15

Verdi – older still

We left Verdi in his Rigoletto years, the early 1850s. From 1842 to 1851 he had written fourteen operas, a burst of activity that would culminate in adding two more, huge successes in their turn: Il trovatore (The Troubador) and La traviata (The Fallen Woman; both 1853). By then he was near the height of his fame, but the culture of Italian opera production was about to undergo some serious tectonic rearrangements. The 1850s would see the Italian repertory, for the first time in history, begin a slow and inexorable drift towards curatorial revivals. La Scala Milan in these years tells the tale. While a decade before, in the early 1840s, there had been a healthy sprinkling of composers with new operas, the Milan repertory by the 1850s was dominated by revivals of a relatively small number of works, almost all by Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini or Verdi (and with Verdi by far the most popular). In 1850 revivals of Verdi’s Attila, Ernani and Nabucco were followed with Bellini’s La sonnambula and Norma, and Rossini’s by now hallowed Il barbiere di Siviglia. Vincenzo Capecelatro’s new opera that year, David Riccio, was an unmitigated disaster. One reviewer commented: ‘it lacks situations, grandeur, oppositions, contrast and feeling; and ultimately it has no originality, no lyrical, elegiac or tragic power’.¹ And that was just the libretto. Amid competition from increasingly revered masterpieces, writing new operas became ever more perilous.

Aged forty in 1853, Verdi was to have four more decades of professional activity. But during those forty years, just eight operas appeared. Even Wagner managed seven in his (shorter) post-1853 career, and given the size of them he easily comes out ahead of Verdi in sheer opera-hours. What stemmed the flow?

The comparison between Verdi and Rossini, who retired in 1829 at a similar age, would seem inevitable. Increasing financial security was certainly involved in both cases. But with Verdi there was the added distraction of finding himself transformed into a national monument. He was being sculpted into a prominent cultural symbol in Italy’s new nation state, which came into being in the early 1860s. Even after the heyday of the 1850s, when most of his pre-Rigoletto operas fell out of fashion, their most popular tunes graced recital programmes and enlivened domestic and al fresco (often brass-band) entertainment. Some were reinvented in the form of revolutionary symbols. As we saw in Chapter 10, this applied especially to ‘Va pensiero’, the chorus of Hebrew slaves from Act 3 of Nabucco. The piece’s gentle nostalgia made it an ideal vehicle for conjuring up a now distant time when progress towards national unity had seemed uncomplicated. That period of communal struggle now became an alluring lost world, one preferable to the present uncertain mood, the strife of Italy’s early years as a nation.

Verdi was not averse to furthering this image of himself, supplying ‘anecdotal’ evidence to the small army of biographers, journalists and other quote-seekers who now crowded around his rustic retreat near Parma. But collaborating in one’s own mythmaking and celebrity has its price. Rossini also suffered from celebrity, of course. A more arresting similarity between him and Verdi, however, was shared despondency over a musical world that was changing too fast, and along paths they had no desire to follow. In Rossini’s case, unwelcome modernity came with the new, Romantic expressiveness of Donizetti and Bellini. That expressiveness had sounded the death knell for Rossini’s own brand of impersonal vocal beauty. For Verdi, the cultural enemy was even more threatening, as it came from outside Italy’s new frontier. Fulminate as he might, he could do little to diminish a new Italian fascination for other European operatic styles (first the French, then – worse – the German) that invaded the birthplace of opera just as it achieved nationhood. Gounod’s Faust reached La Scala in 1862 and was revived many times thereafter. Meyerbeer’s Gli Ugonotti (Les Huguenots) arrived in 1864, Halévy’s L’ebrea (La Juive) came the year after and also became a repertory stalwart. Time and again, from behind the walls of his villa and farmlands, Verdi trumpeted forth his distress at these foreign imports. The French had their blague and superciliousness, their over-inflated grand opéra – he liked to call the Paris Opéra ‘la grand boutique’. The Germans were worse still: their barbarity and symphonic obsessions theatened to influence and thus destroy native talent. As Verdi grew older and richer, and as he turned towards the political right, his grumpy nationalist conservatism became ever more extreme. When asked what kind of curriculum should govern Italy’s new state conservatories, he prescribed the musical equivalent of bread and water, dispensed specifically to blunt the enthusiasms of the nation’s impressionable youth. Students, he said, ‘must attend few performances of modern operas and avoid becoming fascinated either by their many beauties of harmony and orchestration or by the diminished seventh chord’. Instead, they should ‘practise Fugue constantly, tenaciously, until they are satiated’.² In a pedagogic nutshell, here was the old man’s eternal lament. Turn back the clock, life isn’t what it used to be.

But there was a critical difference between Rossini’s and Verdi’s later careers. Rossini’s operatic retirement was permanent. His last forty years produced not a single new theatrical work. With Verdi the flame refused to go out. Although he constantly threatened Rossini-like farewells to the stage, and although the gaps between each new work grew steadily greater, he kept composing. Even in advanced old age, when his public pronouncements about the sins of modernity were ever more uncompromising, the dramatist and the musician in him kept thinking about how to adjust to changing times. And so, slowly and painfully, those eight new operas came into being. Several of them were misunderstood by their first audiences, and some were temporarily forgotten; but nearly all have now become important planets in our operatic solar system. The compelling vitality that was such a feature of Verdi’s early operas migrated underground in the second half of his life. The energy now fed inner compulsions: compulsions to reinvent himself as a symbol of the new nation, certainly; but also to create musical drama that could move audiences whose allegiance was given to a world of changed values.

The sheer variety of the post-Rigoletto works remains astonishing. There is no ‘older Verdi’ style, either in shape or in tone. By comparison, even Wagner’s later works are monochrome in their technical means and dramatic exteriors. The most obvious connecting thread is that each opera engages in a dialogue with the past, specifically with the glories of Italy’s operatic legacy. Increasingly seen as provincial and uninspiring by the intellectual elite, both within and outside Italy, this legacy – to which the young Verdi had contributed so much – managed to sustain him in maturity and old age. But only just. Operas of the kind Verdi wanted to write – grandiose tragic works of the highest aspirations – became harder and harder to produce as the nineteenth century wore on.

WALTZES AND A WEEPING FATHER

Given the ageing Verdi’s regular diatribes against foreign modernity, La traviata (1853) harbours ironies aplenty. Principal among them is that it enthusiastically adopts the very latest scandalous foreign fashion. The work on which it was based is Alexandre Dumas fils’s play La Dame aux camélias (The Lady of the Camellias), first performed in Paris in 1852 only months before the opera itself premiered. The play was immediately seen as an important new moment in French drama. The novelty of Dumas’s work (which in turn derived from his 1848 novel of the same name) was not so much its rebellion against Victor Hugo’s brand of French Romanticism, a literary movement already moribund by 1850. No, the rebellion hit closer to home. Dumas was jousting with Eugène Scribe, with a bourgeois theatrical tradition made famous by France’s most prolific creator of grand opéra and opéra comique libretti. In flamboyant defiance of Scribean orthodoxy, Dumas rejected a dénouement in which morality triumphs. More than that, he chose contemporary subject matter. His play was set in the present and involved modern-day problems. It was much criticized, and much praised, as an early example of realism.

In gravitating to Dumas’s play, Verdi was clearly seeking the means to challenge Italian opera’s traditional ground. Romantic plots of heroism and love, set in a remote historical past, were waved aside. This story tackled a social issue urgently debated at the time, that of prostitution and the spread of disease in the ever more crowded nineteenth-century city. At the opera’s premiere, the Venetian censors insisted that it be staged in an early eighteenth-century milieu, putting its social critique at a comfortable remove. Verdi, however, wanted La traviata set in the time and place of Dumas’s novel and play, wanted it to evoke the modern metropolis, the ambivalent symbol of a ‘progress’ whose blessings were mixed.

La traviata was thus Italian opera’s first brush with urban modernity. Act 1 introduces Violetta Valéry (soprano), a pleasure-loving courtesan afflicted with tuberculosis, a disease commonly thought to be consequent upon loose metropolitan morals. During a no-holds-barred party, she flirts with young Alfredo Germont (tenor), who has fallen in love with her. Act 2 takes place some months later; Alfredo and Violetta have set up house together in the country. Life and love are idyllic until Germont senior (baritone) appears. In a fraught interview, he demands that Violetta renounce Alfredo in order to protect the Germont family reputation. She tearfully agrees and returns to Paris. Alfredo (believing she has deserted him for another lover) pursues her there and publicly insults her. More months have passed by the time of Act 3. Violetta is now desperately ill. She is finally reconciled with Alfredo, who has discovered the true reason she left him; but in the final moments of the opera she falls dead at his feet.

Although we know from Verdi’s letters that the subject’s contemporaneity had attracted him, the basic musical shapes in La traviata hardly respond to its radical subject matter. Not very different in its formal types from the operas that preceded it, La traviata has its share of lyrical adagios, exuberant cabalettas, long, multi-movement duets and grand ensembles. But this outward conformity masks two ways in which it breaks new ground. The first is in what the French called couleur locale (local colour), the rich musical colouration that conjures up a particular geographical location. In La traviata, Verdi found a new sense of dramatic potential in these colours. Rigoletto, which premiered only a couple of years earlier, was eventually set in sixteenth-century Mantua, even though Verdi wrote the music thinking it would be in eighteenth-century France. He complained about the shift in locale, which was demanded by government censors fearing revolutionary parallels; but in the end no great harm was done. Hardly any of the music jars in its new surroundings, quite simply because it is geographically and temporally neutral, making no gestures towards a specific time or a certain place. La traviata is different. The opera’s setting in the Parisian demimonde is obsessively highlighted by the simplest of musical means, by continual reference to the quintessential symbol of nineteenth-century social velocity and uncertainty, the waltz.

Here’s how one American, breathless and – one might guess – a little flushed, observed a Parisian ball in 1847. It was a court event, and so probably more decorous than Violetta’s Act 1 party, but even so the sheer visceral excitement leaps off the page:

To see so many persons, elegant and richly attired, at once entangled in the dance; crossing, pursuing and overtaking each other; now at rest, now in movement; and seeming to have no other movement than that communicated by the music; and to see a hundred couples twirling around in the waltz, with airy feet that seem scarcely to kiss the slippery boards; first flushed and palpitating; then wearying by degrees, and retiring, to the last pair, to the last one – she the most healthful, graceful and beautiful of the choir, her partner’s arm sustaining her taper waist, foot against foot, knee against knee, in simultaneous movement, turns and turns, till nature at length overcome, she languishes, she faints, she dies!³

Such a description could almost be of the opening scene of La traviata, in which the constant, driving waltz rhythms propel a similar sense of excess, with life in the big city moving dangerously fast. More important, though, this opening sequence is not an isolated section, not merely the scene-setting preliminary common in earlier Italian opera. Far from it, Violetta’s entire musical personality is conceived in waltz rhythms. Not only does La traviata’s special ambience saturate the music but – crucially – this ambience is absorbed by the opera’s heroine, fusing her with her setting.

In this sense, Violetta is unlike the other main characters of this or any other opera of the period. Take for example the obsessive trills that become a prime symbol of both of the salon and of Violetta’s fanatical gaiety in Act 1, from the first bars of the opening scene through to the heroine’s frantic celebrations in the closing cabaletta, ‘Sempre libera’ (Forever free). More subtle, but equally marked, is Violetta’s famous Act 3 aria, ‘Addio, del passato’ (Farewell, of the past), which continues in the same vein, even if with telling musical refractions to suit her weakened state. The waltz rhythms are still there in the accompaniment, but now they are hesitant and fragmentary, accompanied by a doleful cor anglais that completes her phrases as her strength fails.

This is a devastating aria. But Verdi was shifting his attention from exquisite solo expression, towards ensemble clashes and confrontation. Confontations give rise to battles between opposing vocal forces, and the imperative to give musical expression to antagonism would in time break several old formal moulds. In La traviata the great hostile encounter comes in Act 2 between Violetta and Germont senior. In it, Verdi turns his back on his former ways and means for personifying women and men on the operatic stage. The younger Verdi was at his most characteristic when he minimized differences between the sexes, in particular by creating a new, more forceful idiom for his soprano heroines. La traviata, though, addresses the question from another angle. Its plot, after all, confronts some of the most vexed issues surrounding sexuality, not least whether women had the right to choose their own destinies. These were matters that preoccupied people at the time, but had never before been raised so overtly on the operatic stage.

Where Verdi the man stood concerning such moral issues is not easy to fathom. There are hints in his correspondence he occasionally frequented prostitutes, notably a ‘Sior Toni’ in Venice. His partner, Giuseppina Strepponi, had had three illegitimate children during her career as an operatic soprano, and thus certainly knew what it was to be on the wrong side of a perceived moral divide. Simple equations between biography and musical/cultural attitudes are, then, fairly easy to make, and La traviata has been a favourite spot for those wanting to do so. But the supposed resonances are, as always, dulled by the way in which emotions are packaged into conventional formal units in Italian opera. One point is clear. The misogyny of Dumas’s novel, which is told throughout from a male point of view, is inevitably softened in the play, where Violetta appears as a character onstage; and it is softened even further in the opera. To use a distinction we’ve made several times already in this book, Verdi’s version of the story makes ‘voice-Violetta’ the unambiguous centre of attention. The composer was evidently more interested in her than in the male principals, who are wooden and one-dimensional by comparison.

Does Violetta nevertheless suffer from musical misogyny? In terms that recall those debates about Lucia’s mad scene mentioned in Chapter 9, it is possible to argue that she does. In the first act, for example, she may be prominent but she lacks musical agency, even musical independence. The famous brindisi (toast) that enlivens her Act 1 party is launched by Alfredo, Violetta merely repeating it after him; and in the ensuing love duet the tenor is again granted the musical power of invention – he states the main themes and then looks on admiringly as Violetta releases a shower of ornament around them. Even in her act-ending aria, Alfredo’s voice again intrudes, insistently reminding us of his musical presence. Such arguments are in many ways attractive. They offer a powerful way of understanding the opera within today’s cultural context, and modern stage directors frequently echo them. But is there a sense in which this reading seriously underplays voice-Violetta? At the least, an opposite interpretation of the passages is possible. The brindisi may be sung first by Alfredo, but it is more suited to Violetta’s vocal capabilities – in performance, her verse almost invariably sounds more convincing. And in the love duet, Alfredo may introduce the melodies, but Violetta makes them alive by decorating them and altering them to suit her character. Similarly, at the end of Act 1 the hero’s melody is heard only in the distance, while Violetta’s reactions are immediate and impressive; she, after all, is centre stage; and – to be prosaic – she gets the bulk of the applause when the scene finishes. And so the argument could go on, each negative interpretation countered by a positive twin. As so often, we need something better than these simple equations between music and meaning.

All of which can bring us to that central, confrontational duet between Violetta and Germont in Act 2. In conventional feminist terms this is where plot-Violetta is crushed by patriarchal authority. The voice of the father requires her sacrifice on the altar of conventional morality: she obeys, and is rewarded by flamboyant insults from her lover (later in Act 2) and by poverty and a painful death (Act 3). Told in these terms the opera fully endorses dominant mid-nineteenth-century attitudes to female sexuality and freedom: one might even say it celebrates them – makes them into an object of aesthetic pleasure, to be enjoyed in the theatre. But what does Verdi, Verdi the composer of music, have to do with this?

When the Violetta–Germont duet starts, the music seems to be articulating gender stereotypes. The first few minutes stage an emotional dialogue, with contrasting sections dominated in turn by one character and then the other. The musical difference is clear. Germont’s opening melody, ‘Pura siccome un angelo’ (Pure like an angel), describes his immaculate daughter, and is the very essence of stability and self-assurance – a patriarchal voice made musical. The regular tread of the accompaniment, the predictability of the phrases, the way in which the wind instruments support the voice to round off phrases; all this gestures in one direction, painting a picture of rationality and above all conventionality. Violetta’s answer, ‘Non sapete quale affetto’ (You don’t know what feelings), is in obvious contrast. It is a succession of brief, hurried vocal phrases, full of sighing figures that draw attention to the body uttering them, with unpredictable leaps and dynamic shifts underpinned by a hesitant, off-beat accompaniment.

This contrasting musical conversation continues through the first part of the duet, as Germont wears down Violetta’s resistance. But at the moment of Violetta’s capitulation, as she agrees to renounce Alfredo, there is a marvellous reversal. Violetta sings ‘Dite alla giovine’ (Tell the young girl), asking Germont to let his daughter know of her sacrifice. And, schooled by the duet so far, we are ready to hear her vocal differences maintained and heightened. Instead, the musical roles are inverted. Violetta’s line is marked piangendo (weeping) in the score, but it is stable and predictable, with a conventional accompaniment. What’s more, the melody develops over a long arc through several phrases, having far more emotional force than Germont was granted earlier. By contrast, Germont’s answer, ‘Piangi, piangi’ (Weep, weep), is in short, sobbing phrases that graphically mimic the bodily gesture of weeping. His words may say that he is magnanimously allowing her to cry (‘piangi, o misera’ – weep, unhappy woman), but the music tells us that Germont is gasping out in feminine tears, while Violetta serenely rewrites herself and her destiny.

The power of this musical reversal, the force of her long melody and of Germont’s incoherent sobs, are hard to dismiss. ‘Dite alla giovine’ has a calm beauty that makes it the still point in this scene, indeed in the entire opera; and from within that still point we hear Violetta, solemnly addressing an unknown woman. If we agree that this moment is the crux of the opera, the moment around which the action hinges, then one-dimensional answers to La traviata’s questions about gender will be unsatisfactory. Verdi’s setting tells us that, at least in this fictional world articulated through music, every relationship of power is fragile. It is a message that all operas can potentially articulate, and contributes to the art form’s remarkable ability to communicate across cultural and chronological divides.

Given the forward-looking nature of La traviata, one might imagine that subsequent years would see something of a retrenchment. But circumstances, together with Verdi’s mid-life creative verve, dictated constant experimentation. First he tried a Parisian grand opéra, Les Vêpres siciliennes (The Sicilian Vespers, 1855). The next opera, Simon Boccanegra (1857), makes yet another departure, both from Les Vêpres and from the earlier Italian works. There are few traces of the Gallic mode in this rhapsody to the dour side of Italian opera. Only glance at the cast list, and gloom is evident – there are no secondary female roles, and a small army of low male voices. The sombre mood becomes more obvious still in the extreme economy of the vocal writing, with declamation more prominent than ever before. Next came yet another volte face: if Simon Boccanegra is single-minded and monochromatic, then Un ballo in maschera (A Masked Ball, 1859) is a potpourri masterpiece. After his experiment in Vêpres – a largely unadulterated version of French grand opéra – Verdi here gestured to the lighter side of French opera, in particular the opéra comique of Auber and his contemporaries. The juxtaposition of this style with a newly intense, interior version of Italian serious opera is extremely bold and, as we saw in Chapter 13, offers further evidence that it was not only the grandest French genre that was influential on European opera in the later century.

Like Ballo, La forza del destino (The Force of Destiny, 1862, revised 1869) quilts many styles and modes together. An episodic plot and extended geographical and temporal span are matched by an astonishing range of operatic manners: post-Rossinian opera buffa from the comic priest Fra Melitone (baritone); opéra comique from the camp-follower Preziosilla (mezzo-soprano); Meyerbeerian scenes of religious grandeur; and at the centre a classic soprano–tenor–baritone love-triangle in the best Italian manner. The opera is Verdi’s most daring attempt at what he would later call ‘mosaic’ drama.⁴ Its disparate parts hang together, as much through an abstract idea – the ‘fate’ (destino) of the title – as by the progress of individual characters. After Forza came a further attempt to scale the citadel of Paris’s home of grand opéra. The result this time was Don Carlos, not notably more successful with the Parisian public and critics. With Don Carlos Verdi, stood accused of Wagnerism, but in the later twentieth century the work came to be seen as the greatest grand opéra of them all.

EXOTIC IMMOBILITY

After all these wildly experimental operas, Aida (1870) may seem like Verdi’s vacation from eclecticism. Judged against the narrative diffusions of a Don Carlos or a Forza del destino, the libretto is plain and simple, even though the spectacular scenic world of grand opéra is obvious in its genealogy. Aida, whose scenario was dreamed up by a French Egyptologist, was commissioned for the opening of the Cairo Opera House. It is set in Memphis and Thebes ‘during the reign of the Pharaohs’. Verdi refused to attend the premiere, joking that he was afraid of mummification;⁵ and his opera, for all its magnificence, does indeed have an immobilized quality. A state of war exists between civilized Egypt and savage Ethiopia. Radames (tenor), an Egyptian captain, is loved by Princess Amneris (mezzo-soprano) but is in love with the captured Ethiopian slave Aida (soprano), who is later revealed as the daughter of the Ethiopian king, Amonasro (baritone). In other words, we have a reiteration of the old love vs duty plot. Radames is lured by Aida into giving away a military secret and for this crime is sentenced to be entombed beneath the temple. The final scene requires a split stage, the temple above, the tomb below. When Radames enters the tomb he finds Aida there, determined to die with him. The lovers end the opera singing gently together of love and death; Amneris hovers above, murmuring a requiem.

Aida used to be Verdi’s most popular late opera, performed far more often than Don Carlos or La forza del destino, whose sprawling plots and uncommon length caused them to be dubbed ‘problem’ pieces. For the first half of the twentieth century it was something like the epitome of Grand Opera: the Act 2 triumphal scene (Radames, the victorious warrior, brings back Amonasro in chains), with its exotic dancers, massed ranks of spear carriers, opportunities for elephant extras, and famous march and trumpet tune, were enjoyed by audiences who found Wagner or even Mozart forbiddingly elite. A late mark of this fame was a 1953 screen version, directed by the aptly named Clemente Fracassi (fracasso means ‘loud noise’ in Italian), in which the opera is given a filmic makeover. We see nothing of the singers who provide the soundtrack (a stellar cast led by Renata Tebaldi as Aida); instead, film icons of the day gesture their way through the plot, often hardly attempting to suggest that singing is heavy work, requiring open mouth and heaving chest. Sophia Loren blacks up decorously as Aida (and if that sounds implausible, Gina Lollobrigida was considered for the role). Such a film would be impossible now: it’s a relic of the Treasury of Grand Opera days, a time when epic cinema was so close to Grand Opera that the transposition could be tolerated. Viewers who enjoyed Ben Hur could be easily drawn into a film world in which sounds produced by Renata Tebaldi came from the mouth of Sophia Loren.

But if the 1950s marked the height of Aida’s popularity, recently it has been in decline. This is a matter of sheer expense, of course, but the opera is also out of season because now we are uncomfortable with the subject matter, all those slaves and Pharaohs and general Egyptian kitsch. The case was made eloquently by the cultural critic Edward Said, who in a famous essay argued that Aida was implicated in nineteenth-century colonial expansion. For him the opera was an example of Orientalism, the means by which Western colonial powers have, over the last centuries, differentiated themselves from, and so managed to think themselves superior to, non-Western cultures. For Said, ‘Aida can be enjoyed and interpreted as a kind of curatorial art, whose rigour and unbending frame recall, with relentless mortuary logic, a precise historical moment and a specifically dated aesthetic form, an imperial spectacle designed to alienate and impress an almost exclusively European audience’.⁶

The accusation of exoticism could of course be directed at many works of art from many periods, and can raise intense passions, these days particularly among those who feel that they derive from such works something like pure aesthetic pleasure, a pleasure that risks being damaged by what they call ‘political’ readings. We have met exotic operatic locales in earlier chapters – the Turkish ambience of Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio, 1782) is an obvious example – but during the later nineteenth century, as Europe’s global adventures became more wide-ranging, such settings were popular in art of many kinds. What’s more, a precise sense of geographical locale became increasingly important to opera at just the same time, with Verdi’s works again no exception. In short, Aida obsesses about its exotic ambience. What is more, its genesis not only intersects with but was dependent on colonialism. What’s disputable, though, is whether the opera should be held accountable for the circumstances of its birth; and also – more important – whether Verdi’s musical treatment of the exotic ambience is so easily co-opted into Said’s Orientalist reading.

The matter emerges at the very start of Act 1, in the opera’s most famous aria. Radames sings ‘Celeste Aida’ in reaction to news that he will lead the Egyptian army against the invading Ethiopians. Although excited by the prospect of military conflict, his thoughts turn to a fantastic vision of Aida as a goddess:

Celeste Aida, forma divina,

Mistico raggio, di luce e fior,

Del mio pensiero, tu sei regina,

Tu di mia vita sei lo splendor.

Il tuo bel cielo vorrei ridarti,

Le dolci brezze del patrio suol;

Un regal serto sul crin posarti

Ergerti un trono vicino al sol!

[Celestial Aida, divine form, / mystic ray of light and flower, / you are the queen / of my thoughts, / you are the splendour of my life. / I want to give back to you your beautiful skies, / the sweet breezes of your homeland; / place a regal garland on your head, / erect a throne for you next to the sun.]

The multi-movement entrance arias of Verdi’s early operas are now a thing of the past. Audiences, composers and critics all agreed that it was now artificial to stand alone onstage and sing through a sequence of musical forms, each with its own beginning, middle and end. Instead, Radames has a one-movement aria, here called a Romance. Although the poetry is in two four-line stanzas, Verdi brings back the first stanza at the end, thus making the piece an ABA form, something resembling the international norm for operatic solos.

The main melody, ‘Celeste Aida, forma divina’, uses singsong half-rhymes and internal repetition to echo a rising melodic shape, one that mimics the idea of putting Aida on a mystic pedestal. What rescues this from banality is its orchestration. A flute in its lowest register doubles the voice, contributing barely heard atmospheric colour; very high violin tremolos (just two soloists) round off each phrase. The combination of these unconventional instrumental effects spelt ‘exotic’ in the vocabulary of the day. Unexciting melodic material is thus locked in a slow dance with novel orchestral colour, and it would be easy – too easy – to reach for Said and interpret this as an Orientalist move. The colonized Aida is reduced to primitive status (the simple melody), which then allows pleasure to be drawn in the colourful exterior (those low flutes and high violins) in which she is wrapped. Too simple a reading, yes: but nowhere else in Verdi is the slow dance between substance and colour enacted quite like this.

After a short ‘B’ section, the ‘Celeste Aida’ music returns to round off the ternary form. But at the end of the aria Verdi adds another statement of the ‘B’ section and then a coda. The latter is extraordinary: the stratospheric solo violins and low flutes reappear, and Radames’ closing image, of a throne near the sun for his beloved, takes him with obvious word-painting to a final, high Ba. In the score this note is marked pp morendo (very quiet, dying away): Radames is instructed, in other words, to disappear into the orchestral ambience that has been so important to the aria. (The effect is very close to the end of José’s Act 2 Flower Song in Carmen, discussed in Chapter 13.) From very early in the history of Aida performances, those singing Radames, one of Verdi’s most strenuous tenor roles, have hated this pp morendo. Most of them simply ignore the instruction, singing the note in full voice with bulging neck and reddening face, thereby drowning out the delicate orchestral effects. It’s worth wondering why they choose to do this. Of course, the opportunity to trumpet out a high Ba – if you have the ability – is not to be ignored lightly; but many tenors over the years have, in other musical contexts, demonstrated just how effective pianissimo high notes can also be. (John McCormack, one of the greatest star tenors of the interwar years, made a splendid career specializing in just that.) Here, though, something makes the moment highly charged. It’s as if a quiet, floated Ba would suggest that Radames, in spite of his military ambitions and the trumpets that blare around him, is not fully in control of his fantasy about Aida. Just like those gender reversals in La traviata, the music can pose difficult questions, in this case – perhaps – questions as basic as who is enslaving whom. True, the message may still be Orientalist, but certainly not in the crude manner of Aida’s plot.

That earlier quotation from Said used a strange adjective, mentioning Aida’s ‘mortuary logic’. The idea that the ‘reign of the Pharaohs’ was impossibly removed from modern concerns surely accounts for the opera’s static splendour, its sense of being somehow buried and inert, despite its new orchestral technologies and moments of grand passion. This feeling is at its strongest in the final scene, in which the two lovers sing out their last moments incarcerated beneath the temple. Their duet offers an end-piece to match ‘Celeste Aida’, this time with both principals heading towards the bright sun:

O terra addio, addio valle di pianti …

Sogno di gaudio che in dolor svanì.

A noi schiude il ciel e l’alme erranti,

Volano al raggio dell’eterno dì.

[Farewell, earth, farewell valley of tears … / Dream of joy that disappeared in sorrow. / Heaven closes on us and the errant souls / fly to the ray of eternal day.]

As with Radames’ first aria, there is a disarming simplicity here. In earlier, brasher days, Verdi might have inserted a showy final cabaletta, and in some ways this piece is cabaletta-like in its progress: the same tune is sung first by Aida, then by Radames, then by both in unison. What’s more, the vocal writing is extremely simple, just a two-bar melody that seems to be repeated endlessly. But the emotional exuberance for which cabalettas are famous is nowhere to be found. The tempo is slow; the delicate orchestra is pp almost throughout; and, most unusual, the two-bar melody is extremely angular, with an exceptional stretch at the start and a difficult, augmented fourth interval in the middle.

This ending is unlike any other Verdian finale. On the one hand, it extends the message of ‘Celeste Aida’ by making the characters disappear into the ambience. Far from closing with a grand gesture, they fade away, caught in endless, mysterious repetition and thus in the grip of another cliché through which the West has imagined other cultures. However, there may be a further angle to this ‘mortuary’ feeling, one closer to home. The words tell us that this is a farewell to life, but the music and the biographical context suggest another kind of leave-taking. Verdi had been threatening to retire from the rapidly changing, technology-fuelled world of international opera for more than a decade; he had even described his career before 1860 as ‘years in the galley’,⁷ his compositions those of a mere slave to the opera industry. Something always brought him back during the 1860s; but after Aida he acted on his threat. At the age of fifty-eight, in his prime as a composer, he stopped writing operas. ‘O terra addio’ – farewell, familiar ground. And then there are all those oblique references to the glory days of Italian opera, when cabaletta-rich Il trovatore could be seen, as Verdi himself said, ‘in the heart of Africa or the Indies’.⁸ Aida’s final duet could thus have been a very personal leavetaking, of an operatic world for ever changed.

OTELLO, FALSTAFF AND THE INTANGIBLE DIVIDE

Verdi’s retirement after Aida was, as it turned out, merely a prolonged sabbatical. In the 1880s the operatic spark again ignited. In spite of the chronological gap, his last two operas (Otello in 1887 and Falstaff in 1893, both based on Shakespearean subjects) perhaps self-consciously recapture old habits and wiles. Although he was now an international celebrity who could – and did – dictate his terms, Verdi continued to compose in the antique manner, in the sense of paying attention to the singers at his disposal, being willing to adjust passages to accommodate them. He even used shards of old operatic forms from time to time. But such continuities can be deceptive. Between Aida in 1871 and Otello in 1887 opera in every country was moving inexorably away from previous comfort zones. At some moment between the two operas, we can guess that Verdi, like so many other composers, crossed an intangible divide.

What marked the crossing? Throughout its history, opera had articulated drama by an alternation between action (musically less complex, reliant on some form of declamation) and reflection (the moments in which music could expand). Now, and although there always remained vestiges of the division, opera became a matter of continuous motion, as musical activity matched activity in other realms: passing time, antagonism and confrontation, or the unspooling of emotions. Wagner and his followers sometimes labelled this new style as ‘unendliche Melodie’ (infinite melody), and in some ways that term suits late Verdi equally well. In Otello, the long Act 2 duet between Otello (tenor) and Iago (baritone) is a good example of how the new disposition worked. The duet, in which Otello gradually becomes convinced that his wife Desdemona (soprano) has committed adultery, cannot easily be parcelled out as an old-fashioned set piece in contrasting movements. It darts around too fluidly. There are indeed set pieces in this act of Otello – a ‘Racconto’ (Narrative) for Iago, a Homage Chorus to Desdemona and a Quartet – but these numbers are embedded in moving waves, and they are interruptions rather than places of repose.

The changes in Verdi’s style were inevitably linked to Wagner, even though Verdi’s nationalist convictions made him wary of Wagnerism and loud in rejecting its lure. However, he would be involuntarily caught up in recent European trends by means of an extraordinary relationship with his last librettist, Arrigo Boito (1842–1918). The partnership had started as early as 1862, when the two men worked amicably together on an Inno delle nazioni for the second Great Exhibition in London. But considering the generational gap, a more predictable exchange occurred a year later. Boito, a leading figure among Italian bohemians, the so-called scapigliatura, improvised an Ode ‘To Italian Art’ that described its ‘altar’ as ‘defiled like the wall of a brothel’.⁹ Verdi took this personally; nor was he further disposed towards the young firebrand by some cool journalistic reviews that Boito published about Verdian revivals.

That rocky start holds a key, in that a significant aspect of the Boito–Verdi collaboration was that they came from different generations. Verdi had grown up in an environment hardly affected by foreign influences, in which new Italian works were the staple of every opera house, and in which there was much formal similarity between individual works. In the 1870s and 1880s that world finally disappeared. As the Italian state fell into parlous economic and (he felt) artistic decline, Verdi’s skin became thinner, his temper shorter; and his production of new operas ceased altogether. Boito’s generation was precisely the problem, powerfully influenced as they were by French grand opéra and later by Wagner. As the ‘brothel’ episode indicates, Boito and his bohemian friends tended to think of Italian music of the first half of the nineteenth century – with Verdi the inevitable figurehead – as embarrassingly provincial, a world of dusty velvet swags and distasteful financial Realpolitik.

Their collaboration on Otello reflects the fact that Boito had mellowed by the late 1870s. His magnum opus, the opera Mefistofele, failed disastrously at La Scala in 1868. When he restaged it seven years later he had toned down many of its most radical aspects, replacing them with more palatable operatic solutions. But there was still that generational gap. Early work on Otello was punctuated by sharp differences of opinion. A recurring problem was the end of Act 3, in which Otello, now in a jealous fury, confronts Desdemona publicly in a scene that had all the trappings of an old-fashioned concertato finale. In his first letter to Boito about the project, commenting on Boito’s draft libretto, Verdi suggested that the ‘dramatic element’ was missing. After a traditional set piece ensemble in which all on stage react to Otello’s striking of Desdemona, he suggested a radical departure from Shakespeare:

Suddenly distant drums, trumpets, cannon-fire, etc., etc. … ‘The Turks! The Turks!!’ … Otello shakes himself like a lion and draws himself erect; he brandishes his sword and, addressing Lodovico, says: ‘Come on! I will lead you to victory again.’ … They all leave the stage except Desdemona … isolated and motionless, her eyes turned to Heaven, [she] prays for Otello.¹⁰

True to the theatrical conventions of his past, Verdi sketched here an external event that would lead the musical action onwards, provide some impetus to break the musical spell he would weave around the great communal reaction to Otello’s violence.

Boito, for whom Otello was above all a modern, claustrophobic, psychological drama, was horrified:

Otello is like a man moving in circles beneath an incubus … if we invent something that must necessarily rouse Otello and distract him from this incubus … we destroy all the sinister fascination created by Shakespeare. … That attack of the Turks is like a fist breaking the window of a room where two people are dying of asphyxiation.¹¹

The decadent imagery, of Otello ‘moving beneath an incubus’, and especially of that couple expiring (more Tristan-like than Aida-like) in a sealed room, says it all. For Boito the drama took place essentially within the psyche, in the realm of what Wagnerians liked to call the ‘inner drama’. But what is most arresting about the disagreement is that Verdi – who had earlier been a veritable tyrant in dealings with librettists – gave way to Boito, trusting his perception of modern drama. What is more, this trust obliged him to do nothing less than reinvent his operatic language, find a newly flexible, rapidly changing mode of musical expression. With many anxious glances backwards, Verdi cautiously made his way across the intangible divide.

In Boito and Verdi’s struggle to establish common ground, there was one binding point of contact. For Boito, true to his modern heritage (and again Wagner’s influence comes to mind), operatic characters were above all abstract symbols. ‘Jago è l’Invidia’, he wrote in a published description of the characters: ‘Iago is Envy’;¹² Desdemona wasn’t a mere woman, she was also a symbol of female purity. Nothing might seem further from Verdi’s practical conception of theatre than this abstract, self-consciously meaningful attitude. But then, in a late letter about the opera, the composer offered his own remarkable gloss on his three main characters:

Desdemona is a part in which the thread, the melodic line never ceases from the first note to the last. Just as Jago has only to declaim and ricaner, and just as Otello, now the warrior, now the passionate lover, now crushed to the point of baseness, now ferocious like a savage, must sing and shout, so Desdemona must always, always sing.¹³

The letter is fascinating because it suggests that Verdi had channelled Boito’s tendency towards the symbolic and the interior to his own ends, in this case fashioning the violent conflict between the characters into a parable about the violent upheavals of Italian fin-de-siècle musical drama. The opera’s principals musically embody the conflicting demands of the lyrical and the declamatory. Iago, the modern man, is constantly declamatory: when he sings beautifully, it is merely to deceive. Desdemona, on the other hand, is a symbol of that lost time when bel canto was at the centre of theatrical communication. Otello, like Verdi himself, is caught agonizingly between the new and the old. But, despite or even because of this, the ageing composer managed to renew himself, symbolically imagining his creative struggle in the opera’s clash of personalities.

Whatever Verdi’s intentions, it was of course inevitable that Otello and then Falstaff, his last opera, and his only comic work since Un giorno di regno (King for a Day, 1840, a youthful failure), were judged by comparison with Wagner. Verdi was yesterday’s man, Wagner was the model for the future. Some went against the tide and bravely proclaimed a Verdian challenge to Wagnerian mists and Teutonism. The French critic Camille Bellaigue called Falstaff ‘a masterpiece of Latin, classical genius’.¹⁴ Boito proudly displayed his awareness of contemporary German philosophy by alluding to Nietzsche’s critique of Wagner: ‘the human spirit must be “Mediterraneanized”; only there is true progress’.¹⁵ But the majority, finding the operas so unlike Verdi’s earlier music, concluded that he had succumbed. The famous musicologist Hugo Riemann, writing in 1901, was one of them: ‘A significant change of style separates “late” Verdi from the works of his middle period. This, quite frankly, is to be traced to the influence of Richard Wagner.’¹⁶ Verdi was by now used to this kind of opinion – accusations of Wagnerism had beset him as early as the Parisian premiere of Don Carlos in 1867 – but they never ceased to enrage. As he once said, to work in the theatre for forty years and still be called an imitator was galling indeed.¹⁷

But what was Verdi’s attitude to Wagner? Amid the polemics flying back and forth, it is difficult – even after more than a century – to arrive at a balanced view. Consider this famous letter from Verdi to his publisher, Giulio Ricordi. It is dated 14 February 1883, the day after Wagner had died in Venice:

Sad. Sad. Sad!

Wagner is dead!

Reading the news yesterday, I was, I don’t know, struck with terror. Let’s not talk about it. – A great individual has disappeared! A name that has left a most powerful mark on the history of art!¹⁸

This letter, on the surface quite simple, is in several ways rather odd. Its melodramatic opening (‘Triste. Triste. Triste! Wagner è morto!’), with its ghostly echoes of the title of Wagner’s most famous opera, reads like the opening lines of a grand lamenting aria; later, its uncertain searching for words suggests genuine involvement mixed with genuine confusion (he feels ‘terror’ rather than the conventional ‘regret’ or ‘sorrow’). But the most significant moment is at the close. The handwritten original shows us that Verdi first wrote ‘has left a powerful [potente] mark’, but then crossed out ‘powerful’ and wrote over the top ‘most powerful’ (potentissima). Just how important was Wagner? Verdi was revealingly unsure of where to pitch his rhetoric.

As the 1880s rolled on, and as Wagnerism took hold ever more powerfully, Verdi’s attitude hardened. Time and again he inveighed against the Wagnerian style that was now pan-European, and had turned the heads of young Italian composers. A typical jeremiad, from the late 1880s:

Our young Italian composers are not good patriots. If the Germans, starting out with Bach, have arrived at Wagner, they’re acting like good Germans, and do the right thing. But we descendants of Palestrina, if we imitate Wagner then we commit a musical sin, and our labours are useless, even damaging.¹⁹

There was plenty more in that vein. During the last thirty years of his life, Verdi’s letters and public pronouncements constantly lament the influence of Wagnerism on young Italians, the dangers of harmonic and orchestral complexity, in particular the errors of composers (Puccini among them) who had been lured by the ‘symphonic’ style. They should return to the national roots, learn counterpoint, revere Palestrina and the great choral traditions of Italy’s musical past.

This is the atmosphere in which Otello and Falstaff were born, and the circumstances left traces. Falstaff begins and ends, for example, with ironic glosses on two grand pillars of ‘academic’ musical form. The first minutes of the opera are in a kind of mock symphonic sonata form, and as each new section begins, Falstaff (bass-baritone) offers laconic comment: ‘Ecco la mia risposta’ (Here is my reply) as the ‘second subject’ begins; ‘Non è finita!’ (It’s not finished!) at the start of the development; there’s even an ‘Amen’ at the coda. In light of Verdi’s concern at the ‘symphonism’ (i.e. Wagnerism) of young Italian opera composers, these asides assume a rich irony. More obvious still is the opera’s closing fugue (which Verdi’s letters tell us was his first musical inspiration for the opera). ‘Tutto nel mondo è burla’ (All the world’s a joke) might be thought a fitting end to Verdi’s long career, but it is also a pointed reminder to the younger generation – counterpoint is our Italian heritage, return to Palestrina and find salvation. Other connections are more fragile. Falstaff, for example, is more highly chromatic than any other Verdi opera, but is also obsessed by cadence, forever punctuated by unequivocal gestures of closure. Related to this is the contrast between the work’s looseness of form and its frequent gestures of closure – huge orchestral climaxes that seem to overwhelm what they ostensibly close off. Was this also a reminder? Just after finishing Falstaff Verdi wrote to a friend, making fun of the ‘modern’ (again, read Wagnerian) school for their melodic style: ‘a modern melody [is] one of those beautiful ones that has neither beginning nor end, and remains suspended in the air like Mohammed’s tomb’.²⁰ Again, those emphatic, triumphant cadences are making a point about the state of the operatic world.

Perhaps, though, these music-and-politics equivalents are too simple. Germanophiles see Otello and Falstaff as influenced by Wagner; their opponents see them as pillars set against the Wagnerian tide. Do we need to continue such ancient polemics? There is, after all, an important distinction between Wagner’s work and Wagnerism – between the operas and the critical message they were dragooned into undertaking. Verdi certainly feared and set himself against the latter, especially the exaggerated claims about ‘symphonic’ operatic structures. One of his most famous letters, again to Ricordi, offers admonitions to his most famous Italian successor:

I’ve heard good things about the musician Puccini. … He follows modern tendencies, and that’s natural, but he keeps contact with melody, which is neither modern nor ancient. It seems, though, that the symphonic element predominates in him. He needs to go cautiously here. Opera is opera; symphonies are symphonies; and I don’t think that in an opera it’s fine to have a symphonic element, merely for the pleasure of making the orchestra dance.²¹

But the letters about Wagner have become different in tone, suggesting a shared project and genuine (if troubled) admiration and understanding. Does this conciliatory stance also show traces in the last operas?

Some have found resonances between the Act 1 finales of Falstaff and Die Meistersinger,²² but more immediately audible is Verdi’s use of that pillar of Wagnerian technique, the recurring theme. Such themes had appeared in many of his earlier operas, but typically they were used in a very un-Wagnerian manner. Ideas like the ‘curse’ theme in Rigoletto stand in isolation from their context, communicating translatable meaning precisely because they are infrequent. But in Falstaff we find a different technique. Ford (baritone) has a tremendous monologue in the first part of Act 2 (‘È sogno? o realtà’; Is it a dream? or reality?) where the musical fabric is largely constructed out of confused fragments of previous themes. The soloist’s psychological state is as much evident in the orchestra as in what he sings. Another moment comes at the start of Act 3, where Falstaff has an extraordinary monologue in which he reaches the depths of despair and then gradually reconstitutes himself (with a little vinous assistance) and prepares for life ahead. At the lowest ebb, he looks at himself with brutal honesty: ‘M’aiuti il ciel! Impinguo troppo. Ho dei peli grigi’ (Heaven help me! I’m getting too fat. My hair is greying). This unhappy litany is sung in a bare, exhausted recitative, punctuated orchestrally only by a sinister chromatic figure in the bass – one that wanders without tonality, just as Falstaff has, for a moment, found himself bereft of energy and direction. This little figure is an obvious quotation, more or less identical to one of Klingsor’s motifs from Wagner’s last opera, Parsifal. What can it mean, set here in the middle of Falstaff? There’s no obvious reference in the libretto. Perhaps it is merely one of those fortuitous resemblances that music sends forth from time to time, to our bewilderment or delight. Or perhaps it is indeed a cryptograph to be unravelled and understood, a musical way for Verdi to repeat: ‘Triste. Triste. Triste! Wagner è morto!’

We know something of the final years of Verdi’s life through photographs – the white beard, the wise grin, the battered hat. This period is often thought of as his Indian summer. Although the operatic world had changed, the aged composer persisted with some of his ancient creative habits until the last. One was in finding a source of creative energy in the vocal characteristics of singers. At a late stage in the composition of Falstaff he auditioned a possible Mistress Quickly, Giuseppina Pasqua (1855–1930), and liked her voice so much that he created for Quickly – and Pasqua – a tiny aria in Act 2 (‘Giunta all’Albergo’). More important still, there is plenty of evidence that the roles of Iago and Falstaff would not have been as they are – in their sudden changes of mood, their disarming flashes of lyricism and above all their sometimes uncanny imitations of other characters – without the remarkable histrionic talents of their creator, bass-baritone Victor Maurel (1848–1923).²³ Maurel’s recordings of ‘Era la notte’ (Otello, Act 2) and ‘Quand’ero paggio’ (Falstaff, Act 2) are now available, and display his extraordinary diction and abilities in vocal mimicry. His sinister enunciation of ‘Desdemona soave’ in the former is still chilling, more than a hundred years after it was recorded.

After Falstaff in 1893, and in spite of some beautiful late religious pieces (collected as the Quattro pezzi sacri), Verdi’s world inevitably narrowed. His partner of some fifty years, Giuseppina Strepponi, died in November 1897, carried off by pneumonia after long and painful illness; in her will she hoped to be reunited with Verdi in Heaven. There are some very sad final letters to another soprano, Teresa Stolz, with whom he had been much involved, perhaps romantically, in the dark, opera-less years of the 1870s. In one of the last, he is eighty-seven and she is sixty-six:

We had some delightful hours, but they were too short. And who knows when even ones as short as those will come again! Oh an old man’s life is truly unhappy! Even without real illness, life is a burden and I feel that vitality and strength are diminishing, each day more than the one before. I feel this within myself and don’t have the courage and power to keep busy with anything. Love me well and always, and believe in my love, which is great, very, very great, and very true.²⁴

Verdi laments the loss of vitality and strength, courage and power – those qualities that he gave so generously in the service of musical and dramatic expression. There is also, at the last, a tender expression of love and loyalty. Most striking of all, though, is an uncompromising honesty, a willingness to stare full in the face what a changing world offers.