5
ANOTHER LOSS AND A FIASCO
In June 1840 Verdi’s wife Margherita – his adored Ghita – fell suddenly and seriously ill, so seriously that doctors could do nothing to help her and warned Verdi she might die. He sent word to his father-in-law in Busseto to come to Milan immediately.
Antonio Barezzi arrived in time to hold his daughter in his arms as she died. Emotions still raw the following year, he wrote a harrowing account in his diary:
Through a dreadful disease, perhaps unknown to the doctors, there died in my arms in Milan at noon on the day of Corpus Domini, my beloved daughter Margherita in the flower of her years and at the culmination of her good fortune, because [she was] married to the excellent young man Giuseppe Verdi, Maestro di Musica. I beg for peace for her pure soul, even as I weep over this tragic loss.16
Margherita’s fatal illness has been described variously as encephalitis or rheumatic fever. It is impossible to know nearly two centuries later exactly what the disease was or how she contracted it. We can be certain only that it took her life with relentless speed.
As further evidence of the unquenchable admiration Barezzi had for Verdi, even in writing about the tragedy of Ghita’s death he finds words to praise his son-in-law.
To summarise, then, the grim roll call of tragedy that had been inflicted on the young composer. As he approached his twenty-seventh birthday, Verdi had lost his two infant children and then his wife. From husband and father to childless widower in the blisteringly short period of one year and ten months.
Before I detail the devastating effect of all this on the young man, I want to pause to recount Verdi’s own timetable of these multiple tragedies. It might seem somewhat heartless to challenge him regarding his memory of such awful events, but it is further evidence of the extraordinary lengths he went to in order to heighten the drama of his early life, and in so doing to wilfully, if mischievously, mislead future biographers. My brief, after all, is to reveal the man.*
His biographer Pougin (whose book was published in 1879 – nearly forty years after the events) quotes Verdi as telling him, ‘A third coffin goes out of my house. I was alone … alone … In the short space of two months three persons dear to me had gone for ever; my family was destroyed.’
Two months? It seems Verdi was in no doubt, and had been in no doubt for some time. When the same account had appeared in a magazine interview ten years earlier, Verdi confirmed it was true: ‘That’s the true story of my life, absolutely and completely true.’17
Verdi had conflated the tragic events of twenty-two months into just two. Could he have been genuinely mistaken about the dates on which he had lost those dearest to him? Impossible, in my view. Could the writer have mistakenly omitted the word ‘twenty’? Possible, but the same mistake in two accounts? And Verdi’s assertion that it really did all happen within two months suggests he was challenged about it. The official Registers of Deaths give the actual dates spanning twenty-two months. But he is adamant.
If it was a wilful compression of the facts, why did Verdi do it? To make an already shocking story even more so. It was in the nature of the man. He was a dramatist. As his biographer Julian Budden puts it, ‘[It was] a fine feat of telescopic memory.’18
What we need be in no doubt about is the effect these multiple losses had on Verdi at the time. His boyhood friend Demaldè described him as sinking into so deep a depression that he gave up everything ‘completely and for ever’. This included music. ‘He thought of nothing but hiding himself in some dark place and living out his miserable existence.’19
Verdi meant it. He had had enough. It was as if the fates were conspiring against him, determined to thwart him in every area of his life. His personal life was in ruins. Not just one death, or even two, but three, with the loss of his wife meaning he could not even contemplate having more children.
And in his chosen profession of music? His first opera performed to a modicum of success – tantamount to failure in his eyes – and inspiration waning even before the latest loss. And he was supposed to be writing a comedy?
We can easily understand why he wanted to get out of Milan, leave the city far behind and return to his roots, back to the countryside of the Po valley where he felt truly at home (even if he had been less than complimentary about it in the past). Maybe now was the moment for a complete change of direction, to pursue the only other path that truly appealed to him. Farming and agriculture. Verdi the farmer, not the musician.
It would be a recurrent theme throughout his life. When music failed to give him the satisfaction he desired, or when others failed to accord it the esteem he felt it deserved, his thoughts would turn to his next love, agriculture.
Leave Milan is exactly what he now did. Significantly he did not return to Le Roncole, but to Busseto and the sanctuary of Barezzi’s house. His relationship with both his parents was now distant. It was as if he had outgrown them, moved beyond the small world in which they existed.
In Busseto, by contrast, he knew he would be among like-minded people. He could converse on a more elevated level. He knew too that he would be cared for and protected, both emotionally and financially, even if there was the pain of all the memories of Ghita in the house where he had first met her and where they had lived together as man and wife.
Verdi’s mental condition deteriorated, to the extent there was speculation that he was losing his sanity. No doubt to the anguish of his father-in-law, who had such faith in him as a musician, Verdi sent off an angry letter to Merelli telling him he was abandoning the opera he was supposed to be working on, and had no intention of returning to Milan.
One can only imagine the effect this had on the impresario, after all the problems he had had with singers and illness, postponements and cancellations. Now the young composer who was showing promise, in whom he had put his faith, had decided to throw it all in.
He knew, of course, the dreadful emotional pressure Verdi was under, and he must have weighed this up very carefully before deciding on his next course of action. It was in his own interests to play a strong hand, remind Verdi he was under contract to complete Un giorno di regno, and hold him to it. But that could deliver the coup de grâce to Verdi’s mental fragility, and even if he did force Verdi to complete the opera, who could tell whether it would result in anything worthwhile?
But ultimately Merelli had no other option. Rehearsals were due to start in August, just weeks away, with the premiere on 5 September. The season was set. It was too late to cancel. He told Verdi in no uncertain terms he was contracted to complete the opera, and he intended to hold him to it.
I imagine Barezzi’s encouragement ringing in his ears as the young composer set out once again for the city in which he had experienced so much personal tragedy. Back once more to the small apartment he had shared with his wife and infant son, and all the familiar furniture they had brought with them from Busseto. Alone now in the apartment in which Ghita and Icilio had died.
He also had with him a small box containing Margherita’s locket, her wedding ring and a strand of her hair, which he kept with him for the rest of his life.
Under excruciatingly awful circumstances, Verdi set to work once more on Un giorno. As he completed each section, he supervised rehearsals. Tired, his emotions on a knife edge, just when he needed cooperation and enthusiasm from his singers, he did not receive it.
Two members of the cast, the lead tenor and soprano, both of whom had sung in Oberto the year before, made it clear that they were not happy. The soprano, in fact, told Merelli she wanted to pull out of the production altogether, requiring him to put out a statement saying she was recovering from an unspecified illness.
Given the fraught circumstances, it is a significant feat of musicianship that Verdi completed the full-length opera in time for the scheduled premiere of 5 September 1840.
It would be heart-warming to report that, on opening night on Europe’s most prestigious operatic stage, singers and musicians rose to the occasion and gave Verdi the success he deserved, thus lifting him from the depths of personal despair and establishing him as the most talented young composer of opera in Italy.
The exact opposite happened. Extraordinary as it is to report, both lead singers at times did not even sing their arias, instead mouthing the words – to ‘spare their voices’, as one critic noted. Some of the arias were greeted with catcalls and whistles. Verdi, sitting with the orchestral players as was customary, heard it all.
The critics were merciless. ‘A real mess’, said the review in La fama. Others bemoaned the lack of humour and sparkle – a comic opera without comedy. Two critics mentioned the tragic personal circumstances under which Verdi had composed the opera, but compassion was not enough to save it.
Merelli had not just a flop on his hands, but a fiasco, in the full brutal sense of the Italian word. One can only imagine what was going through his mind when he made the decision to cancel the production immediately, after just a single performance. It simply cannot get worse than that for a composer, or indeed an impresario – except that an impresario can blame the composer; the composer cannot blame the impresario.
What, then, must have been going through Verdi’s mind as he returned to his empty apartment after that one performance? If he was resolved before returning to Milan to give up composing, how much more determined must he have been that night to throw it all in and become a farmer?
The following day he was summoned to Merelli’s office, fully expecting to be sped on his way to a life in agriculture. If that was not to happen, he would take matters into his own hand. He would ask for his contract to be cancelled, so that he could leave Milan. This is what he told Demaldè, who duly reported it in his memoirs.
But that is not quite the way things happened. Merelli had a problem. He had no choice but to cancel Un giorno, but he needed to put something in its place. It so happened that the scenery for Oberto was still in the warehouse, and many of the singers were still familiar with it.
He told Verdi he would re-stage Oberto, opening on 17 October, and he wanted Verdi to oversee it. Just as importantly – and posterity owes Merelli a debt for this – rather than attacking Verdi, criticising him, blaming him, he actually set about encouraging him, telling him not to let himself be defeated by one unhappy experience.
Verdi’s suitably dramatic account of what transpired at the meeting, related to Pougin many years later, has him demanding that Merelli return his contract, with the impresario replying, ‘Listen, Verdi, I cannot force you to compose! But my faith in you remains unshaken. Who knows whether you may or may not decide some day to begin to write again? Just let me know two months before a season, and I promise you that your opera will be given.’20
We can forgive Verdi if there is an element of exaggeration in his account. He was looking back on what he knew by then was a true turning point. The life of a farmer, at least for now, would have to be put on hold.
Verdi threw himself into overseeing a revival of his first opera. Oberto opened once again, on schedule, and the same audience that had booed and whistled Un giorno now applauded Oberto. The opera ran for a creditable seventeen performances.
I said this was a turning point for Verdi, but he – and we – know that only with the benefit of hindsight. His resolve to give up music was not entirely sublimated by the success of Oberto.
He was still reluctant to pick up his pen again. But what is of supreme importance – again evident only with hindsight – is that Verdi had learned lessons, lessons that could not have been learned in any other way than through the experience of total failure.
He acknowledged this nearly twenty years later in letters to close friends, one a publisher, the other a critic. Of course he is writing as a famous and successful composer, and the urge to dramatise is as irresistible as ever. There is also a large degree of self-pity. Nevertheless, the sheer rawness of what happened that night still consumes him.
[The audience] abused the opera of a poor, sick young man, harassed by the pressure of the schedule, and heartsick and torn by a horrible misfortune! Oh, if only the audience had – I do not say applauded, but had borne that opera in silence, I would not have had words enough to thank them.21
But he gives back as good as he has received. What is particularly interesting about this next passage is the low esteem in which he holds his own profession, even when he is at the height of it.
I accept the whistles [of the audience], on the condition that I am not asked to give back anything in exchange for its applause. We poor gypsies, charlatans, and whatever-you-want-to-call-us, are forced to sell our efforts, our ideas, our ravings, [getting paid in] gold. For 3 lire the audience buys the right to whistle or applaud us. Our destiny is to resign ourselves to the situation. That is the whole story.22
He goes on to say that the dreadful experience of that night taught him how to treat success or failure in the future:
At twenty-five [sic] I already knew what ‘the public’ meant. From then on, successes have never made the blood rush to my head, and fiascos have never discouraged me. If I went on with this unfortunate career, it was because at twenty-five, it was too late for me to do anything else, and because I was not physically strong enough to go back to my fields.23
He might not always have put his own wise words into practice in later years, but these excerpts from his letters suggest he had recognised the all-important qualities necessary for the successful pursuit of a career as opera composer.
He had learned something else too from the fiasco of Un giorno. Comic opera was not for him. Comedy was not his forte. Drama: that was what came naturally, whether he was composing opera, describing his life, or writing letters.
It was a lesson well learned. It would be fifty-two years before he would compose a second comic opera.
