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{vair'-dee}
Giuseppe Verdi, the foremost composer of Italian romantic
opera, was born in the village of Le Roncole near Parma on
Oct. 10, 1813, the son of an innkeeper. His first formal musical
studies were with the organist Ferdinando Provesi in the nearby
town of Busseto, where he attended school. Verdi lived in
Busseto in the home of the merchant Antonio Barezzi, who supported
him financially and whose daughter Margherita was to become
his first wife. In 1832 he applied for admission to the Milan
Conservatory, but he was refused because he was over the age
limit and his piano playing was judged to be too weak. He
pursued private studies in Milan with Vincenzo Lavigna until
1835, when he returned to the post of organist in Busseto.
After 3 years his desire to write for the theater brought
him back to Milan, where his first opera, Oberto, was performed
in 1839.
A series of personal tragedies--the death of his wife and
both his children in the space of 22 months (1838-40)--interrupted
Verdi's career, but in 1842 he was induced by his Milan producer
to write Nabucco, the opera that brought him his first great
success. For a decade thereafter he was sought by all the
great opera houses of Italy, and he produced 18 operas in
15 years, culminating in 3 of his best-known works--Rigoletto
(1851), Il Trovatore (The Troubador, 1853), and La Traviata
(The Wrongdoer, 1853).
By the early 1850s, Verdi had become an important international
figure, and he began fulfilling commissions for theaters outside
Italy--Les Vepres siciliennes (Sicilian Vespers, 1855), Don
Carlos (1867), and a revision (1865) of his earlier Macbeth
(1847) for Paris; La Forza del destino (The Force of Destiny,
1862) for Saint Petersburg; and Aida (1871) for a new opera
house in Cairo. During this period he also became involved
in politics, being elected to a term in the first Italian
parliament after the unification of the country in 1861. His
election was not merely a tribute to his great popularity;
Verdi had introduced patriotic elements into his operas as
early as Nabucco, and his name had become an acronym for "Vittorio
Emanuele, Re D'Italia" ("Vittorio Emanuele, king
of Italy"--the rallying cry of the political movement
for the unification of Italy).
After Aida, Verdi went into semiretirement with his second
wife, the singer Giuseppina Strepponi. The only other major
work of the 1870s was a Requiem Mass (1874) in memory of the
novelist Alessandro Manzoni. He considered his operatic career
finished, contenting himself with revisions of the earlier
operas. But through the cajoling of his publisher Giulio Ricordi
and the librettist Arrigo Boito, who had assisted (1881) with
the revisions of Simon Boccanegra (1857), Verdi was induced
to take up first Otello (1887) and then Falstaff (1893). These
two Shakespearean operas, one tragic and the other comic,
were the crowning achievements of his old age. Verdi died
in Milan on Jan. 27, 1901.
Verdi was the most important figure in the succession of 19th-century
composers of Italian opera, which began with Gioacchino Rossini
and ended with Giacomo Puccini. His early operas adopt the
basic procedures and style of his immediate predecessors,
Vincenzo Bellini and Gaetano Donizetti. Emphasis is on the
vocal line, accompaniments are simple, transitions from one
piece to the next are mostly perfunctory, and scenes are constructed
on a few conventional patterns, the most common comprising
a pair of arias--a lyrical cantabile followed by an energetic
cabaletta--for one of the principal singers. Verdi brought
to these conventional procedures his own gift for memorable
melody and a masculine vigor that was often lacking in his
models. He favored compact librettos of a melodramatic sort,
built around a few emotionally charged confrontations. The
typical plot has a tenor and soprano as protagonists, opposed
by a baritone who might be a romantic rival (as in Il Trovatore)
or a father (as in La Traviata). These baritone roles have
a special prominence in Verdi's operas.
The compact pattern of the early works is expanded somewhat
in the operas that Verdi wrote for foreign theaters, especially
in Les Vepres siciliennes, Don Carlos, and the revised Macbeth,
which incorporate the spectacle and ballet associated with
French grand opera of the same period. In the works of the
1850s and '60s, Verdi relied less heavily on conventional
methods: accompaniments are richer, musical transitions more
interesting, and structures less predictable (in particular,
the crowd-pleasing cabalettas grow less frequent). As a result
of this experimentation, perhaps, the operas of this period
do not always make satisfactory wholes. No such problems exist
in Aida, Otello, and Falstaff, however. In these the dramatic
compression of the early works is achieved anew, and Verdi's
technique, especially his control of the orchestral accompaniment,
is at its most flexible.
Verdi's influence has been less decisive than that of his
German contemporary Richard Wagner. Most later romantic composers
of operas drew on the styles of both, but the new musical
language that developed after 1900 owed more to Wagner's polyphony
and chromatic harmony than to Verdi's lyricism, vigor, and
clarity. As the more conservative (and popular) of the two,
Verdi has also been regarded with suspicion by critics and
academicians. His ready acceptance of conventional structures
and his willingness to place so much emphasis on the vocal
line exaggerated the importance of melodic inspiration, and
where the latter was uneven, inevitable lapses into banality
occurred. As he matured, Verdi saw how to make his structures
more flexible and his accompaniments more expressive, without
sacrificing the power of his melodies. The musical achievement
of the last operas and the quality of Verdi's dramatic insight
in general have long been recognized.
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