My Notes: This information was reprinted for the opera lovers who might want more background material on the Operatic Works of Verdi. Some of his most famous works: Aida, Un ballo in maschera (1859), and Don Carlos (1867),are appreciated and loved by opera fans all over the world. The blog has posted many opera stars performing the Works of Verdi and other composers. Enjoy
Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi
Verdi was born the son of Carlo Giuseppe Verdi and Luigia Uttini in Le Roncole, a village nearBusseto, then in the Département Taro, which was a part of the First French Empire after the annexation of the Duchy of Parma and Piacenza. The baptismal register, on 11 October lists him as being "born yesterday", but since days were often considered to begin at sunset, this could have meant either 9 or 10 October. The next day, he was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church in Latin as Joseph Fortuninus Franciscus. The day after that (Tuesday), Verdi's father took his newborn the three miles to Busseto, where the baby was recorded as Joseph Fortunin François; the clerk wrote in French. "So it happened that for the civil and temporal world Verdi was born a Frenchman."
When he was still a child, Verdi's parents moved from Le Roncole to Busseto, where the future composer's education was greatly facilitated by visits to the large library belonging to the local Jesuit school. It was in Busseto that Verdi was given his first lessons in composition.
Verdi went to Milan when he was twenty to continue his studies. He took private lessons incounterpoint while attending operatic performances and concerts, often of specifically German music. Milan's beaumonde association convinced him that he should pursue a career as a theatre composer. During the mid-1830s, he attended the Salotto Maffei salons in Milan, hosted by Clara Maffei.
Returning to Busseto, he became the town music master and gave his first public performance in 1830 in the home of Antonio Barezzi, a local merchant and music lover who had long supported Verdi's musical ambitions in Milan.
Because he loved Verdi's music, Barezzi invited Verdi to be his daughter Margherita's music teacher, and the two soon fell deeply in love. They were married on 4 May 1836, and Margherita gave birth to two children, Virginia Maria Luigia (26 March 1837 – 12 August 1838) and Icilio Romano (11 July 1838 – 22 October 1839). Both died in infancy while Verdi was working on his first opera and, shortly afterwards, Margherita died of encephalitis on 18 June 1840, aged only 26. Verdi adored his wife and children and was devastated by their deaths.
The production by Milan's La Scala of his first opera, Oberto, in November 1839 achieved a degree of success, after which Bartolomeo Merelli, La Scala's impresario, offered Verdi a contract for three more works.[7]
It was while he was working on his second opera, Un giorno di regno, that Verdi's wife died. The opera, given in September 1840, was a flop and he fell into despair and vowed to give up musical composition forever. However, Merelli persuaded him to write Nabucco,and its opening performance in March 1842 made Verdi famous. Legend (and Verdi's own "An Autobiographical Sketch" of 1879[8]) has it that it was the words of the famous "Va, pensiero" chorus of the Hebrew slaves that inspired him to write music again.
A period of hard work – producing 14 operas in all – followed in the fifteen years after 1843, right up through the composition of Un ballo in maschera, a period which Verdi was to describe as his "years in the galleys" in a letter to Countess Clara Maffei: "From Nabucco, you may say, I have never had one hour of peace. Sixteen years in the galleys".These included his I Lombardi in 1843, and Ernani in 1844. For some], the most original and important opera that Verdi wrote is Macbeth (1847). It was Verdi's first attempt to write an opera without a love story, breaking a basic convention of 19th-century Italian opera.
In 1847, I Lombardi, which was revised and renamed Jérusalem, was produced by the Paris Opera. Due to a number of Parisian conventions that had to be honored (including extensive ballets), it became Verdi's first work in the French Grand opera style.
Sometime in the mid-1840s, after the death of Margherita Barezzi, Verdi "formed a lasting attachment to the soprano Giuseppina Strepponi who was to become his lifelong companion", but she was in the twilight of her career. Their cohabitation before marriage was regarded as scandalous in some of the places they lived, but Verdi and Giuseppina married on 29 August 1859 at Collonges-sous-Salève, in the Kingdom of Piemonte, near Geneva. In 1848, while living in Busseto with Strepponi, Verdi bought an estate two miles from the town. Initially, his parents lived there, but after his mother's death in 1851, he made the Villa Verdi at Sant'Agata in Villanova sull'Arda his home, which it remained until his death.
As he was still laboring through his "years in the galleys", Verdi created one of his greatest masterpieces, Rigoletto, which premiered in Venice in 1851. Based on a play by Victor Hugo (Le roi s'amuse), the libretto had to undergo substantial revisions in order to satisfy the epoch's censorship, and the composer was on the verge of giving it all up a number of times. The opera quickly became a great success.
With Rigoletto, Verdi sets up his original idea of musical drama as a cocktail of heterogeneous elements, embodying social and cultural complexity, and beginning from a distinctive mixture of comedy and tragedy. Rigoletto's musical range includes band-music such as the first scene or the aria "La donna è mobile", Italian melody such as the famous quartet "Bella figlia dell'amore",chamber music such as the duet between Rigoletto and Sparafucile and powerful and concise declamatos often based on key-notes like the C and C# notes in Rigoletto and Monterone's upper register.
There followed the second and third of the three major operas of Verdi's "middle period": in 1853 Il trovatore was produced in Rome and La traviata in Venice. The latter was based on Alexandre Dumas, fils' play The Lady of the Camellias, and became the most popular of all Verdi's operas, placing first in the Operabase list of most performed operas worldwide.
Between 1855 and 1867 there was an outpouring of great Verdi operas, among them such repertory staples as Un ballo in maschera (1859), La forza del destino (commissioned by the Imperial Theatre of Saint Petersburg for 1861 but not performed until 1862), and a revised version ofMacbeth (1865). Other somewhat less often performed include Les vêpres siciliennes (1855) and Don Carlos (1867), both commissioned by the Paris Opera and initially given in French. Today, these latter two operas are most often performed in Italian translation. Simon Boccanegra was composed in 1857.
Giuseppe Verdi in 1876
In 1869, Verdi was asked to compose a section for a requiem mass in memory of Gioachino Rossini which was to be a collection of sections composed by other Italian contemporaries of Rossini. The requiem was compiled and completed, but was cancelled at the last minute (and was not performed in Verdi's lifetime). Verdi blamed this on the lack of enthusiasm for the project by the intended conductor, Angelo Mariani, who had been a longtime friend of his. The episode led to a permanent break in their personal relations. The soprano Teresa Stolz (who later had a strong professional – and, perhaps, romantic – relationship with Verdi) was at that time engaged to be married to Mariani, but she left him not long after. Five years later, Verdi reworked his "Libera Me" section of the Rossini Requiem and made it a part of his Requiem Mass, honoring the famous novelist and poet Alessandro Manzoni, who had died in 1873. The complete Requiem was first performed at the cathedral in Milan on 22 May 1874.
Verdi's grand opera, Aida, is sometimes thought to have been commissioned for the celebration of the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, and the Khedive had planned to inaugurate an opera house as part of the canal opening festivities, but according to Julian Budden, Verdi turned down the Khedive's invitation to write an "ode" for the new opera house because "I am not accustomed to compose morceaux de circonstance. The opera house actually opened with a production ofRigoletto. Later, in 1869/70, the organizers again approached Verdi (this time with the idea of writing an opera), but he again turned them down. When they warned him that they would ask Charles Gounod instead and then threatened to engage Richard Wagner's services, Verdi began to show considerable interest, and agreements were signed in June 1870.
Teresa Stolz was associated with both Aida and the Requiem (as well as a number of other Verdi roles). The role of Aida was written for her, and although she did not appear in the world premiere in Cairo in 1871, she created Aida in the European premiere in Milan in February 1872. She was also the soprano soloist in the first and many later performances of the Requiem. It was widely believed that she and Verdi had an affair after she left Angelo Mariani, and a Florence newspaper criticised them for this in five strongly worded articles. Whether there is any truth to the accusation may never be known with any certainty. However, after Giuseppina Strepponi's death, Teresa Stolz became a close companion of Verdi until his own death.
Verdi and Wagner never met. Verdi's comments on Wagner and his music are few and hardly benevolent ("He invariably chooses, unnecessarily, the untrodden path, attempting to fly where a rational person would walk with better results"), but at least one of them is kind: upon learning of Wagner's death, Verdi lamented, "Sad, sad, sad! ... a name that will leave a most powerful impression on the history of art." Of Wagner's comments on Verdi, only one is well-known. After listening to Verdi's Requiem, the German, prolific and eloquent in his comments on some other composers, stated, "It would be best not to say anything.
During the following years, Verdi worked on revising some of his earlier scores, most notably new versions of Don Carlos, La forza del destino, and Simon Boccanegra.
Otello, based on William Shakespeare's play, with a libretto written by the younger composer of Mefistofele, Arrigo Boito, premiered in Milan in 1887. Its music is "continuous" and cannot easily be divided into separate "numbers" to be performed in concert. Some feel that although masterfully orchestrated, it lacks the melodic lustre so characteristic of Verdi's earlier, great, operas, while many critics consider it Verdi's greatest tragic opera, containing some of his most beautiful, expressive music and some of his richest characterizations. In addition, it lacks a prelude, something Verdi listeners were not accustomed to. Arturo Toscanini performed as cellist in the orchestra at the world premiere and began his association with Verdi (a composer he revered as highly as Beethoven).
Giuseppe Verdi in Vanity Fair
Verdi's last opera, Falstaff, whose libretto was also by Boito, was based on Shakespeare'sMerry Wives of Windsor and Henry IV, Part 1 via Victor Hugo's subsequent translation. It was an international success and is one of the supreme comic operas which show Verdi's genius as a contrapuntist.
In 1894, Verdi composed a short ballet for a French production of Otello, his last purely orchestral composition. Years later, Arturo Toscanini recorded the music for RCA Victor with the NBC Symphony Orchestra which complements the 1947 Toscanini performance of the complete opera.
In 1897, Verdi completed his last composition, a setting of the traditional Latin text Stabat Mater. This was the last of four sacred works that Verdi composed, Quattro pezzi sacri, which can be performed together or separately. They were not conceived as a unit and, in fact, Verdi did not want the Ave Maria published, as he considered it an exercise. The first performance of the four works was on 7 April 1898, at the Opéra, Paris. The four works are: Ave Maria for mixed chorus; Stabat Mater for mixed chorus and orchestra; Laudi alla Vergine Maria for female chorus; and Te Deum for double chorus and orchestra.
On 29 July 1900, King Umberto I of Italy was assassinated by Gaetano Bresci, a deed that horrified the aged composer.
While staying at the Grand Hotel et de Milan in Milan, Verdi suffered a stroke on 21 January 1901. He gradually grew more feeble and died nearly a week later, on 27 January. Arturo Toscanini conducted the vast forces of combined orchestras and choirs composed of musicians from throughout Italy at Verdi's funeral service in Milan. To date, it remains the largest public assembly of any event in the history of Italy.
Verdi was initially buried in Milan's Cimitero Monumentale. A month later, his body was moved to the "crypt" of the Casa di Riposo per Musicisti, a rest home for retired musicians that Verdi had recently established. In October 1894, the French government awarded him the Grand-Croix de la Legion d'honneur. He was the first non-French musician to receive the Grand-Croix.
Verdi was an agnostic atheist. Toscanini, in a taped interview, described Verdi as "an atheist", but "agnostic" is probably the most accurate description. His second wife, Giuseppina Strepponi, described him as "a man of little faith".
Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi
Verdi was born the son of Carlo Giuseppe Verdi and Luigia Uttini in Le Roncole, a village nearBusseto, then in the Département Taro, which was a part of the First French Empire after the annexation of the Duchy of Parma and Piacenza. The baptismal register, on 11 October lists him as being "born yesterday", but since days were often considered to begin at sunset, this could have meant either 9 or 10 October. The next day, he was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church in Latin as Joseph Fortuninus Franciscus. The day after that (Tuesday), Verdi's father took his newborn the three miles to Busseto, where the baby was recorded as Joseph Fortunin François; the clerk wrote in French. "So it happened that for the civil and temporal world Verdi was born a Frenchman."
When he was still a child, Verdi's parents moved from Le Roncole to Busseto, where the future composer's education was greatly facilitated by visits to the large library belonging to the local Jesuit school. It was in Busseto that Verdi was given his first lessons in composition.
Verdi went to Milan when he was twenty to continue his studies. He took private lessons incounterpoint while attending operatic performances and concerts, often of specifically German music. Milan's beaumonde association convinced him that he should pursue a career as a theatre composer. During the mid-1830s, he attended the Salotto Maffei salons in Milan, hosted by Clara Maffei.
Returning to Busseto, he became the town music master and gave his first public performance in 1830 in the home of Antonio Barezzi, a local merchant and music lover who had long supported Verdi's musical ambitions in Milan.
Because he loved Verdi's music, Barezzi invited Verdi to be his daughter Margherita's music teacher, and the two soon fell deeply in love. They were married on 4 May 1836, and Margherita gave birth to two children, Virginia Maria Luigia (26 March 1837 – 12 August 1838) and Icilio Romano (11 July 1838 – 22 October 1839). Both died in infancy while Verdi was working on his first opera and, shortly afterwards, Margherita died of encephalitis on 18 June 1840, aged only 26. Verdi adored his wife and children and was devastated by their deaths.
The production by Milan's La Scala of his first opera, Oberto, in November 1839 achieved a degree of success, after which Bartolomeo Merelli, La Scala's impresario, offered Verdi a contract for three more works.[7]
It was while he was working on his second opera, Un giorno di regno, that Verdi's wife died. The opera, given in September 1840, was a flop and he fell into despair and vowed to give up musical composition forever. However, Merelli persuaded him to write Nabucco,and its opening performance in March 1842 made Verdi famous. Legend (and Verdi's own "An Autobiographical Sketch" of 1879[8]) has it that it was the words of the famous "Va, pensiero" chorus of the Hebrew slaves that inspired him to write music again.
A period of hard work – producing 14 operas in all – followed in the fifteen years after 1843, right up through the composition of Un ballo in maschera, a period which Verdi was to describe as his "years in the galleys" in a letter to Countess Clara Maffei: "From Nabucco, you may say, I have never had one hour of peace. Sixteen years in the galleys".These included his I Lombardi in 1843, and Ernani in 1844. For some], the most original and important opera that Verdi wrote is Macbeth (1847). It was Verdi's first attempt to write an opera without a love story, breaking a basic convention of 19th-century Italian opera.
In 1847, I Lombardi, which was revised and renamed Jérusalem, was produced by the Paris Opera. Due to a number of Parisian conventions that had to be honored (including extensive ballets), it became Verdi's first work in the French Grand opera style.
Sometime in the mid-1840s, after the death of Margherita Barezzi, Verdi "formed a lasting attachment to the soprano Giuseppina Strepponi who was to become his lifelong companion", but she was in the twilight of her career. Their cohabitation before marriage was regarded as scandalous in some of the places they lived, but Verdi and Giuseppina married on 29 August 1859 at Collonges-sous-Salève, in the Kingdom of Piemonte, near Geneva. In 1848, while living in Busseto with Strepponi, Verdi bought an estate two miles from the town. Initially, his parents lived there, but after his mother's death in 1851, he made the Villa Verdi at Sant'Agata in Villanova sull'Arda his home, which it remained until his death.
As he was still laboring through his "years in the galleys", Verdi created one of his greatest masterpieces, Rigoletto, which premiered in Venice in 1851. Based on a play by Victor Hugo (Le roi s'amuse), the libretto had to undergo substantial revisions in order to satisfy the epoch's censorship, and the composer was on the verge of giving it all up a number of times. The opera quickly became a great success.
With Rigoletto, Verdi sets up his original idea of musical drama as a cocktail of heterogeneous elements, embodying social and cultural complexity, and beginning from a distinctive mixture of comedy and tragedy. Rigoletto's musical range includes band-music such as the first scene or the aria "La donna è mobile", Italian melody such as the famous quartet "Bella figlia dell'amore",chamber music such as the duet between Rigoletto and Sparafucile and powerful and concise declamatos often based on key-notes like the C and C# notes in Rigoletto and Monterone's upper register.
There followed the second and third of the three major operas of Verdi's "middle period": in 1853 Il trovatore was produced in Rome and La traviata in Venice. The latter was based on Alexandre Dumas, fils' play The Lady of the Camellias, and became the most popular of all Verdi's operas, placing first in the Operabase list of most performed operas worldwide.
Between 1855 and 1867 there was an outpouring of great Verdi operas, among them such repertory staples as Un ballo in maschera (1859), La forza del destino (commissioned by the Imperial Theatre of Saint Petersburg for 1861 but not performed until 1862), and a revised version ofMacbeth (1865). Other somewhat less often performed include Les vêpres siciliennes (1855) and Don Carlos (1867), both commissioned by the Paris Opera and initially given in French. Today, these latter two operas are most often performed in Italian translation. Simon Boccanegra was composed in 1857.
Giuseppe Verdi in 1876
In 1869, Verdi was asked to compose a section for a requiem mass in memory of Gioachino Rossini which was to be a collection of sections composed by other Italian contemporaries of Rossini. The requiem was compiled and completed, but was cancelled at the last minute (and was not performed in Verdi's lifetime). Verdi blamed this on the lack of enthusiasm for the project by the intended conductor, Angelo Mariani, who had been a longtime friend of his. The episode led to a permanent break in their personal relations. The soprano Teresa Stolz (who later had a strong professional – and, perhaps, romantic – relationship with Verdi) was at that time engaged to be married to Mariani, but she left him not long after. Five years later, Verdi reworked his "Libera Me" section of the Rossini Requiem and made it a part of his Requiem Mass, honoring the famous novelist and poet Alessandro Manzoni, who had died in 1873. The complete Requiem was first performed at the cathedral in Milan on 22 May 1874.
Verdi's grand opera, Aida, is sometimes thought to have been commissioned for the celebration of the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, and the Khedive had planned to inaugurate an opera house as part of the canal opening festivities, but according to Julian Budden, Verdi turned down the Khedive's invitation to write an "ode" for the new opera house because "I am not accustomed to compose morceaux de circonstance. The opera house actually opened with a production ofRigoletto. Later, in 1869/70, the organizers again approached Verdi (this time with the idea of writing an opera), but he again turned them down. When they warned him that they would ask Charles Gounod instead and then threatened to engage Richard Wagner's services, Verdi began to show considerable interest, and agreements were signed in June 1870.
Teresa Stolz was associated with both Aida and the Requiem (as well as a number of other Verdi roles). The role of Aida was written for her, and although she did not appear in the world premiere in Cairo in 1871, she created Aida in the European premiere in Milan in February 1872. She was also the soprano soloist in the first and many later performances of the Requiem. It was widely believed that she and Verdi had an affair after she left Angelo Mariani, and a Florence newspaper criticised them for this in five strongly worded articles. Whether there is any truth to the accusation may never be known with any certainty. However, after Giuseppina Strepponi's death, Teresa Stolz became a close companion of Verdi until his own death.
Verdi and Wagner never met. Verdi's comments on Wagner and his music are few and hardly benevolent ("He invariably chooses, unnecessarily, the untrodden path, attempting to fly where a rational person would walk with better results"), but at least one of them is kind: upon learning of Wagner's death, Verdi lamented, "Sad, sad, sad! ... a name that will leave a most powerful impression on the history of art." Of Wagner's comments on Verdi, only one is well-known. After listening to Verdi's Requiem, the German, prolific and eloquent in his comments on some other composers, stated, "It would be best not to say anything.
During the following years, Verdi worked on revising some of his earlier scores, most notably new versions of Don Carlos, La forza del destino, and Simon Boccanegra.
Otello, based on William Shakespeare's play, with a libretto written by the younger composer of Mefistofele, Arrigo Boito, premiered in Milan in 1887. Its music is "continuous" and cannot easily be divided into separate "numbers" to be performed in concert. Some feel that although masterfully orchestrated, it lacks the melodic lustre so characteristic of Verdi's earlier, great, operas, while many critics consider it Verdi's greatest tragic opera, containing some of his most beautiful, expressive music and some of his richest characterizations. In addition, it lacks a prelude, something Verdi listeners were not accustomed to. Arturo Toscanini performed as cellist in the orchestra at the world premiere and began his association with Verdi (a composer he revered as highly as Beethoven).
Giuseppe Verdi in Vanity Fair
Verdi's last opera, Falstaff, whose libretto was also by Boito, was based on Shakespeare'sMerry Wives of Windsor and Henry IV, Part 1 via Victor Hugo's subsequent translation. It was an international success and is one of the supreme comic operas which show Verdi's genius as a contrapuntist.
In 1894, Verdi composed a short ballet for a French production of Otello, his last purely orchestral composition. Years later, Arturo Toscanini recorded the music for RCA Victor with the NBC Symphony Orchestra which complements the 1947 Toscanini performance of the complete opera.
In 1897, Verdi completed his last composition, a setting of the traditional Latin text Stabat Mater. This was the last of four sacred works that Verdi composed, Quattro pezzi sacri, which can be performed together or separately. They were not conceived as a unit and, in fact, Verdi did not want the Ave Maria published, as he considered it an exercise. The first performance of the four works was on 7 April 1898, at the Opéra, Paris. The four works are: Ave Maria for mixed chorus; Stabat Mater for mixed chorus and orchestra; Laudi alla Vergine Maria for female chorus; and Te Deum for double chorus and orchestra.
On 29 July 1900, King Umberto I of Italy was assassinated by Gaetano Bresci, a deed that horrified the aged composer.
While staying at the Grand Hotel et de Milan in Milan, Verdi suffered a stroke on 21 January 1901. He gradually grew more feeble and died nearly a week later, on 27 January. Arturo Toscanini conducted the vast forces of combined orchestras and choirs composed of musicians from throughout Italy at Verdi's funeral service in Milan. To date, it remains the largest public assembly of any event in the history of Italy.
Verdi was initially buried in Milan's Cimitero Monumentale. A month later, his body was moved to the "crypt" of the Casa di Riposo per Musicisti, a rest home for retired musicians that Verdi had recently established. In October 1894, the French government awarded him the Grand-Croix de la Legion d'honneur. He was the first non-French musician to receive the Grand-Croix.
Verdi was an agnostic atheist. Toscanini, in a taped interview, described Verdi as "an atheist", but "agnostic" is probably the most accurate description. His second wife, Giuseppina Strepponi, described him as "a man of little faith".
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