Massimo d’Azeglio might have been a character from The Charterhouse of Parma. He was a romantic figure, tall and handsome and blue-eyed, and he possessed the aristocratic charm and sexual appeal of the novel’s protagonist, Fabrizio del Dongo. Irreverent and unreserved (unusual qualities in Piedmont), he could talk to anyone from dancing girls to countesses, from bandits and wagoners to colonels and cardinals. A painter and a writer by profession, his amateur skills included music, swimming, riding and fencing. Perhaps his talents were too diffuse for him to be really good at anything, even politics, although in 1849, at the age of fifty, he became prime minister of Piedmont. Azeglio seldom bothered to conceal his rather frequent boredom, and in old age he regretted the invention of l’homme sérieux in France. He also deplored the fact that ‘the most tedious of the seven [deadly] sins – pride, envy and avarice – [had] got the better of the other four’: a Friend of Pleasure (another rare species in Piedmont), he saw nothing very reprehensible about sex, eating, laziness and occasional wrath. He enjoyed a good number of love affairs and tolerated two bad marriages.
Massimo was born in 1798, the fourth son of a noble Piedmontese family, the Taparelli d’Azeglio. After an agreeable childhood in Florence, he studied painting in Rome, leaving the city each summer to paint in the hill villages of the Castelli Romani, staying in carters’ inns and finding himself on easy terms with peasants and local brigands. Later he lived in Milan, where he exhibited his pictures at the Brera. He never liked Turin, which he found boring and oppressive, a philistine capital without art galleries or a good opera, a city permeated with a religious atmosphere that gave him a feeling of ‘moral suffocation’. Florence was a far more congenial abode; so was Milan where, in the capital of the Austrian ‘oppressors’, this Italian patriot could ‘breathe freely’ and publish his books.1
Apart from his matrimonial misfortunes, the only blight on Azeglio’s life was the sense of shame he felt at being an Italian in that era. He admitted he was so ‘morbidly sensitive’ about the condition of Italy and felt so humiliated that part of it remained under a ‘foreign yoke’ that he chose not to make friends with foreigners in case they mocked him.2 For him the only cure for this national and personal inferiority complex was independence for the whole peninsula – independence, but not unity. Azeglio knew mid-century Italy, its land and its peoples, better than other politicians, and he was more realistic than they about the potential difficulties of unification. His priorities were the expulsion of the Austrians, the reform of native governments and some kind of unity for the north.
As an artist and writer, Azeglio nursed his ‘feeling of humiliation’ by trawling the past in search of heroic episodes which he could then transform and publicize through his art. One glorious subject for a canvas was the Battle of Legnano, Barbarossa’s defeat by the Lombard League in 1176. Another was the so-called Challenge of Barletta, a much mythologized event from the early sixteenth century at which thirteen Italian knights in Apulia, outraged by a slur on the Italian character, challenged thirteen French knights to a duel and were victorious. While working on this canvas, Azeglio realized the subject could also be used for a patriotic novel, one that might ‘be understood in the streets and marketplaces’. He duly wrote Ettore Fieramosca and got it past the Austrian censor even though the hero (Ettore) declares that foreigners are the obstacle to Italian unity. Encouraged by its success, both financial and patriotic, he wrote a second novel, this time about the siege that destroyed the Florentine Republic in 1530, and began a third on the Lombard League, which he did not complete. By then, the mid-1840s, this many-sided man had decided that his patriotism required two new professions, that of soldier (in his youth he had served briefly in the Piedmontese army) and that of politician. Presumably he had realized by this time that as a novelist he was not in the same league as his father-in-law, Alessandro Manzoni.
Other Italians were equally ashamed of Italy’s decline. Although the composer Gioacchino Rossini was not much of a patriot, he liked to thank God for the Spanish: ‘If there were no Spaniards,’ he once observed, ‘the Italians would be the last people in Europe.’3 What made decadence so galling was the consciousness that, while Italians had for centuries been recognized as the most prosperous and civilized people on the continent, they were now regarded by foreigners as lazy, effeminate and rather comical. Italians were and are frequently rude about Italy – Dante called it a ‘brothel’ in Inferno and a ‘desert’ in Purgatorio – but they weren’t and aren’t happy when foreigners say similar things. Goethe described Italy as ‘the shadow of a nation’ while the French poet Alphonse de Lamartine termed it a ‘land of the past … where everything sleeps’, its people too fond of ‘sensual pleasures’ to be able to fight properly. Disparaged as a ‘trivial poet’ for these opinions, Lamartine made the mistake of challenging his Italian detractor and was badly wounded in a duel.
Italians could hate both the condescension of foreigners and the reasons why visitors wanted to come to Italy. Some of them could even resent Stendhal because he adored what they detested, the Italy of love and music and hospitality, Italy the giant antique shop and innkeeper of the world, Italy the land of limitless ruins and the domicile of effete dilettanti. Many Italians were convinced that their dignity could not be restored without the recovery of masculinity and martial ardour. Vittorio Alfieri, the Piedmontese poet-prophet of unity who wrote ‘An exhortation to free Italy from the barbarians’, was especially concerned with the question of virility, a recurrent concern for future builders or rebuilders of the nation up to and including Mussolini. When, according to Alfieri, Italians recovered the virility of their ancient ancestors and discarded the manners of the cosmopolitan present, they would again be able to lead Europe.
Numerous patriots joined Azeglio in quest of a past to be proud of. They also searched for heroes who had fought valiantly against invaders and who had been prepared to sacrifice their lives for the sake of Italy. As they could not find such figures in recent centuries, they had to rummage through the more distant past. Ancient Rome was not an ideal model partly because it had not been a nation and partly because Napoleon had very recently appropriated its glory, making himself a Caesar and his son the King of Rome. The idea of Italian Davids standing up to northern Goliaths seemed a more promising source, yet it became so difficult to unearth suitable examples that patriotic artists often found themselves writing, painting and composing music about the same event: I lombardi alla prima crociata (The Lombards on the First Crusade) was an epic poem by Tommaso Grossi, an early opera by Verdi and the subject of several pictures by Francesco Hayez. Another drawback was that certain selected episodes, the Battle of Legnano excepted, were not fully appropriate: while the Sicilian Vespers of 1282 (exalted by the historian Michele Amari and again painted by Hayez and set to music by Verdi) might conceivably be portrayed as an uprising against a foreign invader, the incident – in which thousands of Frenchmen in Palermo were slaughtered after one of them pestered a Sicilian woman – might also be regarded as a grotesque reprisal. A third defect was that the paintings of these events – huge, hideous, sub-Delacroix expanses – belong to the most unfortunate period in the history of Italian art. A dispiriting though representative sample of this genre can be examined today in the Museo Civico of the Tuscan town of Pistoia. The walls are covered by canvases depicting scenes such as ‘the Pazzi Conspiracy’ and ‘other rebellions against tyranny’, the murder of Francesco Ferruccio (a hero of the Florentine Republic) and the riot instigated by Balilla, the Genoese boy who inspired a mob to chase the Austrians out of his city in 1746. The most ghastly exhibit of all is another vast painting of the Sicilian Vespers, this time by Giulio Piatti, an infernal and almost lunatic composition of people brandishing knives and staring insanely.
The literary equivalents of this art were the books of Azeglio and the poetry of Giovanni Berchet, but the only novel of the era that has truly lasted is Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (The Betrothed), a work that acquired the status of a monument soon after its publication and transformed its author into a national prophet, a patriarchal fount of moral and patriotic wisdom. In fact the Milanese Manzoni, who was a poet as well as a novelist, deserved this reputation less for his masterpiece than for his contribution to the making of the language* and perhaps also for the nationalistic sentiments of a patriotic ode claiming that the Italians were a single people between the Alps and the sea, a people united by blood, heart, arms, language, memories and Catholicism. Of course he knew this was an exaggeration, that at the time of writing (1821) Italians shared little of these things except the same Church, but he used poetic licence to attack the idea of ‘diversity’, a word he believed was insulting to Italy because it summed ‘up a long history of misfortune and humiliation’.4
Yet Manzoni had his defects as both a patriot and a prophet. Indifferent to the medieval past of the communes, he defended the papacy’s historic role and believed in its contemporary national relevance. The Betrothed, a saga of tyranny eventually vanquished, may have become a canonical text for the patriotic movement, but the idea that it foreshadowed a struggle for national liberation is far-fetched. Its seventeeth-century heroes are not heroic – they display Christian resignation; the villains are not foreign – Don Rodrigo is a home-grown tyrant with a Spanish name, not a recognizable caricature of a Bourbon or Habsburg overlord; and the plot is melodramatic and Manichaean. The pervading aura of divine providence at work certainly seems at odds with the patriotic belief that Italians could only become free if they themselves removed their shackles. Perhaps the success of the novel owed something to the fact that there were few Italian competitors at the time.
The figure who most closely combined romantic culture with revolutionary politics was Giuseppe Mazzini, the sad-eyed ascetic who in the early 1830s appealed for a revival or resurgence of Italy, a ‘risorgimento’, and connected this idea to the project of unifying the peninsula politically. For him a nation was a ‘universality of citizens speaking the same tongue’, a definition that was not of course applicable to Italy. Yet Mazzini pretended that it was. Born in Genoa in 1805, his sense of mission was fixed early in life, and he dressed always in black in mourning for what he regarded as his lost fatherland. He read widely in literature and history, and from his reading he absorbed ideas that he adapted and exploited to further his cause. Inspired by the works of Dante, by the history of Rome and by the example of the Lombard League, he appropriated suitable passages and details and incorporated them into a programme that was obviously neither communal nor imperial. For the goal that he and his democratic followers aimed for was simply an Italy that would be both independent and undivided. Only a unitary state, they believed, would liberate Italy from its age-old rivalries.
Other ideologues believed the opposite, that only regard for those rivalries would allow Italians to respect each other’s differences and live together in harmony: a unitary state could never conceivably work in so diverse a country. The foremost federalist was the brilliant Milanese intellectual Carlo Cattaneo, who considered ‘the ancient love of liberty in Italy’ to be more important than ‘the cult of unity’. Like Guicciardini 300 years earlier, he believed that Italy had prospered from competition between the cities and argued that a political system that failed to take the communal spirit into account would not succeed. In his eyes this spirit was far from being a medieval irrelevance: it was alive – as it still is, remaining a vital component of the national identity even today. Cattaneo did not greatly exaggerate when he claimed, ‘The communes are the nation: they are the nation in the most innermost sanctuary of its liberty.’5
Cattaneo was no romantic nationalist. Indeed he believed that nationalism was essentially illiberal – an unusual credence in those days – and he suspected with some reason that this would be the case with Piedmont. As a Milanese historian, he was aware of the old Piedmontese custom of grabbing and annexing bits of Lombardy, and he was rightly apprehensive about the ambitions of the Savoia monarchs in his own time. As a Lombard, he was also aware of his region’s ancient trading relationships beyond the Alps and recognized that there could be advantages, administrative and economic, in becoming a self-governing part of the Habsburg Empire. Such advantages would obviously disappear if Lombardy were to be annexed by Piedmont.
Piedmontese patriots understandably disagreed. In 1843 Vincenzo Gioberti, a theologian from Turin, published a book called Del primato morale e civile degli Italiani (Of the Moral and Civil Pre-eminence of the Italians), a work whose title alone was calculated to improve morale. Earnestly and verbosely, Gioberti told Italians that pre-eminence had been theirs and would be so again if only they could stand up and seize it. Readers, who had been led to believe that they were actually inferior to other nations, were naturally pleased by the message, although few of them were enthusiastic about the formula Gioberti suggested for their salvation: a federation of Italian states under the presidency of the pope (currently the elderly and reactionary Gregory XVI), who would be allowed to retain his temporal power over the Papal States. This was an even more dramatic divergence from Mazzini’s ideology than the views of Cattaneo. Mazzini and his supporters followed Machiavelli in believing that the papacy had been one of the chief obstacles to Italian unity in the past; no Italy of their dreams would concede to the pope an ounce of political power.
After the appearance of Primato, Azeglio persuaded his cousin, Cesare Balbo, to write another book on Italian possibilities, Delle speranze d’Italia (On the Hopes of Italy), another anti-Mazzinian work with another optimistic title written by another prominent Piedmontese. Balbo agreed with Gioberti that a federal solution was essential, but he argued that a confederation under the Piedmontese monarchy would be preferable to one under the pope. Independence from Austria (or any other power) was also vital: one couldn’t achieve pre-eminence without first attaining parity, and the way to achieve parity with independent nations was to gain independence for oneself. Political unity, by contrast, was unimportant, indeed a ‘childish’ idea because a confederation was clearly the system ‘most suited to Italy’s nature and history’.6
In the mid-1840s Piedmont did not seem a very promising candidate for leadership of a pan-Italian confederation. It was still governed by a conservative, authoritarian monarch, Charles Albert, who had savagely crushed an attempted coup in 1833. Yet the king was also a member of the Savoia dynasty who had inherited ancestral urges to continue the expansion of the realm. As the obstacle to the fulfilment of such desires was now Austria, it seemed logical for him to give at least tacit support to moderates in the national movement, to those at any rate who were not republican or democratic or in any way radical. As his country possessed the best army in the peninsula, he believed he would without difficulty dominate the patriotic side in any war against Austria.
One of the king’s abettors in this matter was Massimo d’Azeglio, whose picaresque career was showing no sign of flagging. In 1845 he abandoned fiction and began his unexpected involvement in politics. Equally unforeseen was the energy he displayed during a surreptitious tour of the Romagna, where he spoke to a number of patriots hoping for an end to papal rule there. On informing Charles Albert of their hopes for Piedmontese assistance, the king replied with doubtful sincerity that, when the time was right, everything he had – even his life – would be dedicated to the Italian cause.
Italian conspirators did not enjoy a good reputation. If ‘treacherous’ was the adjective most often applied to the archetypal plotter of the Renaissance, ‘incompetence’ and ‘fiasco’ are appropriate nouns to describe the actions and consequences of many nineteenth-century schemers. Conspirators came in several guises, including the bomb-thrower who missed his target, the youth who achieved nothing except his own death, and the carbonaro, the member of a secret society of masonic inspiration who moved in a shadowy world of passwords, secret cells, police informers and hidden weapons. Their conspiracies tended to have brief lives and dramatic endings: in some cases they were betrayed before anything happened; in others a group of young men reached a southern shore where, after shouting Viva Italia! at an astonished populace, they were arrested and taken before a firing squad, some of them singing as they died an operatic chorus about how wonderful it was to die for one’s country.
Not all conspiracies ended like that. If the plotters happened to be soldiers, they sometimes enjoyed a brief success. In 1820, inspired by the proclamation of a constitution in Spain, carbonari in the Bourbon army, allied with former followers of Murat, joined an uprising outside Naples. Although they persuaded the aged King Ferdinand to grant a constitution, they had little popular support and were soon suppressed by Austrian troops. A similar rising with a similar conclusion occurred the same year in Piedmont. Army officers rebelled, the Spanish constitution was proclaimed, and an Austrian force was called in to restore absolute rule.
Revolutions in other parts of Europe twice heralded rebellions in Italy. In 1820 the catalyst was Spain, but in 1830 it was France, where the July Revolution expelled the most reactionary of all Bourbon rulers. In the following year a spate of insurrections broke out in the Po Valley – in Modena, Parma and Bologna – which as usual the Austrians easily extinguished. None of these or the earlier revolts were inspired by the goal of Italian independence. Nor did they enjoy significant local support or indeed much sympathy from other parts of Italy.
After the failures of 1831, the carbonari began to fade from the revolutionary stage. Their place was occupied by Mazzini, who had been exiled from Italy in 1830 and had gone to live in Marseille. There the young Genoese patriot founded Giovine Italia (Young Italy), a society that later had as many as 50,000 members, becoming in effect the first Italian political party. Mazzini’s organization had the advantage over the carbonari of possessing a clear programme whose objectives for Italy included democracy, unification and, ideally, a republic, though this last was not essential and could be jettisoned if a decent monarchical candidate emerged. Politics, however, were only a part of Mazzini’s campaign. Other ingredients he regarded as crucial for success were education, insurrection and violence.†
From France Mazzini began plotting conspiracies, some of which were discovered by the authorities at the planning stage. In 1833 he helped organize a plot in Turin which the Piedmontese government quashed with public executions in a repression far harsher than Ferdinand’s in Naples or Austria’s in Lombardy in 1821–3 (when the Austrians had commuted all the death sentences). Mazzini was among those condemned to death in absentia. The following year another of his coups failed in Genoa, which resulted in a death sentence for another young revolutionary, Giuseppe Garibaldi, who fled to South America and did not return to Italy for fourteen years.
After the failed coups in Piedmont, Mazzini was expelled from France and took refuge in Switzerland, where he set up Young Europe, an organization that promoted self-determination, freedom for the oppressed and a Europe of cooperating nation-states. In 1837, after another expulsion, he emigrated to England, where he spent most of the rest of his life, safe from the threat of eviction. In London he lived frugally and alone, seeming to survive on coffee, working obsessively into the night, tirelessly writing letters, articles and propaganda. He liked the English, and they liked him, regarding this rather mournful man, with his gaunt face and large eyes, as the romantic figure he undoubtedly was, an aspiring liberator dedicated to his cause.
A united Italy was achieved in Mazzini’s lifetime not by his team but by opponents of theirs led by Cavour, who had not believed in unification until just before it happened. Subsequently the winners wrote the history, or most of it, and they edited Mazzini out of the glory, maligning him personally and denying his contribution to the great epic of unity. For them Mazzini was simply a terrorist and a revolutionary, an enemy of Italy, although actually he was in many ways an admirable person, a generous and uncorrupt individual, an internationalist rather than a chauvinist, a man who condemned the death penalty and held progressive views on women’s rights and social justice. Undeniably he possessed an unfeeling and unappealing side, for he schemed from the safety of London to send young idealists on fatal expeditions in Italy because, as he all too bluntly put it, ‘ideas ripen quickly when they are nourished by the blood of martyrs’. He was sure that Italians had to fight and be killed in order to win their nation: it was ‘better to act and fail than do absolutely nothing’.7
These sentiments were shared by two followers of Mazzini from Venice, the brothers Bandiera, who in 1844 embarked upon the most foolish, futile and unorganized insurrection of all. They were officers in the Austrian navy (in which their father was a vice-admiral) but also anti-Habsburg plotters who, on becoming aware they were under suspicion, managed to evade arrest and flee to the Ionian Islands. There they learned that a revolt had broken out in Calabria and decided to assist it, prompting their mother to track them down in Corfu and tell them they were madmen. ‘What kind of foolishness is yours,’ she asked her elder son, ‘on a mere frenzied impulse to cast aside your parents, your wife, your rank, name and family, for the sake of nothing at all?’8
Ignoring their wretched mother, the Bandieras set off with a handful of companions and in midsummer landed on the coast of Calabria, where they kissed the sand and were surprised to find the weather too hot to march about in the daytime. Disappointingly, they attracted no local support and soon discovered that the revolt they had read about in the newspapers had been a small one extinguished some weeks earlier. Eventually they took refuge in an inn, where they were caught off-guard by local militiamen, who captured them and carried them off for trial in Cosenza. The brothers’ subsequent executions – and those of seven of their companions – were blamed on Mazzini, whose exhortations incited many such escapades but who on this occasion had discouraged the expedition. Yet predictably the London plotter found consolation in their ‘martyrdom’. It did not matter, he wrote, that the Bandieras had not succeeded because they were ‘apostles’ and ‘martyrs’: ‘the Appeal of Martyrdom is brother to the Angel of Victory.’9
1848 was the year of European revolutions and the year of the fall of Prince Metternich, who a year before had made his celebrated description of Italy as ‘a geographical expression’. Yet this time it was Italy that set the continental pace, ahead of Orleanist France, the German Confederation and the Habsburg Empire. A popular uprising broke out in Sicily in early January and forced Ferdinand II to grant his kingdom a constitution three weeks later. Within two months, constitutions had also been proclaimed in Tuscany, Piedmont and Rome, and further insurrections had erupted in Venice, Milan, Parma and Modena.
In Italy these outbursts had a multiplicity of causes, motives and objectives. They were not coordinated and they were seldom inspired by similar grievances or even similar ideologies. The Sicilian revolt owed little to Mazzini: it was a popular movement driven by hostility to the government in Naples and supported by local aristocrats who wanted autonomy for their island. Encouraged by its early success to aim for detachment from the Bourbons, the new parliament soon declared Sicilian independence. Yet only a small number of islanders were eager to exchange the partnership with Naples for membership of an Italian federation.
The citizens of some Italian states had little desire to change their rulers. A constitution in Rome seemed merely a logical step after the 1846 election of a charismatic and apparently liberal pope, Pius IX, who had relaxed censorship and declared an amnesty, and who seemed to be demonstrating that Gioberti’s programme might have a future after all. In Tuscany there was equally scant zeal to change the regime except in that most untypical Tuscan town, the port of Livorno. There was little patriotic inclination to rise against Grand Duke Leopold II, a moderate and enlightened leader who had encouraged an Italian customs union and was even prepared to join a federation of Italian princes.
The most Mazzinian insurrection took place in Milan, where the populace rose in March and, after five days of street-fighting, forced the Austrian commander, Marshal Radetzky, to withdraw his troops from the city. The revolt spread to other Lombard towns, which were all captured by revolutionary insurgents except for the fortress city of Mantua, and also to the countryside among peasants distressed by the recent agricultural crisis and the consequent fall in living standards. Yet in Milan’s sister capital of Venice, where Mazzini had found it difficult to recruit members for Young Italy, Italian nationalist fervour was almost non-existent. When Venetians rose in March, they did so not as aspirant Italians but as Venetian patriots eager to regain their independence fifty years after Bonaparte had destroyed it. Almost alone among Italians, they were proud of their pre-napoleonic past and wished to return to it. After forcing the Austrian garrison into an unexpectedly rapid surrender, they set up their own government and, to great enthusiasm, proclaimed the restoration of their republic.
In any Italian conflict with Austria the protagonist had to be Piedmont, a state with a strong army and a long military tradition. Seizing his opportunity to take control of the situation, King Charles Albert thus moved quickly to support the Milanese insurgents, and in late March he declared war on the Austrian Empire. His troops then advanced and won a number of small engagements, while his government set out to annex Parma and Modena, whose ducal rulers had fled. The patriotic cause in the north rapidly acquired so much momentum that even the pope and the king in Naples dispatched forces in support. Much has been made of popular participation in the struggle, of the thousands of volunteers joining up, of the titled lady who raised her own battalion, of the city women who fought on the barricades in Brescia and Milan. Yet the great majority of volunteers came not from the south or the countryside but from the educated middle classes of the north. In any case, there were not very many even of these. Azeglio observed that an Italian population of 25 million could muster fewer than 50,000 volunteers – an unimpressive figure for a struggle of national liberation.
Things began to go wrong when the pope decided they were going too quickly. Azeglio, who had written an excoriating criticism of the previous pope, was now such an admirer of Pius IX that at the age of forty-nine he volunteered as a staff officer in the papal army marching north under the command of General Durando. Pius intended his troops to play a defensive role, stationed on the northern borders of his dominions to deter an Austrian attack, but Durando and his staff officer were set on a more ambitious strategy. Placed in charge of the army’s proclamations, which were published in the press, Azeglio tried to push Pius into pursuing an aggressive war of independence in alliance with Piedmont. Thus he told the world that the pope would fight a crusade for God and Italy and would, together with Charles Albert, expel the Austrians from the peninsula. This proclamation inflamed the pope who, when forced to choose between his mildly patriotic feelings for Italy and his international obligations as leader of the Catholic Church, found no difficulty in selecting the latter. In late April, in a document known as the Allocution, he therefore declared that he had been misrepresented, that fighting a war against Catholic Austria was far from his thoughts and that, even if Italy were one day united, he never wished to be its president. By then, however, Durando had crossed without orders into Habsburg territory and was now in Venetia, where Austria twice defeated his troops: in the second battle, outside Vicenza, Azeglio received a bullet in his knee, an injury that caused him trouble for many years to come.
After their early victories in the spring, the Piedmontese had been busy organizing plebiscites, persuading voters in Milan, Parma and Modena to vote for annexation to their kingdom. The task was not a difficult one because everybody knew that getting military assistance from the Piedmontese against Austria was dependent on an affirmative vote. Even Venice, which had no desire to be annexed, submitted as approaching Habsburg armies began the reconquest of the terraferma. Yet Piedmont’s behaviour antagonized many people. King Ferdinand II quickly withdrew his Neapolitan force when he realized that Turin was aiming for expansion. Carlo Cattaneo, a leader of the revolution in Milan, concluded sadly that his Lombard suspicion of Piedmont had proved to be accurate. And in England Queen Victoria wrote a cross letter to her foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston: ‘Why Charles Albert ought to get any additional territory, the Queen cannot in the least see.’10
Unfortunately for the Piedmontese king, annexation was quickly followed by military defeat. At the head of his army, Charles Albert was beaten in July by Radetzky’s Austrians at Custoza near Verona, a small reverse which he turned into a big one by retreating all the way to Milan in case the Lombards exploited his discomfiture by proclaiming a republic. Although he had promised to defend the city, he decided to discard his pledge as soon as he reached Lombardy. Then, abandoning his newly acquired territories, he accepted an armistice with Austria and publicly put the blame for his defeat on the Milanese. The Venetians refused to accept the armistice and carried on fighting.
Revolution was also defeated in the south. In May Ferdinand was able to dispense with the constitution he had granted in February and turn his attention to Sicily, whose government spurned the offer of autonomy under the Bourbon crown and even invited a surprised Piedmontese prince to become its sovereign. In July Ferdinand invaded the island, bombarding the fortifications of Messina and angering Britain and France so much that they stepped in and forced him to accept an armistice for six months. The Sicilian government failed to take advantage of the respite to prepare a defensive plan or even procure weapons for its soldiers, yet at the same time it rejected a fresh offer from Ferdinand of a separate parliament and a viceroy. The combination of arrogance and incompetence led, predictably, to a swift and humiliating collapse. Neapolitan forces recaptured Palermo without a fight.
In other parts of Italy revolutionary sentiment was still alive. Pope Pius found it so strong in Rome that in November, following the assassination of his chief minister, he fled in disguise across the Neapolitan border to the fortress port of Gaeta. In Tuscany Grand Duke Leopold stayed longer, presiding nervously over an increasingly radical government until February 1849, when, with the assembly in newly constitutional Florence debating the possibility of his removal, he also left for Gaeta.
The following month, the Piedmontese government returned to the offensive, repudiating the armistice and ordering its army to attack the Austrians. The campaign was short and catastrophic: the commander-in-chief never received the government’s order to attack, and his army was routed by the formidable Radetzky. On the day of the defeat the king abdicated and commenced a sorrowful journey to Portuguese exile and death. Although the Piedmontese had again been the aggressors, Austria was again generous with its armistice, demanding little beyond a modest indemnity. In the same period its troops captured the city of Brescia, which had risen in support of Piedmont, and shortly afterwards brought the grand duke back to Tuscany. Such an outcome was naturally humiliating for Piedmont, which had fought two embarrassingly inept campaigns. Especially galling for the monarchy in Turin was the knowledge that, while a royalist army had twice been defeated by an octogenarian field marshal, the republican revolutions in Venice and Rome were still being defended with valour.
The Venetian president, Daniele Manin, was not a romantic hero of the type that Risorgimento propaganda liked to extol. A middle-aged lawyer, he was short and bespectacled, rational and pragmatic, an undashing and even accidental leader of a revolt. Nor were his priorities congenial to later ideologues. He put Venice before Italy, regarding the restoration of the republic as more desirable for Venetians than unification with Piedmont and other parts of Italy. Aware that they had something solid to fight for – a land rather than a set of ideas – the Venetians supported Manin from the initial insurrection at the Arsenale in March 1848 through the establishment of the republic and its military defiance to the last grinding weeks of an inexorable siege. Decimated by cholera, bombarded by the Austrians and abandoned by the Piedmontese, they resisted until August 1849. If they did not quite fulfil their pledge to resist until the last slice of polenta – and watch their city smashed to pieces – we can all be grateful for that.
The Venetians have been largely neglected in nationalist mythology because, however heroically they resisted the Habsburg Empire, they never – either then or later – showed much desire to join the rest of Italy. Besides, the memory of Mazzini and Garibaldi fighting in Rome for a future nation made more inspiring propaganda than the memory of Manin’s efforts to re-establish an ancient republic.
In February 1849, after the pope had fled and refused to come back, a constituent assembly in Rome proclaimed a republic and invited Mazzini, who had been in exile for seventeen years, to join its government, effectively as its leader. During the only three months of his life when he exercised political power, this much-traduced revolutionary proved to be a wise and tolerant statesman. He abolished clerical censorship but did not attack religion; he repealed the death penalty and refused to countenance political repression. Having always insisted that Rome should become the capital of a united Italy, Mazzini briefly had the chance to demonstrate how it might be governed.
The Roman Republic was also aided by another former exile, Giuseppe Garibaldi, who had worked for thirteen years as a sailor and soldier in South America. Returning to Europe in the revolutionary spring of 1848, he had led without special distinction a volunteer force against the Austrians in the foothills of the Alps. Surprised to find that the local population was unwilling to join his irregular troops, he had been outmanoeuvred by the enemy and forced to take refuge in Switzerland. The following year he went to Rome, where the republic was being besieged at the request of the pope by French, Austrian and Neapolitan troops. Against the odds, Garibaldi managed to defeat both an army from Naples and an over-confident force from France, but in the summer, at the Battle of the Villa Corsini, his tactic of ordering repeated frontal attacks left the French victorious. His eternal instincts – ‘Never retreat’ and ‘When in doubt, charge with the bayonet’ – on this occasion failed him.
The outcome of the siege was, of course, as inevitable as that of Venice. With Rome on the verge of capitulation, Garibaldi refused to surrender and marched out of the city to continue the struggle in the hills of central Italy. The republican defeat was greeted with much joy by Piedmontese politicians such as Gioberti and Cavour, who had even advocated dispatching troops from Turin to assist in the denouement. For them, Mazzini and Garibaldi were as much the enemies of Italy as the Austrian Empire. Even Azeglio compared the Roman Republic to a comic interlude in an opera whereas in fact – together with the siege of Venice and the insurrections in Lombardy – it was one of the most serious episodes of 1848–9, a subject that might have been worthy of an opera by Verdi.
By 1848 Italian opera had gained a reputation that few people could have predicted two generations earlier. In the early years of the century the musical form, invented by Florentine composers over 200 years before, had appeared to be dying: Domenico Cimarosa was dead, Giovanni Paisiello had stopped composing, the eighteenth-century tradition of opera seria – with its dazzling arias, its skimpy drama and its invariable happy endings – seemed to have passed away as terminally as the royal courts that had sustained it. At the time of Cimarosa’s death in 1801 the glories to come could not have been anticipated. Gioacchino Rossini was eight, Gaetano Donizetti was only three, Vincenzo Bellini had not quite been conceived, and the parents of Giuseppe Verdi were still children.
The resurgence of Italian opera was accomplished almost single-handedly by Rossini, a sparkling composer with a talent for comedy who became famous with two operas produced in Venice in 1813, Tancredi and L’italiana in Algeri (The Italian Girl in Algiers). He dominated opera in the peninsula for the next decade and for several years afterwards, even when he was living abroad as a French composer writing for the Paris Opéra. Although his Romanticism was reluctant and even alien to his nature, Rossini became acknowledged as the father of Italian Romantic opera. At the age of thirty-seven, after he had produced Guillaume Tell, he stopped writing operas, but by then his reputation was unassailable.
At the time of Rossini’s retirement, two younger and more naturally Romantic composers were waiting to take over. One was Donizetti, who wrote with a grace and a facility to rival the master: while Rossini had taken sixteen days to write Il barbiere di Siviglia, he allegedly needed only fourteen days to compose L’elisir d’amore. The other was the Sicilian, Bellini, who made audiences swoon with his plangent melodies and his melancholy lyricism. Both men triumphed soon after Guillaume Tell, Donizetti with Anna Bolena in 1830, Bellini a year later with Norma, although he had to wait until the second night for acclamation: at the première at La Scala in Milan the Druid priestess flopped, thus inaugurating an unhappy tradition for tragic women on first nights that went on to engulf La traviata in Venice in 1853 and Madama Butterfly in 1904. In his final opera, I puritani, Bellini created the character Elvira, the role that a century later ensured the fame of the great Greek-American soprano Maria Callas.
The works of these three – and of several lesser composers such as Giovanni Pacini and Saverio Mercadante – transformed Italian opera from a courtly entertainment with mythological figures such as Orpheus into a middle-class passion that demanded historical and romantic tragedies. All of Verdi’s operas end in tragedy (except of course for his two comedies); even in Simon Boccanegra, in which the lovers – almost uniquely – remain united and alive, the heroine is forced to witness the murder of her father in the final scene.
Foreign observers were astonished by the passion for opera in the peninsula: Italians used theatres as Englishmen used clubs, as places where they could meet each other and chat; the fashionable ladies of Milan were thus reduced to opening their salons only on Friday, when La Scala was closed. The energy and enthusiasm of operatic culture reinforced the northern European view that Italian was the language of passion, pleasure and melodrama. Many Italians were doubtless content with this, but some wondered whether the obsession with musical melodrama was injuring their sensibility to art and the subtlety of fine writing. The Sicilian aristocrat Giuseppe di Lampedusa, who was born in the year of La bohème (1896), claimed that ‘opera mania’ had for a century ‘absorbed all the artistic energies of the nation’. There could be no symphonies and no successful plays because ‘music was opera, drama was opera’, even painters had abandoned their canvases to design Don Carlos’s prison and the sacred groves of Norma. By 1910, when the frenzy diminished, Italian intellectual life resembled ‘a field which locusts had visited for a hundred consecutive years’.11
The popularity of opera prompted a wave of theatre construction. In the half-century after the fall of Napoleon, over 600 playhouses were built in Italy, half of which were large enough to put on operas.12 Cities such as Venice and Milan had several theatres where opera could be performed, and most towns of the north and centre had at least one, however small: the orchestra pit in Lucca’s Teatro Giglio is so narrow that the harpist and percussionists have to play from adjacent boxes. Yet it was easier to build opera houses than to people them with adequate musicians. In the heyday of Donizetti and Bellini, Italy possessed some great singers yet its orchestras were so poor that they sometimes broke down during performances; the madcap overture of Guillaume Tell was apparently never played correctly in the peninsula because no orchestra had enough cellists. The most successful composers were thus eager to have their premières only in the finest opera houses – the San Carlo in Naples, La Fenice in Venice and La Scala – before they earned enough renown to have them in Paris. In spite of La Scala’s claims to sempiternal pre-eminence, the best opera house before 1860 was usually the San Carlo. While the Bourbons did not personally enjoy going to the opera, they spent a lot of money on their theatre, providing the best orchestra and many of the best singers. It was the favourite Italian venue for both Rossini and Donizetti.
Around 1840 the great operatic revival seemed in danger of petering out. Bellini, perhaps the most talented of the composers (and the one most admired by Wagner), had died in 1835 at the age of thirty-three. Rossini had another three decades of life but he was depressed and overweight, composing nothing except an occasional bolero or canzone and refusing to write anything of note until the Petite messe solennelle in 1863. Donizetti was just still going, and in 1842 he produced an opera in Vienna and accepted the post of court composer to the Austrian emperor. But this kind and attractive man was already dying from the effects of syphilis; in 1844 he was declared insane and four years later he died in his home town of Bergamo. Italy was plainly in need of a new star.
Giuseppe Verdi was born in 1813 in the hamlet of Roncole, close to the River Po and to the town of Busseto. As France had annexed the region, he began life as a French citizen and was christened Joseph; the following year, after Napoleon’s abdication, he became a subject of the Austrian grand duchess who ruled Parma. In middle age he enjoyed calling himself ‘a peasant from Roncole’ although actually he was the son of an innkeeper wealthy enough to employ labourers on his land and to purchase a second-hand spinet for his musical offspring. Giuseppe’s infant life was subjected to a further myth that he never bothered to refute. His so-called birthplace, his casa natale, was declared a national monument in 1901 and is today a museum, yet he was not in fact born in it. His parents moved to the ‘casa natale’ when he was a teenager.
The boy went to school in Busseto, found a patron who sponsored his music studies in Milan and began a career that was almost overwhelmed at its start by family tragedies. After losing his only sibling at the age of nineteen, Giuseppe married his patron’s daughter when he was twenty-two but had lost through illness his entire young family – daughter, son and wife – by the time he was twenty-six, the age when his first opera (Oberto) was performed at La Scala. After his wife’s death, he tried to get out of composing his second, a comedy, but the impresario insisted – perhaps out of kindness – that the contract should be fulfilled, and Un giorno di regno (King for a Day) was duly staged in Milan. Considering the misery Verdi was going through, and the fact that he had little sense of humour anyway, it is a surprisingly attractive and light-hearted piece which owes much to the work and spirit of Rossini. Unfortunately, the audience at La Scala did not agree. The première was such a fiasco (the word then favoured to denote a first-night flop) that it was taken off next day. The composer did not write another comedy for over fifty years.
Verdi’s career was rescued by Nabucco, which was performed seventy-five times at La Scala in 1842, produced at nineteen other playhouses the year after, and repeated at twenty-five more in 1844.13 This was later proclaimed the first of Verdi’s ‘Risorgimento operas’, since Italian nationalists asserted that audiences living under the Austrian ‘yoke’ identified themselves with the Hebrew slaves sighing for freedom from the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar (Nabucco), who had removed them from Jerusalem. There is not much contemporary evidence, however, to suggest that audiences made this connection or that the composer intended them to do so. The opera became popular chiefly because it was a strong and moving work by a striking new talent.
Nabucco was followed by another so-called ‘Risorgimento opera’, I lombardi alla prima crociata (The Lombards on the First Crusade), the spectators of which were allegedly persuaded to think of themselves as crusaders and the Austrians as their Saracen foes. After that, Verdi composed his most beautiful early opera, Ernani, succeeded by three others (I due Foscari, Giovanna d’Arco and Alzira) which were written hurriedly and carelessly and are among his least memorable works. Next came the third ‘Risorgimento opera’, Attila, in which the audience is supposed to have considered itself Roman and even to have joined in with encouraging shouts when the Roman general tells the King of the Huns, ‘You will have the world, leave Italy to me.’ Early in 1847 Verdi returned to form with Macbeth, enjoyed some success with I masnadieri (The Bandits) at Covent Garden in the presence of Queen Victoria, and followed them up with Il corsaro (The Corsair), one of the weakest of all his works.
Verdi was subsequently acclaimed as ‘il maestro della rivoluzione italiana’, the great patriot whose music inspired people to man the barricades or rush to Garibaldi’s banner in 1848 and 1849. Yet the only opera he produced in ‘the Year of Revolutions’ was an apolitical drama about pirates performed in Trieste, a city of the Austrian Empire. He himself did not go to Trieste but nor did he spend much of 1848 in Italy. Since August of the previous year, he had been living in Paris, converting (not very successfully) I lombardi into Jérusalem for the Opéra. Although the work had its première in November, Verdi remained in Paris even after the risings in Sicily and elsewhere, apparently preferring to witness a revolution in France rather than one in his homeland. Not until after the ‘Five Days’ in Milan that ejected Radetzky did he travel to the Lombard capital.
The composer was of course a patriot with strong sentimental feelings about an independent Italy. At stirring moments he himself could be stirred. From Milan he wrote to Francesco Piave, the librettist of Ernani and Macbeth, regretting that he had missed the fighting and willing to honour the heroes who had driven out the Austrians. ‘The hour of liberation’ was nigh, he proclaimed, as if writing a portentous libretto, no power could resist the people’s wish, and within a few years, perhaps only a few months, Italy would be ‘free, united and republican’. Piave, he sternly told his correspondent, must not again talk to him about writing music.
What has got into you? Do you think that I want to bother myself now with notes, with sounds? There cannot be any music welcome to Italian ears in 1848 except the music of cannon! I would not write a note for all the money in the world: I would feel an immense remorse, using music-paper, which is so good for making shells.14
Later in the letter, after noting that Piave had become a national guard in Manin’s Venetian Republic, Verdi confided that, if he had been able to enlist, he would have been a common soldier rather than a ‘wretched tribune’, but he did not explain why he had been unable to enlist; he was only thirty-four, fifteen years younger than Azeglio, who had managed the transition from artist to officer without difficulty. The real explanation doubtless came in the next paragraph when he told Piave he had ‘to go back to France because of obligations and business’, which he clarified as meaning two operas to write and a lot of money to collect. Verdi was thus a patriot so long as patriotism did not interfere with work or business. Subsequently it transpired that the chief purpose of his Italian visit had been not to applaud the revolution or tour the barricades but to buy a farm near Roncole, which later became his home. By the middle of May, he was safely back in France, after just over a month in Italy and just before the battle for Lombardy began.
From Paris Verdi wailed at the armistice that followed the Piedmontese defeat in the first Battle of Custoza. ‘What a wretched time we live in! What a pygmy time! Nothing great: not even great crimes!’ He himself composed the music for a battle hymn, ‘Suona la tromba’ (‘Sound the Trumpet’), which had been written by the young poet Goffredo Mameli and which Verdi sent to Mazzini in the hope that it would ‘soon be sung on the Lombard plains, to the music of cannon’.15 Mazzini had requested the hymn in May, but the composer did not send it until the autumn, by which time both Lombardy and the Italian cannons had been silenced. Although it might have been used in later campaigns, the work never caught on, and a different poem by Mameli, ‘Fratelli d’Italia’ (‘Brothers of Italy’), set to music by Michele Novaro, eventually became the Italian national anthem. Mameli himself was killed in 1849, at the age of twenty-one, fighting with Garibaldi’s forces in Rome.
While he was in Paris, Verdi wrote his one indisputable ‘Risorgimento opera’, La battaglia di Legnano, a work that celebrated what his librettist called ‘the most glorious epoch of Italian history’ – the twelfth century. Staged in January 1849 in the Rome of Mazzini’s republic, its composer left France with reluctance to conduct the opening performances; again he stayed in Italy for just over a month and again he left before the real fighting – Garibaldi’s defence of the city – took place. In the circumstances of the moment, the opera could hardly have failed to be a success. From the opening chorus, which declared that Italy was ‘at last … a single people of heroes’, to the final act (‘To Die for the Fatherland’), for which an encore became obligatory, the applause was so loud that the music could hardly be heard.
Verdi was evidently the composer laureate in Rome at the beginning of 1849, but he does not appear to have been regarded as such in other parts of Italy during the revolutions. Some patriots wondered why his previous three operas had been about brigands, pirates and a Scottish usurper married to a murderess. Others were puzzled that, at such a critical time, he had chosen to write about a medieval battle instead of a more recent event such as the ‘Five Days’ of Milan. Following the proclamations of the new constitutions early in 1848, a few towns staged Attila and Ernani, but elsewhere Verdi’s name on the posters was absent. As the musicologist Roger Parker has shown, patriots had little appetite for the ‘Risorgimento operas’ even in the most important year of the Risorgimento. The people of Bologna, one theatrical journal observed, preferred to sing nationalist songs themselves rather than watch I lombardi, while the arrival of Nabucco in Naples was a disappointment because audiences were not at that moment interested in ‘the traditions … of the ancient Orient’. Considering a production of Attila in Ferrara, the author of another article wondered why it was necessary to ‘recall an epoch so humiliating for Italy’ rather than stage an opera ‘more suitable to the current times’ that would ‘recall only those facts that lend glory to our most dear homeland’. Parker also discovered that Verdi’s music did not feature in the concerts performed in liberated Milan between the ‘Five Days’ and the return of Radetzky four months later. Instead of listening to the most talented Italian still composing, the Milanese preferred choruses from lesser musicians that urged ‘Italians into the fray’ and told them not to sleep ‘until Italy belongs to us’.16
None of this would have surprised Verdi, who never thought of himself as the ‘maestro della rivoluzione’. He had patriotic and republican instincts, he had given his children names from ancient Rome (Virginia and Icilio Romano) that seemed to reflect this, he considered himself to be Italian and he wanted Italy to be free. Yet he had no passionate animus against Austria. In 1836 he had composed a cantata for the Habsburg emperor’s birthday, and his first visit abroad was to Vienna, where he conducted Nabucco, a work that evidently did not upset the Austrians. On his return to Parma, he conducted the same opera before the Austrian archduchess, Marie-Louise, who granted him an audience and gave him a present. Subsequently she became the dedicatee of his next work, I lombardi.
If Verdi felt comfortable with the Austrians, they were similarly untroubled by him. Their censorship was generally light before 1848, and even afterwards they allowed revivals of Attila and Nabucco at La Scala. A few alterations were demanded for Ernani but none for Nabucco or indeed Attila, and only one, an esoteric change, for I lombardi, where the words ‘Ave Maria’ were substituted by ‘Salve Maria’. Censors in Lombardy-Venetia, and in other parts of Italy, were at the time less concerned with politics than with questions of religion and morals. The Austrians were more perturbed a little later by Verdi’s Stiffelio, in which a Protestant minister, quoting the New Testament, forgives his adulterous wife, than by a Roman general telling Attila to leave Italy to him.
The Habsburg authorities did not regard Verdi as politically dangerous before 1848 because they had no reason to do so. The composer was a man of range as well as talent, and he had no intention of limiting his settings to his time or his country. In fact he preferred to base his works on the dramas of foreign writers: only five of his twenty-six operas have an Italian provenance. Among the dramatists he used were Byron, Voltaire, Eugène Scribe and Alexandre Dumas fils, but his favourites were Schiller, Victor Hugo and, above all, Shakespeare. Apart from Macbeth, the English playwright provided Verdi with the material for his two last and perhaps greatest operas, Otello and the incomparable Falstaff; he also inspired him with the idea of King Lear, which Verdi hoped for years to turn into a huge, magnificent, unconventional opera.
Since the era of the Risorgimento coincided with that of Romantic opera, subsequent generations have spent much time searching for connections between the two. Doubtless they would have liked to make them with Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti, but the last two had died too soon, and the first was politically unacceptable. Rossini’s operas contain the odd suggestively patriotic phrase. The soprano in Tancredi, for example, has to sing of ‘cara Italia’, while the protagonist in L’italiana in Algeri exhorts her listeners to ‘think of the fatherland’ and do their duty; the composer had even written a hymn for Murat that began with the line, ‘Italy, arise; the time has come’. Yet such occasional sentiments could not rescue Rossini from his well-known transgressions: that he had been a conservative happily working for the Bourbons, that he was a friend of Metternich for over forty years, that he had written embarrassing cantatas for the reactionary Holy Alliance,‡ and that in April 1848 he had been so frightened by the situation in Bologna that he had run away to Florence.
Scourers of Verdi’s librettos were able to affirm their hero’s patriotic credentials without having to deal with encumbrances like these. The connections they made were, nevertheless, often tenuous: no reading of Macbeth’s libretto can convince one that Verdi was thinking of Italy when he made his Scottish exiles sing of their ‘oppressed homeland’. Similar connections were also made by foreign writers who, though often sceptical about other claims of united Italy, propagated the Verdian myth without investigating how much of it was true. A typical example is the Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who claimed that Verdi ‘lived near the centre of gravity of his nation, and spoke to his countrymen and for them, as no one else did, not even Manzoni or Garibaldi’. The composer, he alleged, was tireless in his work for the cause. ‘The hymn which Verdi wrote for Mazzini is only an episode in a single great campaign.’ The patriot ‘responded deeply and personally to every twist and turn in the Italian struggle for unity and freedom. The Hebrews of Nabucco,’ Berlin added, piling up the mistakes in the space of half a paragraph, ‘were Italians in captivity’, and their famous chorus was ‘the national prayer for resurrection’.17
On glancing at Verdi’s librettos, one quickly becomes aware of the complex and intimate nature of his stories. The typical Verdian plot has the tenor and soprano falling in love and being thwarted by the baritone, sometimes with the assistance of the mezzo. Even Legnano is based on a love triangle: the soprano had loved the tenor but, believing him to be dead, had married the baritone, who swears vengeance on realizing that his wife and the resurrected tenor still love each other. Any political messages in the works are subordinate to the amorous problems of the leading characters and are further obscured by the difficulty in the ‘Risorgimento operas’ of identifying the true villains. If the crusaders in I lombardi are the good guys, why are they trying to kill each other, and why is the Saracen Orontes the opera’s most appealing figure? Why does Attila, the archetypal barbarian invader, become the most sympathetic character in the eponymous opera? Why in Legnano is another ferocious aggressor, Barbarossa, treated so gently, and why do audiences need to be reminded that Italy’s historic divisions were so deep that the citizens of Como had fought on the emperor’s side against the Lombard League?
The myth most frequently repeated is that audiences at Nabucco identified themselves with the Hebrew slaves, regarded their chorus (‘Va pensiero’) as a kind of secret national anthem, and demanded encores of it at every performance. A glance at the words, by Temistocle Solera, makes one wonder how such a myth could ever have gained credence.
Go thoughts on golden wings,
Go rest upon the slopes, the hills,
Where, soft and mild, the sweet breezes
Of our homeland smell so sweet!
Greet the banks of the Jordan,
The ruined towers of Zion.
Oh my homeland so beautiful and lost!
Oh, remembrance so dear and fateful!
Golden harp of the prophetic bards:
Why hang mute upon the willow?
Rekindle the memories in our breast,
Tell us of times past.18
The words and music are beautiful, but they are a lament for the past rather than a martial call for action; not until the end of the scene, and only after Zechariah has told them to ‘rise up’ and stop behaving like ‘timorous women’, do the slaves think of breaking their chains. The chorus itself contains nothing relevant to the current situation in Italy. Contemporary Italians could still smell the ‘sweet breezes’ of their homeland, they could still see such towers as they had not demolished and they could still enjoy the banks of the River Po, even with an Austrian viceroy in Milan. They had no need of ‘so dear and fateful’ a ‘remembrance’.
While investigating Nabucco, Roger Parker was puzzled to find that, although contemporary journals often wrote about other scenes of the opera, they made few references to ‘Va pensiero’ and no mention of spectators demanding encores. Later he discovered that the tale of the encores had been constructed by Franco Abbiati, the author of a four-volume biography of Verdi published as recently as 1959. In his support Abbiati had cited one particular review, which had made no mention of the encores, but had evidently taken the idea from a different review in a different journal reporting a different performance in which an encore had been given to a different chorus, ‘Immenso Jehova’, which concludes the opera and contains not the slightest hint of aspirational nationalism.19
Music can, of course, stir people and encourage them to have noble and heroic sentiments even if that had not been the composer’s intention. There are moments in Beethoven’s symphonies that can make one feel one is leading a cavalry charge. Donizetti had had no propaganda project in mind when he wrote Gemma di Vergy in 1834, but its performance in the revolutionary atmosphere of Palermo at the end of 1847 led to shouts of ‘Long live Italy!’, ‘Long live the pope!’ and even ‘Long live the king!’ Norma had a similar effect, equally unintended by its long-dead composer, at La Scala in 1859. Some of Verdi’s operas, performed in the feverish ambience of certain Risorgimento years, also inspired people to see unintended patriotism in the works and to shout their approval at them. Yet with the sole exception of Legnano in Rome, the evidence for political shouting – as opposed to the usual baying of claques – is weak. Verdi was popular outside as well as inside the opera house because he wrote melodies which people could sing in taverns or whistle on street corners, tunes that could be performed by town bands, on barrel-organs and later on the accordion. His music and plots inspired many people and doubtless incited some of them to take up arms or make other sacrifices for Italy. Yet the operas of other composers had a similar effect, Bellini’s I puritani, for example, or Donizetti’s Marino Faliero.
Nearly all of Verdi’s early operas – the fifteen he wrote before 1849 – soon went out of fashion, though a few enjoyed a revival in the twentieth century and then joined the international repertoire. Most of them share defects seldom found in the later works, including an over-hearty boisterousness and noise levels so much higher than those of his predecessors that Verdi seems to belong to a special category of loudness beside Beethoven; Queen Victoria was at least half right when she complained that I masnadieri was ‘very noisy and trivial’. In addition, Verdi’s orchestration in the early works is often primitive, sometimes repetitious and on occasion little more than an accompaniment, the equivalent of strumming, when all the strings are playing in unison. As Verdi rarely began to orchestrate before he started rehearsals, this is not altogether surprising. Critics have accused him of composing ‘barrel-organ music’, which is an unfair charge, but he did make excessive use of stage-bands, and some of his instrumental music carries a whiff of the fairground.
Artistic evaluation is fraught with the problems of subjectivity and in Verdi’s case by the knowledge of how great a composer he became later, from Rigoletto (1851) onwards. Yet it is clear that, just as he was not a national patriotic figure in 1848, neither was he the Italians’ favourite operatic composer at that time. Donizetti’s operas were performed far more frequently. If Verdi had died after Legnano, at the age of thirty-five, his legacy would have looked poor compared to Bellini’s, who had died at thirty-three. Without the knowledge that they had preceded Il trovatore and La traviata, it is unlikely that many of the early operas would be performed today; some of them, such as Oberto, Alzira and Giovanna d’Arco, might have disappeared altogether. Perhaps only Nabucco, Ernani and Macbeth would now be in the repertoire.