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Giuseppe Verdi 1813–1901

In the Roman Forum, near the Arch of Severus, stands a solitary column. Other such pillars, and remains of yet others, are found in groups; this one has no rivals and no companions. That it was erected in honour of Phocas, a very bad specimen of even Roman emperors, and that the debased Romans of Pope Gregory’s day, not having it in them to make a column, stole one from some ancient temple, is nothing to my present purpose. I use the lonely memorial as a symbol of what Verdi was when all his great contemporaries had gone, leaving him solitary in a much impoverished world. The symbol yet stands; the towering man of genius is no more; that pillar has fallen and left a blank in the scene of which it was so conspicuous a feature.

Italy needed a new composer when, in 1839, Giuseppe Verdi appeared on the lyric stage with his first essay in opera – Oberto, Conte di S. Bonifacio. Donizetti and Bellini had flooded the world with their melodies, and although the elder of these minstrels had in him the power to write such music as the Contract Scene in Lucia and the last act of La Favorita, the public began to feel a need of something stronger – something of greater dramatic force and illustrative truth; some composer who, less careful about the symmetry and charm of his tunes, could get a musical grasp of dramatic situations, and, so to speak, tear the heart out of them. The hour and the man, as usual, came together, and when Verdi’s Nabuccodonosor appeared in 1842, I Lombardi a year later, and Ernani in 1844, the world of music began to feel that a new and dominating spirit had arrived. The mass of the Italian public yielded itself frankly to the stimulus of the fresh, young, virile voice. It is nearly always the ‘common people’ who are first to do this. They have no scruples to remove, no theories to safeguard, no prejudices to overcome. With musicians and men of culture the case was different, and even those who kept an open mind held aloof through the timidity which that which is new and strange often inspires. Horses can reconcile themselves to the rush and roar of a passing train, but when they see the thing a first time there is a natural disposition to bolt.

In England, the strenuous, fiery composer, whose music flamed along in such an unmeasured manner, met with strong opposition; in some cases with downright abuse. Here is an example of overdoing, provoked by a performance of Nabucco, under the new title of Nino, at Her Majesty’s Theatre, on March 3, 1846: ‘Ernani led us to suspect, and Nabucco has certified our suspicion, that of all the modern Italian composers, Verdi is the most thoroughly insignificant. We listen, vainly, as the work proceeds, for the semblance of a melody. There is positively nothing, not even a feeling of rhythm – but rather, indeed, a very unpleasant disregard for that important element of musical art. The choruses are nothing but the commonest tunes, arranged almost invariably in unison – perhaps because the composer knows not how to write in parts. The concerted music is patchy, rambling, and unconnected. The cantabiles are always unrhythmical – and the absence of design is everywhere observable. The harmonies are either the tritest commonplaces, or something peculiarly odd and unpleasant. Nothing can possibly be more feeble than the orchestration. The employment of the wind instruments is remarkably infelicitous, and all the experiments are failures. The overture is the poorest stuff imaginable, and yet the only glimpses of tune in the opera are comprised within its limits – and these are subsequently employed throughout the work ad nauseam. Serious criticism would be thrown away upon such a work. Either “young Verdi” must be a very clever man of business, or he must have come into the world with a silver spoon in his mouth. His popularity in Italy signifies nothing – but the reputation he elsewhere maintains is an enigma. We might overlook his ignorance of all the rules of art, were there in him any indication of natural feeling, or the shadow of inventive power, but – alas, no – all is a dead flat – a dreary waste of barren emptiness!’

Clearly this critical horse was in a state of panic terror at the apparition of the Italian locomotive. After a time he became less susceptible, and ambled along almost comfortably when the train passed his paddock. Apropos to a revival of Ernani in 1849, the same journalist wrote: ‘We are not of those who scoff and sneer at the scores of Verdi because they contain neither the depth of Mozart and Beethoven nor the inventiveness of Rossini and Auber. He may not be as clever as Donizetti, nor as melodious as Bellini, nor as dramatic as Meyerbeer, nor as overpowering as Halevy (!); must it therefore follow that he has no merit whatever? Far be it from us to affirm any such thing, although, as our readers must by this time be well aware, we are no great lovers of his music. Still, he has strong dramatic feeling, and is by no means devoid of energy and passion. If these sometimes degenerate into rant, it proceeds from exuberance rather than poverty of conception.’ See, now, the eye-opening effect of use and wont. Our friend of 1849 recognised qualities which were just as evident three years earlier. They were only less familiar; that was all.

A French journalist, who obtained an interview with Verdi at Milan, in 1845, has given us a glimpse of the composer as he was in those comparatively young days. From him we learn that even then Verdi was reputed to keep people a off by a distant manner: ‘I found him to be anything but the cold and reserved person he had been represented to me, absorbed in his art, and taking no interest in anything else. He received me with the utmost cordiality, and with an ease and grace truly French.’ Then we have a thumb-nail sketch of the rising master: ‘In person, Verdi is extremely handsome, with chestnut hair, and blue eyes that have an expression at once soft and vivacious. When he speaks his face lights up, and an incessant mobility of expression reflects the varied feelings that are passing within him... His tastes are the most simple in the world. The room in which he works contains no furniture but four or five chairs, his piano, a statuette of himself, and over the piano, a frame to which are suspended three coronals, and within the frame the words, “Le chemin de la posterité.” ’ The writer adds: ‘The works of this young composer are so sought after in Italy that they command their weight in gold, and he has already realised a handsome fortune.’ It is not difficult to trace a connection between the wealth of Verdi – which eventually became very great, measured by the standard of Italy – and the simple, restrained life of the composer, whose devotion to his art took the power away from dangerous temptations. It may here be stated, in passing, that the French journalist’s article appeared in English under the heading ‘A Day with Verdi,’ and was answered by parody in ‘A Day with Blewett.’ Blewett, it should be said, was a very humdrum musical personage of the period. Such were the amenities of the forties.

Strong dramatic feeling, energy, passion, exuberant conception – these were the qualities recognised, somewhat tardily and no doubt reluctantly, by the critic I have quoted. Let that critic in turn have his due. With entire accuracy he pointed out the specially strong features in the Italian composer’s musical character. Verdi, from his earliest stage work down to the time when years dimmed his native fires and energy relaxed, was one who loved strength – strength of feeling, of expression, and of dramatic situations which favoured its display. He had no affinity with the kid glove and rosewater school. Let it be granted that, in his earlier works, he was often crude and violent – a fact very much insisted upon by his critics. For his crudities it can at least be said that they never stood in the way of appropriate effects; for his violence it may be urged that it only matched the violence of the subjects he selected or accepted.

Verdi, as we all have had reason to know, loved a full-flavoured story. Had he been an ordinary reader of novels, he would have invested heavily in ‘shilling shockers.’ Il Trovatore was quite in his line; so were Attila and Macbeth, Rigoletto and La Forza del Destino, Les Vepres Siciliennes, and Don Carlos. Verdi has been charged with favouring the ‘raw head and bloody bones’ type of libretti. He simply took his good wherever he found it – the good being whatever called forth the powers within him which he felt to be strongest; which, in point of fact, would not respond to any milder invocation. Hence the typical Verdian opera has in it a virile element of fierceness. Its neck, like that of the Biblical war-horse, is ‘clothed with thunder,’ and it is by no means averse from shouting ‘Ha, ha!’ when blows resound and blood flows. Intense and powerfully concentrated feeling naturally led to the employment of every means. It was charged against him by early opponents that his orchestration was wasteful and ridiculous excess, that he evoked loud noises for their own sake, and paid no heed to the wreckage of voices in trying to make themselves heard through the din of brass and drums. There is no doubt that, in the matter of noise, Verdi anticipated Wagner and the modern Russians, though by no means to the full extent. Perhaps he could do no other. In whatever he was deficient, he lacked nothing of honesty, of faithfulness to his own nature and fidelity to his own ideal. The strenuousness of his orchestration was in him; it was part of himself, and it found outward expression as a matter of course, concerning which his mind perceived no possible shadow of doubt. Memorials of Verdi will presently abound. Should one of these assert his absolute sincerity – the quality which, both in art and life, distinguished his long career – it will testify straight to the point.

Nothing in the first of the criticisms quoted , above is so surprising as the declaration that Verdi was no melodist. The writer, it is true, knew only two of his operas, Ernani and Nabucco, which are not among the best, and, therefore, some excuse may be allowed. It would be waste of time, however, to treat the charge with any seriousness. Not only was Verdi a melodist, but one of singular power in the invention of phrases which seemed to grow naturally out of the text, and to fit the situation, as a well-made glove fits the hand. No reader of this magazine can be at a loss for examples, and I will mention only two. First, the cantabile phrase repeatedly sung by Violetta in the gambling scene of La Traviata. The beauty and pathos of this little melody, heightened by contrast with the frivolity proper to the heartless crowd around, place it among the highest illustrations of adaptiveness in art. My second example is found in the well known air, ‘Di quella pira,’ sung by Manrico in Il Trovatore – an air otherwise notable for one of those original rhythms that give such strikingly fresh effect to the composer’s themes. The group of semiquavers which constitutes a distinguishing feature suggests to me a shudder at the sight of agony and death. Other examples, a crowd of them, clamour for equal notice, but enough if I merely indicate the broken and passionate utterances of Leornora in the ‘Miserere’ of Il Trovatore as contrasted with the unsympathetic formality of the regulation Prayer. I have mentioned these matters more for my own gratification than because readers need to be convinced on the points they concern. The musical quality of Verdi, seen in the light of his later works, is not for doubt, and absolutely refuses liberty of denial.

With the continued ripening of his powers, the manifestations of Verdi’s genius obeyed the law of change. So did the genius of Beethoven; so does that of all really gifted men who have no need to stereotype themselves lest their last state should be worse than the first. But change operates differently in different cases. With Beethoven it was purely personal, unaffected by anything extraneous to the composer himself. In the instance of Verdi, it marched pari passu with the advance of music generally, and the improvement of public taste in regard thereto. That march was never suspended; hardly ever interrupted by weakening and wavering. It continued to the end; reaching the final goal in the bright and happy music of Falstaff.

But the whole tenor of the master’s life and character protects him from any charge of mere opportunism. His earlier works were as sincere as those of later years, for it was not in him to write down to the capacity and taste of the public. His pride and high sense of honour and duty would have revolted against the mere suggestion of such a course. Indeed, every consideration bearing upon the case goes to show that he put himself as much into his first opera as into his last, widely as they differ in manner. Between these extremes lies a long stretch of time, and as, like all real live men, Verdi possessed the faculty of growth, his musical expression underwent inevitable modifications. But it is not wise to assume that therefore the earlier operas are works worthy only of neglect. In some respects, as a matter of fact, they are more interesting than their younger companions, because of the youthful frankness with which they reveal the composer. Listen to the words of Henry Chorley – no mean critic – written as far back as 1846, when only the early works were in existence. Chorley was by no means an out-and-out admirer of Verdi, yet, recognising the master’s earnestness in attempting dramatic expression, he said: ‘He is not tame or timid in his movements on his stilts. Some of his concerted pieces combine a group of contrasted emotions, within the conditions of regular musical form, which shows an advance upon his predecessors. Signor Verdi is not to be disdained, as a shallow or perversely insincere man should be. It is evident – howsoever incomplete may have been his training, however mistaken his aspirations must be proved, and thought to have been and to be – that he has aspired, and in this aspiration he is separated far from the dolce far niente folk who, once having got art and its resources into their hands, have made of the same toys, or means of money getting. What there is good in his music, betokens certain elevation of instinct and ambition.’ This witness to the Italian master’s honesty and sincerity, as well as to his high aim, is the more important because given in view of only a very partial revelation of the man and his mission.

Writing as above, I have taken no note of the fact that, in England especially, and more or less everywhere, Verdi’s operas have gone out of fashion. That does not touch the question of their work; fashions come and go, and neither their coming is evidence for the temporarily favoured nor their going testimony against the cast off. The higher tribunal – the final court of appeal, where sit as judges the wise and prudent of every nation – that alone decides upon value. To those judges, who are unaffected by mere vogue, the position of Verdi among dramatic composers must be committed. They will say of him, or I am miserably mistaken, that not only was he a sincere and devoted musician, but also that he achieved great things, that every note of passion, every shade of sentiment finds in his works true and natural expression. To say this truthfully of any composer is to crown him with unfading laurels.

Dignified and honourable in all his relations with art, Verdi was, as a man and a citizen, worthy of profound respect. His worst enemy, if he had an enemy at all, could not charge him with the meanness of a time-server, the degradation of a self-advertiser, or the vanity that seeks to make a figure before the world. As a Senator of Italy, a member of many Orders, and a friend of kings and princes, Verdi might have lived much in the eyes of men. He preferred to do otherwise. He desired no titles, or he would not have refused them; he never sought ‘the applause of listening Senates to command,’ and the atmosphere of high social places was not that which he freely breathed. ‘I have lived a musician,’ he once said, ‘and a musician I desire to die.’ His art, and his avocations at Santa Agata, made up his life. He wished for nothing better; he could have obtained nothing better. So, respecting himself, and respected by others, the hours of his long lifeday were passed. How nobly passed, as the old composer’s native energv spent itself in providing a Home of Rest for musicians less fortunate than himself, and as he resolved that his remains should repose among them after a funeral rite as unpretending as that of the poorest! The simple little procession passing through the streets of Milan, thousands of people looking silently on – in this there was the spirit of true greatness by which epithet the world gave its final salute to Giuseppe Verdi. JOSEPH BENNETT.

Musical Times, March 1901