10

Young Verdi

By the mid-1840s Bellini had been dead for a decade and Donizetti was forced by illness into premature retirement. As we saw in the last chapter, both had made important changes to the Rossinian ‘code’ that spread throughout Italy (and then the rest of Europe) in the 1820s; but – although conservative contemporaries often had reservations – neither has been seen as a revolutionary. For one thing, neither challenged the formal outlines that had solidified during the Rossinian period. Their individuality came in different ways, mostly by altering forms from within – changing the way sentiments were uttered but leaving the exterior largely intact. By the 1840s, this meant that Italian opera had begun to seem conservative. As opera in other countries became ever more adventurous, and as instrumental genres acquired greater importance in the musical universe, the Italians stubbornly continued in the old ways, widening the gap between themselves and composers elsewhere (operatic or otherwise). This conservatism did little to damage their popular appeal, but it caused Italian opera gradually to lose aesthetic prestige, the pedigree of progressiveness. By the 1860s, and for the first time in operatic history, the hegemony of the Italian manner of doing things with opera was being called into question.

It is a paradox that this loss of prestige coincided with the career of Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901). The paradox is so glaring that Verdi is often cast as perpetually struggling to overcome his legacy, to shake off the restraints of the Italian tradition and emerge blinking into the freedoms of the later nineteenth century. Standard accounts tell us that Rossini set up that continual succession of multi-movement forms, ending with the eternal cabaletta, its showy virtuosity demanded by the eternally imperious prima donna. Donizetti and Bellini, albeit sporadically, had tried to escape this tyranny, but they were gentle and willowy Romantics, and so remained under its spell. The breakthrough came with Verdi, the full-bearded revolutionary. Equipped with powerful implements and firm resolve, he managed to fight free from the formal shackles, forswearing cabalettas and other singer-pleasing, applause-seeking clichés.¹

There is some truth in this story. Opera in all languages and national traditions became less predictable during the nineteenth century, and Verdi’s operas are no exception. The replacement of solo arias with duets and other types of musical dialogue, something that had been in train since at least the middle of the eighteenth century, gathered pace; and these dialogue episodes became less likely to fit pre-established patterns such as the Rossinian multi-movement duet. But, despite all this, there remains the unfortunate fact that, in the broad European context of such formal innovation, Verdi’s early operas were reactionary rather than revolutionary. In one sense, the idea of revolution sits even more uncomfortably when applied to him than it did when Stendhal, famously, attached it to Rossini. Verdi was, it is true, fond of grand epistolary gestures to the contrary. To the librettist of Il trovatore (1853) he confided that: ‘If in the opera there were no cavatinas, duets, trios, choruses, finales, etc., and if the whole work consisted … of a single number, I should find it all the more right and proper.’² These are fine words, and are often quoted. But Il trovatore turned out to be among Verdi’s most conventional operas – in some senses a triumphant celebration of the old forms – and is none the worse for it. For the most part, and in spite of hortatory statements to the contrary, Verdi held faith with the Rossinian code. More than anyone, he was responsible for keeping Italian opera distinct from the styles emerging in other countries. When, in mid- and late career, he followed everyone else by loosening these forms, he was rebelling against constraints to which he himself had given a new lease of life.

THE PAGES OPENED

With its clear-cut multi-movement arias and duets, Verdi’s first great success, the biblical drama Nabucco (Nebuchadnezzar, 1842), is in many ways closer to Rossini than are the late works of Donizetti or Bellini. The reason is not hard to find: tinkering with the Rossinian code, blurring the distinction between recitative and aria, was not at this stage as important to him as a more basic kind of dramatic immediacy. When instructing a later conductor about how Nabucco should go, he was unequivocal: ‘as for the tempi’, he said, ‘they should not be too broad. They should all move.’³ While that was an exaggeration (there are obvious moments of lyrical relaxation in Nabucco), Verdi showed from the very start a directness of vocal utterance that made his operas unmistakable. Yes, he sometimes wrote passages of ornamentation reminiscent of his predecessors, but these were the exception. More typically, Verdi reined in any suggestion of vocal elaboration, constraining his singers to communicate within a tight sequence of symmetrical phrases. We hardly ever get movements such as the mad scene in Donizetti’s Lucia, in which the musical progress seems to stall during massive floods of ornament. Verdi wanted above all to sculpt the progress of musical time. He wanted his auditors to be aware of his controlling presence, as a composer.

The chorus of Hebrew slaves in Act 3 of Nabucco, ‘Va pensiero’, the most famous melody in the opera, indeed one of the most famous in all opera, is a case in point, even though it is choral and even though it moves at a stately pace. The poetry supplied by the librettist Temistocle Solera for these slaves, captive in Babylonia and looking nostalgically towards their homeland, is full of naïve nature-painting and echoes of the 137th Psalm:

Va pensiero sull’ali dorate,

Va ti posa sui clivi, sui colli,

Ove olezzano libere e molli

L’aure dolci del suolo natal!

Del Giordano le rive saluta,

Di Sïonne le torri atterrate …

Oh mia patria sì bella e perduta!

Oh membranza sì cara e fatal!

[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!]

This invitation to sentimentality and antique word-painting is taken up in the orchestral introduction. But when the chorus enters, the filigree comes to a halt. The melody is simple, disarmingly so, a series of symmetrical phrases, with no rhythmic or harmonic surprises, just a steady alternation of dotted rhythms and triplets over a rocking accompaniment. More surprising still is that the chorus sing mostly in unison, as if they have one collective voice (Rossini called the piece ‘a grand aria sung by sopranos, contraltos, tenors and basses’⁴). When they break into harmony, they do so in the simple parallel thirds typical of Italian folk music.

This new, hyper-direct voice, its brand of radical simplicity, took the Italian opera world by storm. Within a few years, Nabucco had been performed all over Italy and in many far-flung places around the world. A few years more and Verdi had overtaken all his rivals and predecessors, becoming (and remaining to this day) Italy’s most famous and popular opera composer. There are many reasons for this fame, but it is important to start with the essentials. Verdi was, like all the greatest opera composers, fundamentally a musical dramatist. He was content to write in the standard musical parlance of the day, in idioms that he knew could communicate readily to his audiences; but through these predictable shapes he channelled an acute sense of dramatic time and – his means to this end – an undeviating sense of musical direction.

Like so many nineteenth-century composers, Verdi also proved an able manipulator of his life story. In a Sketch of his early life, published several decades after the events they describe, he headlined ‘Va pensiero’ as nothing less than the keystone of his entire career, saying that a first, miraculous glance at the words had dragged him back from the abyss, saved him for posterity. The Sketch had up to that point often been gloomy, as befitted a struggling Romantic artist. Verdi had suffered an embarrassing fiasco with his previous opera, a clumpy Rossinian comic work called Un giorno di regno (King for a Day, 1840), and this together with personal tragedy had, he tells us, made him resolve never to compose again. His decision held firm until a chance meeting with an impresario forced on him the Nabucco libretto. Reluctantly, he carried it away:

Along the way I felt a kind of vague uneasiness, a supreme sadness, an anguish that swelled in the heart!… I went home and, with a violent gesture, threw the manuscript on the table and stood before it. As it fell, the sheaf of pages opened on its own; without knowing how, my eyes stared at the page that lay before me, and this line appeared to me:

‘Va, pensiero, sull’ali dorate…’

I glanced over the following lines and received a deep impression from them. … I read one passage, I read two: then, steadfast in my intention of not composing, I made an effort of will, forced myself to close the script, and went off to bed! … No good. … Nabucco was trotting about in my head! … I got up and read the libretto, not once, but two, three times, so often that in the morning you could say that I knew Solera’s entire libretto by heart.⁵

The most remarkable aspect of this Sketch was not that people believed it at the time. It was first published in 1879, when Italy was a very new nation and anxious to shore itself up with national myths. The age was generally prone to ‘anecdotal’ biographies and autobiographies, flowery artistic justifications and confessions as generous in narrative flair as they were meagre in documentary back-up. What is astonishing is that modern scholars have continued to quote Verdi’s account, treating it as a reliable record of an historical event. They have done so even though, elsewhere in the Sketch, Verdi is known to have made gross manipulations. He changed by years the death dates of his two young children, having them and his young wife expire within months of each other in order to intensify the pathetic reach of his story. Such lapses seemed not to matter, however, as soon as ‘Va pensiero’ became Verdi’s topic. The numinous moment, the miraculous appearance of the ‘right’ text, was too perfect: ‘As it fell, the sheaf of pages opened on its own; without knowing how, my eyes stared at the page that lay before me’.

What was, what is going on here? The answer is that Verdi’s early music became, and to a degree remains, entangled in an alluring tale about opera and politics, a neat tying together of the two. According to this story, ‘Va pensiero’ and other Verdi choruses from subsequent operas, such as I Lombardi alla prima crociata (The Lombards at the First Crusade, 1843), Ernani (1844) and Attila (1846), were a rallying cry in what came to be called the Risorgimento (literally, resurgence). Their new manner – aided by suggestions in the text (‘la mia patria sì bella e perduta’) that were easily understood by audiences as referring to their present situation – is supposed to have energized an emerging Italian nation, encouraged the masses to the barricades in the revolutions of 1848 and generally acted as a soundtrack to the formation of the nation state in the 1860s. As far as the 1840s are concerned, hardly any historical evidence supports this story. Operatic performances in Italy were occasionally the site of public demonstrations during the immediate run-up to the 1848 revolutions, but Verdi’s music was not particularly prone to arouse such demonstrations. Several other composers, in particular gentle, Romantic Bellini, had proven more significant as theatre-based incendiaries. The aftermath of the 1848 revolutions, which failed miserably, makes clear a different and more prosaic story. In the case of Milan (the hub of Verdi’s activities during this period) the Austrian authorities, who had been driven from the city in March 1848, were soon back in power, and in the next couple of operatic seasons at La Scala (Carnival 1849 and Carnival 1850) they approved revivals of several of Verdi’s greatest hits, Nabucco, Ernani and Attila included. It is inconceivable in the circumstances that any of these works were associated with the failed revolution.

So why did the connection between Verdi and political upheaval become so strong? Links between operatic history and political history have emerged a few times already in this book, but the nineteenth century is their fulcrum. Such obvious political watersheds as 1814–15 and the collapse of the Napoleonic empire, or the Europe-wide revolutions of 1848, have also been claimed as important moments in operatic history (we do so ourselves in the next chapter). And it’s certainly true that, in the largest sense, the 1848 revolutions started a process that shook the opera industry to the core. They posed a dire threat to many of those petty principalities and places of absolute rule that had been such great oilers of the operatic wheel. But in the shorter term these historical events seem to have interrupted the steady production and consumption of operatic pleasure in no more than superficial ways. True, the theatre was an important meeting place for the urban bourgeoisie – in some places, and apart from the church, virtually the only meeting place. Occasionally performances became caught up in the century’s great bourgeois revolutions. But it was more often a place where, as had been standard throughout opera’s history, the ruling classes could rely on stability and an opportunity to display magnificence and power. As the century progressed and revolutionary movements embraced a wider socio-economic spectrum, an ever larger element of the putative revolutionary population was excluded from all but the humblest of operatic events. Even in Italy, nineteenth-century operatic performances were never ‘popular’ in a twentieth-century sense. The art form remained a relatively elite entertainment, from which most of the population was barred through simple lack of economic means. Thus any revolutions being depicted on stage, or allegorized in music, were essentially for show, their entertainment value being equivalent to all those other operatic staples, female madness or pathological male jealousy.

However, by the 1860s and 1870s, when Italy had achieved statehood and was searching anxiously for national monuments to symbolize the new order, Verdi’s early music lay conveniently by and (with anecdotal help from the great man himself) was found eminently fit for purpose. It seems likely that his image as a bard of political protest was first articulated, almost accidentally, with the brief vogue for the acrostic VIVA V.E.R.D.I. (which stood for VIVA Vittorio Emanuele Re D’Italia, i.e. to acclaim the Piedmontese monarch, who would become united Italy’s first king) in late 1858 and 1859. That image then received more stimulus during Verdi’s (reluctant) service in the first Italian parliament in the early 1860s. From these and other shards arose the myth of ‘Va pensiero’ and a few other Verdi choruses, a myth that has remained in stubborn currency ever since. The chorus has served as background accompaniment for countless groups wishing to assert a simple sense of ‘Italianness’, from the most benign to the most destructive. An instance of the latter comes in Mussolini’s regime, which was a great propagator of the patriotic Verdi, for obvious nationalistic reasons. In 1941, in spite of serious military distractions, it financed extensive commemorations of the fortieth anniversary of Verdi’s death. One of the most impressive publications marking 1941 was an iconography of Verdi’s life and times, which featured on its final page a picture of the Duce enjoying his Verdi, seated among the audience but placed on a specially raised platform.⁶ Political appropriations of ‘Va pensiero’ go backwards and forwards from this grim moment, backwards to Verdi’s attempts to boost its significance in his own life story, forwards to its recent appearance as the ‘Padanian hymn’ (l’inno della Padania) of the north Italian separatist group, the Lega Nord.

None of this is to deny that opera in the early nineteenth century was in many ways intimately bound up with the idea of nation and national representation; nor that much operatic music in the lead-up to 1848, Verdi’s included, sometimes traced in its contours a new mood, glorifying public energy and the possibility of action, albeit with the aim to entertain and beguile rather than to engender actual political engagement. We will see potent examples of this mood later in this chapter, and in those that follow. Nor does it deny that ‘Va pensiero’ is an extraordinary piece of choral music: it would not have been elevated to its position both present and past without that potent mixture of melodic single-mindedness and popular appeal. But political events and operatic events are very different, their relationship is often complex and subterranean. In this case, Verdi’s reputation as ‘bard of the Italian Risorgimento’ was real enough, but it was for the most part constructed in the latter half of the nineteenth century, when a young, newly consolidated, fragile Italy required cultural monuments to cement a sense of national identity, and in which ‘Va pensiero’ supplied an intoxicating recollection of simpler times past.

SOPHIE LOEWE, TENOR SOPRANO

The explosive effect of Verdi’s presence on the Italian operatic scene was at first mostly restricted to the northern half of the peninsula, but by the mid-1840s he was making an impact even in the south, and had also established a reputation (at first strongly contested) in the German lands, France and Britain. His distinctive new voice was part of the reason his later fame as a ‘revolutionary’ took shape. And although this voice speaks out clearly in the powerful simplicity of ‘Va pensiero’, it was at least as obvious to contemporary audiences in his music for solo singers, then and always at the centre of operatic communication. Although the young Verdi did little to challenge the formal devices of his predecessors, his way with vocalists went decisively beyond them. For example his fifth opera, Ernani, shows important variations in something as basic as the classic ‘vocal triangle’. The manly tenor was now a fixed feature. While Donizetti only flirted with this new type of romantic hero, Verdi was virtually unwavering in his allegiance. To balance the tenor came darker-voiced, often more psychologically complex antagonists: the Verdian baritone, whose uppermost vocal reaches Verdi remorselessly pushed; and the booming Verdian bass, the voice of the patriarch, the symbol of political or religious power.

These new vocal allegiances were controversial. Although Verdi’s popularity in the north of Italy soon swept all before it, that was not the case in the south; still less was it so abroad, where national and other sensibilities were often at stake. One of the most vociferous anti-Verdians was the long-time critic of The Times of London, James William Davison. Performances of Nabucco in 1850 stimulated one of his very many jeremiads:

Never was a writer of operas so destitute of real invention, so destitute in power or so wanting in the musician’s skill. His sole art consists in weaving ballad tunes – we never find any tune in his songs – into choruses which, sung in unison, make an immense noise; or in working up a finale by means of a tremendous crash of the brass instruments, drum and cymbals and voices screaming at the top of their register.⁷

The three main reasons critics found Verdi troublesome are neatly laid before us here: he was too popular (the ‘ballad tunes’) at a time when the divisions between ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ music were just beginning to form; he made too much noise, both chorally and in his orchestra, which habitually used the loudest new instruments (the brass in particular); and he misused the voices cruelly, obliging singers to scream rather than sing.

Although Davison didn’t mention it, one of the young Verdi’s most startling innovations, present in both Nabucco and Ernani, involved the soprano voice. His operas of the 1840s feature women of two distinct types. The first are heroines of the conventional feminine sort, with much fluttering and fainting amid showers of vocal ornament. Verdi could manage this when his sopranos proved incapable of anything more roburst; he did so, however, by resorting to a rather old-fashioned musical language. He was more at home with an opposite and almost wholly new type – sopranos who sacrificed beauty of tone and ornament at the altar of sheer forcefulness. This new species adopted what became Verdian trademarks: liberal use of the low, chest register; preference for short, intense utterances rather than long lyrical lines; and ornamental writing that, far from embellishing the line, was bound in with it and rigorously restrained. Music like this, requiring both force and agility, proved extremely hard to sing, and virtually impossible to sing beautifully; it aimed for dramatic effect at the expense of vocal poise.

The plot of Ernani, based on a drama by the arch-Romantic Frenchman Victor Hugo (1802–85), has plausibly been retold in abstract, new-Verdian vocal terms as the story of a soprano besieged by three male voices.⁸ The higher the male voice, the more youthful and more romantically successful its possessor; but, as so often in opera, life expectancy diminishes alarmingly as one ascends the vocal ladder. On the top male rung is the tenor, Ernani, a nobleman turned bandit, who is loved by the soprano, Elvira; next down is the suave baritone, Don Carlo, the King of Spain, whom Elvira treats with cautious respect; growling away at the bottom is the bass, Silva, old, noble, vengeful and nasty, whom Elvira hates but to whom she is betrothed. There is a further twist. Although plot-Elvira is a classic passive female, around whom all these lovers circulate while casting heavy curses on each other, voice-Elvira is as far from passive as can be imagined; in fact she is the most forceful musical presence in the opera. Such is the alchemy that operatic music can perform on gender stereotypes.

The opening two multi-movement arias of Ernani illustrate the new vocal regime perfectly. In libretto terms, a scene for forceful, dynamic, tragic Ernani is followed by one for passive, love-lorn, tragic Elvira. But the music turns this on its head. Ernani has his share of high notes and lively syncopation, but Elvira’s aria is on an entirely different level of musical energy – is indeed a classic example of the new Verdian voice. Far from dissolving into vocal virtuosity in the manner of Verdi’s Italian predecessors, both movements of her aria continue to harness the ornamentation within periodic phrases. The energy so typical of Verdi's early operas is thus created – through a tightening of form coupled with an intensification of expressive content. The fact that the contrast between tenor and soprano is so noticeable also chimed with the changing vocal qualities of a new generation of female performers: Verdi, like his predecessors, was careful to tailor his vocal writing to the skills of his first vocal interpreters, as were all operatic composers. In this case, Elvira was created by the formidable Sophie Loewe (1812–66), a German soprano whose directness of vocal utterance was undoubtedly an influence on Verdi’s ‘new vocal woman’.

In the final trio in Act 4 of Ernani, this new intensity of vocal utterance becomes extraordinary. Elvira and Ernani are about to be married, the problem of Don Carlo’s interest in Elvira having disappeared, reasonably enough, when he is elected Holy Roman Emperor in Act 3. But old Silva is still lurking out there somewhere – Ernani struck a fateful pact with him, as a result of which his life is now forfeit whenever Silva decides to claim it. Wedding preparations are cut short by the sound of a distant horn, Silva’s sign that he is calling in his pact. Silva’s appearance then precipitates the final trio, ‘Ferma, crudel, estinguere’ (Stop, cruel one, extinguish). As in ‘Va pensiero’, a simple alternation of triplets and dotted figures creates a concentration on crucial pitches and melodic shapes – and hardly any ornamentation or other possibility of conventionally beautiful singing. The trio thus becomes a remorseless exploration of vocal desperation, with the orchestra precipitating the voices forward through the drive of its accompaniment patterns. The soprano and her two male antagonists are strikingly similar as voices, with no hint of the gender distinctions Donizetti’s operas had emphasized. On the contrary, Elvira yields nothing to Ernani in vehemence of declamation, and the bass matches them both in fierceness. In the Ernani final trio, everyone sings like the new, manly tenor.

FELICE VARESI, UGLY BARITONE

In the decade after Ernani, Verdi produced a steady succession of operas (roughly one a year), his worldwide fame ever greater. His basic musical personality changed little (always that forcefulness and dynamism), but almost every work breaks new ground. Ernani had made effective use of a recurring motif, a solemn melody associated with the pact between Ernani and Silva; in his next opera, I due Foscari (The Two Foscari, 1844), Verdi experimented with a larger system of recurring motifs, all the major characters being given a melodic tag that is restated each time they enter.

As we saw in earlier chapters, reminiscence themes had long been used in French and German opera, and they could be effective if saved for special moments – interruptions of normal operatic procedure. The problem in I due Foscari is that the recurring themes are more numerous but don’t develop as the characters move through the opera: they simply get restated, as a kind of musical ‘calling card’ presented on each entrance. The themes quickly begin to sound redundant: the music simply replicates what our eyes have already taken in, and who needs a calling card on the second visit? They are also constricting, the characters seeming forever trapped within the musical gestures of their themes. The experiment taught Verdi a valuable lesson. His later treatment of recurring themes would never again be so systematic, and he found other ways of injecting musical connections into his operas. But I due Foscari raises a question that nevertheless becomes acute in the later nineteenth century: how much musical connection should an opera strive for? As the prestige of instrumental music, with its connective musical tissue such as themes subjected to elaborate development and periodic return, became ever greater, so the pressure intensified for operatic composers to display symphonic wares.

After I due Foscari, Verdi continued to experiment, sometimes returning to the grand choral style first heard in Nabucco, sometimes trying out more intimate subjects with greater literary sophistication. The most ambitious was Macbeth (1847). Fuelled by a longstanding interest in Shakespeare, Verdi took special pains over the opera, and later discouraged it featuring as an ‘opera di ripiego’ (a stop-gap work used to fill up the repertory if other, more important productions failed). Most revealing, though, is a comment he made as late as 1875, at a time when – much to his annoyance – he was being bombarded by questions about Richard Wagner. An interviewer in Vienna steered round to the inevitable topic, and Verdi is reported as commenting in a most surprising manner:

When our conversation turned to Wagner, Verdi remarked that this great genius had done opera an incalculable service, because he had had the courage to free himself from the tradition of the aria-opera; ‘I too attempted to blend music and drama, in my Macbeth’, he added, ‘but unlike Wagner I was not able to write my own libretti’.⁹

What might Verdi have meant? The most important experiment in Macbeth is the new way musical moods define two strands of the opera’s world, giving them what Verdi later called tinte or identifying colours. The first strand belongs to the witches, and is largely confined to the opening scenes of the first and third acts, which in Verdi’s words had to be ‘trivial but in an extravagant and original way’.¹⁰ Both scenes move from the minor to the major mode, and both employ similar musical means to depict the witches: sudden changes of rhythm and texture; rapid, Mendelssohnian passages in thirds for the strings; dark woodwind sonorities. The second strand of tinta is associated with Macbeth (baritone) and Lady Macbeth (soprano) and is more widespread. Here there is a prominent recurring motif: a simple alternation of middle C with the note a semitone above, which accompanies Macbeth’s words ‘Tutto è finito!’ (All is finished) as he returns from murdering King Duncan, immediately before his Act 1 duet with Lady Macbeth. This device was very different from the calling cards of I due Foscari; the ‘tutto è finito’ idea is simple enough to perform its purpose without ostentation, and flexible enough to function in subterranean ways, in particular disappearing into accompanying figures.

But Macbeth offers more than just an added sense of musical coherence. In order to do justice to the excess – in particular the free mixing of the comic and serious – that the nineteenth century found in Shakespeare, Verdi was even more uncompromising about the vocal urgency of his dramatic message. A hint of this comes in a letter by Emanuele Muzio, Verdi’s composition pupil and general dogsbody, who could be relied on to repeat uncritically his master’s opinions. Writing to a mutual friend, Muzio stressed Macbeth’s novel use of the baritone protagonist, whom they hoped would be sung by Felice Varesi (1813–89), one of the great singer-actors of the day (he later created both Rigoletto and Germont père in La traviata):

Now everything depends on an answer from Varesi; if Varesi agrees to sing in Florence … then [Verdi] will write Macbeth, in which there are only two principals: [Lady Macbeth] and Macbeth – Loewe and Varesi. The others are secondary roles. No actor in Italy can do Macbeth better than Varesi: because of his way of singing, because of his intelligence and even because he’s small and ugly. Perhaps you’ll say that he sings out of tune, but it doesn’t matter at all because the part would be almost completely declaimed, and he’s very good at that.¹¹

Verdi’s own letters to Varesi were more circumspect, but their sentiments were the same. It is also significant that Verdi imagined Loewe, so forceful a presence in Ernani, for the part of Lady Macbeth. In the end she was not available, but Verdi was adamant that he must have someone who was a fitting partner for the unprepossessing but uniquely dramatic Varesi. When one of the greatest sopranos of the period, Eugenia Tadolini, was suggested as Lady Macbeth, Verdi rejected her with great explicitness:

Tadolini’s qualities are far too good for this role. … Tadolini has a beautiful and attractive appearance, and I would like Lady Macbeth to be ugly and evil. Tadolini’s voice has an angelic quality; and I would like the Lady’s voice to have something of the diabolical! The two principal numbers in the opera are … the duet between Lady and her husband and the sleepwalking scene. If these numbers fail, then the opera is ruined. And these pieces must not be sung: they must be acted out and declaimed with a very hollow and veiled voice; otherwise they won’t be able to make any effect.¹²

This was an astonishing reversal of the values that had sustained Italian opera through the eighteenth century and up to Rossini, in which beauty of vocal delivery had conquered all in the expression of drama. Vocal beauty, the quality that had portrayed saints and sinners alike for so long, quite suddenly became insufficient. Voice must now suit character.

The kind of music Verdi wrote for these extraordinary performers is well illustrated by the Act 1 ‘Gran Scena e Duetto’, which he mentioned as one of the opera’s ‘principal numbers’. Its outer shell, as so often in early Verdi, follows the old Rossinian four-movement model; but internally there are sea changes. Not least is that the duet is introduced by a remarkable accompanied recitative, ‘Mi si affaccia un pugnal?!’ (Is this a dagger I see before me?), as Macbeth steels himself to murder Duncan. This passage is unusually rich in musical invention, as sliding chromatic figures jostle with distorted, mock-religious harmonies and fugitive reminiscences of the witches’ music. It sets in motion a fluid musical argument that doesn’t so much introduce the formal movements of the duet as set their tone; the recitative language becomes, in other words, a vocal model for what follows. The first fixed-tempo movement begins as Macbeth returns, having murdered the king, to meet Lady Macbeth. As mentioned, Macbeth’s first utterance, ‘Tutto è finito!’, then presents in its simplest form a recurring motif that becomes critical to the fabric of the duet. As if to demonstrate this, its distinctive musical contours immediately migrate into the accompaniment material. A crucial reversal thus takes place. On the surface the first movement involves a rapid exchange between the characters, with an emphasis on recitative-like declamation over orchestral underpinning; but the orchestral contribution is impregnated with the ‘Tutto è finito’ motif. The orchestra doesn't just communicate a standard sense of agitation, but has precise semantic associations. In other words, it performs a narrative role.

Even though this duet is conventional in being cast in multi-movement form, it is unconventional in making few distinctions in vocal behaviour between one movement and the next. Both characters express themselves mostly in stifled phrases. In the first two movements, Macbeth makes sporadic attempts to introduce more traditionally lyrical ideas (in the first movement he recalls Duncan’s sleeping attendants, in the second with ‘Com’angeli d’ira’ – Like angels of anger); but on both occasions he is countered, silenced even, by brittle ornamental explosions from Lady Macbeth, who derides his doubts as ‘follie’ (madness). The fact that her crazed coloratura recurs in three of the four movements is itself unusual, contributing to the sense that the entire duet is a single musical argument. Equally important, though, is that Verdi uses her vocal virtuosity to unorthodox ends. What had traditionally been decorative and ornamental here marks hysteria, or at the least forced, unconvincing gaiety. In other words, in this heavily charged, declamatory world, vocal ornament becomes jarring, laden with negative meaning. The final movement of the duet, traditionally the place in which ornament spills forth no matter what, makes this clearer still: it is stifled and subdued throughout, ending with isolated staccato exclamations low in the singers’ registers.

It was a further mark of Macbeth’s significance that Verdi agreed to add ballet music to a revival planned for Paris’s Théâtre Lyrique in 1865; he also decided to make substantial changes to some sections that were, as he called them, ‘either weak or lacking in character’.¹³ These included a new aria for Lady Macbeth in Act 2 (‘La luce langue’; The light weakens) and the replacement of Macbeth’s death scene with a final, French-sounding ‘Inno di vittoria’ (Hymn of victory). The Paris version is what we usually hear today, in spite of the stylistic dissonances Verdi’s revisions create. ‘La luce langue’ makes no attempt to adapt to the surrounding musical atmosphere, indeed is one of the most radical stretches of music (both orchestrally and harmonically) that Verdi had written even by the mid-1860s. Another example is the ‘Inno di vittoria’. The 1847 death scene it replaced was faithful to Macbeth’s vocal personality, being almost entirely declaimed, and returning chillingly to the tonality and motivic ambience of the Act 1 duet with Lady Macbeth. The ‘Inno’, on the other hand, is a jaunty chorus of celebration, with a virtual quotation of ‘La Marseillaise’ at the end (something guaranteed to get the French up and saluting). These revisions again raise the question often asked in this book, and critical in the nineteenth century and beyond: how much musical coherence does an opera need? In 1847, Verdi invested parts of Macbeth with much connective musical tissue (recurring orchestral combinations, motifs that appear periodically in different context, etc.); in 1865 he sacrificed some of this to bring his opera up to date and make it more amenable to Parisian taste. Today we have access to both versions; we can (at least on recordings) mix-and-match, perhaps including ‘La luce langue’ but retaining the old death scene. And the choices may well be invigorating, reminding us that operatic texts from the past need not be sacred objects, even in today’s museum culture.

LAUGHING VILLAIN, WEEPING JESTER

In 1847, the year of Macbeth, Verdi transferred to Paris and remained there for most of the next two years. It was an important move, most of his subsequent operas betraying obvious Parisian manners, including French-style arias and a greater refinement of orchestral writing. Much of this came from exposure to Meyerbeer and other grand opéra composers; but Verdi also attended more humble theatrical events. In his Stiffelio (1850) the final scene is influenced by spoken melodrama, then hugely popular in the Parisian boulevard theatres. In some scenes, intense personal confrontation is mimed or declaimed over a spare, atmospheric orchestral background, in a manner very similar to what was happening in spoken theatre. It was a style Verdi would use to even greater effect in the operas of the early 1850s, in particular Rigoletto (1851), which marked another stage in his long musical development.

Verdi’s early letters about the setting of Victor Hugo’s play Le Roi s’amuse (The King Amuses Himself, 1832, another Romantic drama in the vein of Hernani) brim over with enthusiasm. ‘There’s a character in it who is one of the greatest creations that the theatre of all countries and all times can boast’;¹⁴ ‘[Rigoletto] is a creation worthy of Shakespeare!’¹⁵ The elevated comparison should alert us. Like Hugo, whose Preface to Le Roi s’amuse he had surely read, Verdi found in his new protagonist a tragic divide that posed new musical challenges. Even the greatest of his past operatic characters had tended to be one-dimensional. Like their eighteenth-century forebears, they may be cruelly torn by conflicting emotions (romantic love and filial duty, or personal and public responsibilities); but these trials are visited on them by the plot mechanism, not by faults within themselves. Their behaviour under duress is always resolutely predictable. Rigoletto was to be different. The seeds of his destruction are embedded deep in his own psyche. Outwardly he is deformed, a hunchbacked jester who encourages a debauched and unscrupulous ruler. Secretly, though, he nurtures a beloved daughter who is innocent of the evil that surrounds her. As Hugo put it with uncharacteristic economy: ‘Triboulet [Hugo’s name for what became the Rigoletto character] has two pupils, the king whom he instructs in vice, his daughter whom he rears in virtue. One will destroy the other.’¹⁶

The plot is easily told. Rigoletto (baritone) is court jester to the Duke of Mantua (tenor), a notorious philanderer. The Duke’s latest enthusiasm is a young woman called Gilda (soprano); he ardently woos her after illicitly entering the walled garden in which she is enclosed. His courtiers discover that she is under the protection of Rigoletto (they assume she is a mistress) and, in the finale of Act 1, they abduct her. In Act 2 Rigoletto tries to rescue Gilda, but finds that she has been seduced by the Duke; he swears revenge. In the final act, Rigoletto hires an assassin, Sparafucile (bass), to murder the Duke, but Gilda hears of the plan and – having fallen in love with her seducer – allows herself to be killed in his place. Rigoletto takes delivery of what he thinks is the Duke’s body in a sack, but then hears the still-libidinous aristocrat singing of love from afar; he opens the sack to find his daughter on the brink of death.

Verdi saw his complex baritone protagonist as another operatic experiment, one whose influence could spread to all the major characters. In part this was, as with Ernani and Macbeth, a continuing play with voice-characters. Rigoletto was again tailored for and created by Felice Varesi, whose smallness and ugliness made him highly desirable for the role, and whose melodramatic exterior as the wrong character (deformed, and thus – according to the melodramatic codes of the day – evil), could then be contradicted by his dramatic presence and ability to move audiences. But there were further changes. Gilda starts the opera as an old-fashioned soprano: her Act 1 entrance aria, ‘Caro nome’ (Dear name), is a famous virtuoso display piece. But as events overtake her, and particularly after she is seduced, she changes vocally, adopting a more direct style – in Act 3 even matching the declamatory mode of her father. The most surprising innovation is in the tenor role. For the most part, the philandering Duke’s musical idiom is close to comic opera: voice-Duke is, in other words, charming and persuasive, and is fitted out with almost all the opera’s famous melodies. But plot-Duke is unrelievedly negative. Just as Lady Macbeth’s vocal virtuosity acquired a new, sinister meaning, so here the entire façade of easy, lyrical singing is called into question: it is placed at the command of a libertine, a man whose outer charm is grotesquely ill matched to his inner cynicism.

There is one further important aspect of Rigoletto’s innovation in vocal personae. Previous Verdi characters had been vividly differentiated by voice type and mode of singing, but they had all expressed themselves through largely identical vehicles – the multi-movement arias, duets and ensembles that, somewhat against international trends, remained the building blocks of Verdian opera. But, in Rigoletto, Verdi for the first time distinguished between the main characters through their engagement with these forms. Rigoletto is the emotional centre of the drama but has no multi-movement arias. He typically sings in a free, declamatory style, one that allows the tragic division in his character to be made musically manifest in an immediate way. On the other hand, the Duke perpetually inhabits stock formal numbers, both his charm and his superficiality thus projected through this sense of conventional predictability, just as his mellifluous tenor seems to have emigrated from some bel canto paradise lost. Caught between the two, forever responding to one and then the other, is Gilda, who moves from extreme conventionality to extreme fragmentation as she grows up, painfully, during the drama.

In this sense it is fitting that Rigoletto’s most celebrated number is the Act 3 Quartet ‘Bella figlia dell’amore’ (Beautiful child of love). Rigoletto has brought Gilda to a remote inn to show her the man she loves continuing in his philandering ways. The Quartet has all the principals sing together, but they remain crucially divided: Rigoletto and Gilda stand outside the inn, peering in on the Duke, who is courting his latest flame, Maddalena (contralto). Verdi conducted a radical experiment, making the Quartet’s most distinctive feature its vocal difference. The Duke (who carries the main melodic thread) is ardent, lyrical and wholly conventional, advancing his amorous suit with a rhythmic predictability that teeters on the banal, punctuated by staccato woodwind chords after each phrase and by Maddalena’s chatter. Rigoletto, at the opposite pole, is stubbornly unlyrical, his line made up of declamatory outbursts, often on a single note. And Gilda is as ever caught between these two, expressing herself in fragmented, ‘sobbing’ figures. One early commentator described her contribution to the Quartet as ‘canto spezzato’¹⁷ – a broken song for a broken, divided heart.

These musical innovations in the Rigoletto Quartet have often been extolled – the number is iconic in histories of Italian opera. Less often mentioned is that Verdi followed Hugo in placing the Quartet within an innovative scenic picture:

Divided stage. Deserted bank of the Mincio. To the left is a two-storey house, half-ruined, whose front, facing the audience, reveals through a large arch the inside of a rustic inn on the ground floor. A rough ladder leads to the loft, within which, from a balcony without shutters, is visible a cot. On the side of the building which faces the street is a door that opens towards the inside: the wall, furthermore, is so full of cracks that from the outside one can easily see what is happening within.

As many contemporary illustrations of the scene demonstrate – it was a favourite among engravers and appeared on the frontispieces of many libretti and vocal scores – the characters of the Quartet are further separated by this divided stage. The Duke and Maddalena flirt in a warmly lit interior; Rigoletto and Gilda peer through cracks in the wall from the dark outside. There could be no more telling representation of the harshness of the divide, the gulf between characters, the impossible rifts that fuel their march towards destiny.

What exactly is the nature of this rift? Just as those conflicts made the title character so stimulating to Verdi, so these fractures play out a mid-nineteenth-century version of the divide between outside and inside, between the public and the private world. Rigoletto is the public figure, the court jester who hides within himself an intense private world – the world of Gilda, locked away from view. It is when, near the end of the first act, these two worlds collide, when the Duke slips into Gilda’s garden to pursue his adventures, and then when his courtiers abduct her, that the tragedy is set in motion. In Act 2 Rigoletto appears in the ducal palace, searching for his lost daughter, still acting out his public persona as jester. But he soon realizes that, just beyond the public space bounded by the stage set, on the other side of a door to the side, his daughter is alone with the Duke – that something he would call seduction and we would call rape is taking place. ‘Cortigiani, vil razza dannata’ he rails (Courtiers, you vile, damned creatures). The outburst is nothing like an aria in the conventional sense, more a fragmented series of emotions that ends in a plea. Laying bare his hidden, private emotions, he begs to have access to the hidden space in which the true action of the opera is taking place.

‘The time is out of joint’, says Hamlet after seeing his father, who belongs in another world, standing before him on the battlements. The phrase could be a motto for Rigoletto. Public and private are disturbingly intertwined. The feigned emotions and posturing of the public world can penetrate and damage irreparably the private places where true feelings are harboured. No wonder Verdi called his protagonist ‘worthy of Shakespeare’, and no wonder that Rigoletto marked an important new stage in his operatic career.

Verdi’s early operas are in many ways predictable. Like Donizetti and Bellini, he preferred to follow the old forms and change operatic manners from within, in his case by single-mindedly raising the emotional temperature, forcing the voices into new, more declamatory modes. But after Rigoletto this early manner never returned. From then on the old certainties – of character, of venue, of musical conventions that could align characters in predictable patterns – were never again to be trusted. Verdi did sometimes return to the old Rossinian code, and use it to great effect. But the choice was by no means automatic. Operatic forms, like operatic space and operatic characters, had quite suddenly become more unpredictable.