Giuseppe Verdi

Giuseppe Verdi was born on 10 October 1813 at Le Roncole, a hamlet near Busseto in the Duchy of Parma, then under French rule. His parents ran an inn and a grocery. As a child he was fascinated by the village church organ, and at nine he became its organist. A wealthy Busseto merchant and music lover, Antonio Barezzi, noticed his talent, took him into his home and paid for his studies. Verdi studied with the music master Ferdinando Provesi and composed his first marches for the town band.

In 1832, thanks to a grant and Barezzi’s help, he went to study in Milan. But the Conservatory refused him: he was over the age limit, not an Austrian subject, and his piano technique was judged inadequate. Ironically, the Conservatory now bears his name. Verdi then studied privately with Vincenzo Lavigna, a former La Scala musician, who taught him counterpoint and took him to the opera. In 1836 he returned to Busseto as music master and married Margherita, Barezzi’s daughter.

In 1839 his first opera, Oberto, was premiered at La Scala with respectable success. But between 1838 and 1840 Verdi suffered a terrible tragedy: his two children and then his wife Margherita died of illness. Meanwhile he had to compose a comic opera, Un giorno di regno, which was a complete failure. In despair he decided to stop composing. It was the La Scala impresario Bartolomeo Merelli who slipped into his pocket a libretto on the biblical story of Nebuchadnezzar.

The libretto fell open at the lines “Va, pensiero, sull’ali dorate” (“Go, thought, on golden wings”), the chorus of the Hebrews exiled in Babylon longing for their homeland. Verdi was overwhelmed and went back to work. Nabucco, premiered at La Scala on 9 March 1842, was a triumph. The chorus “Va, pensiero” became the symbol of Italians dreaming of freedom from Austrian rule. In the following years, which Verdi called his “galley years”, he composed at a frantic pace, almost an opera a year.

The 1850s produced his famous “popular trilogy”: Rigoletto (1851), the story of a hunchbacked jester trying to protect his daughter, with the aria “La donna è mobile”; Il trovatore (1853), with its Anvil Chorus; and La traviata (1853), after Alexandre Dumas fils’s The Lady of the Camellias, at first a failure and then one of the most performed operas in the world. Verdi was then living with the soprano Giuseppina Strepponi, whom he married in 1859, and settled on his estate at Sant’Agata near Busseto, where he also devoted himself to farming.

His name became a political slogan: patriots wrote “Viva VERDI” on walls, secretly meaning “Viva Vittorio Emanuele Re d’Italia”, long live Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy. In 1861, after unification, Verdi was elected deputy to the first Italian Parliament at Cavour’s request. He then composed operas on a larger scale: La forza del destino for St Petersburg (1862), Don Carlos for the Paris Opéra (1867) and Aida (1871), commissioned for the new Cairo opera house, with its famous Triumphal March. In 1874 he wrote his Messa da Requiem in homage to the writer Alessandro Manzoni.

For sixteen years Verdi composed no opera. It was the composer and poet Arrigo Boito who persuaded him to take up his pen again: together they created Otello (1887), after Shakespeare, and then Falstaff (1893), a sparkling comedy written at seventy-nine. Generous, he founded in Milan the Casa di Riposo, a retirement home for elderly musicians, where he now lies. He died in Milan on 27 January 1901. When his body was transferred, a vast crowd spontaneously sang “Va, pensiero”.