautiful (bel) singing (canto).' (In music) An Italian style of singing and composition that prizes smoothly flowing melody, an even and supple tone, and brilliant virtuosity. Flowering in the age of Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini, the style still runs deep in Verdi's early works.