Composer
Giuseppe Verdi
Italian opera's dominant Romantic-era voice, for nearly sixty years.
Giuseppe Verdi dominated Italian opera for the better part of six decades, writing music built around direct, powerful melody and real dramatic and emotional stakes - qualities that have kept his operas among the most frequently performed in the world, well over a century after his death.
Life in brief
Verdi was born in 1813 in Le Roncole, a village near Busseto in northern Italy, where his parents kept an inn. A local merchant, Antonio Barezzi, recognized his talent and paid for his studies - and Verdi later married Barezzi's daughter, Margherita. When he applied to the Milan Conservatory, he was turned down, partly because he was over the usual age; he studied privately in Milan instead.
Then came tragedy. Between 1838 and 1840 his two young children and his wife all died, and a comic opera he was writing at the time flopped. Verdi resolved to give up composing - until he was handed a libretto about the Babylonian captivity of the Jews. Nabucco (1842) was a sensation, and its chorus of Hebrew slaves, "Va, pensiero," became one of the most beloved melodies in Italy. Years of relentless work followed, which Verdi called his "years in the galleys," producing a stream of operas - and, in the early 1850s, the trio of Rigoletto, Il trovatore, and La traviata.
He lived much of his later life on his farm estate near Busseto with his second wife, the soprano Giuseppina Strepponi. After Aida (1871) and the Requiem (1874), he seemed to retire - only to return in his seventies with two masterpieces written with the poet and composer Arrigo Boito: Otello (1887) and the comedy Falstaff (1893), written at nearly 80. He founded a retirement home for musicians in Milan, the Casa di Riposo, which still operates today, and he is buried there. When he died in 1901, huge crowds lined the streets of Milan.
Music and style
Verdi's operas are built on unforgettable melody and on the human voice at full stretch - but always in the service of drama. He pushed his librettists hard for tight, fast-moving plots and strong situations, and his characters are flesh-and-blood people: a jester trying to protect his daughter, a courtesan sacrificing herself for love, a jealous general destroyed by lies. Over his long career his style deepened from rousing, tune-driven early works to the continuous, richly orchestrated drama of Otello and the quicksilver wit of Falstaff.
Key works
- Nabucco (1842) - the breakthrough, with "Va, pensiero."
- Rigoletto (1851) - including the famous tenor aria "La donna è mobile."
- La traviata (1853) - an intimate tragedy about a Parisian courtesan, with the drinking song "Libiamo."
- Aida (1871) - a grand-scale spectacle set in ancient Egypt, premiered in Cairo, complete with some of opera's most famous processional music.
- Requiem (1874) - despite writing almost exclusively for the stage, Verdi's Requiem, composed to honor the writer Alessandro Manzoni, whom he revered, stands apart: a large-scale sacred choral work so dramatic and theatrical in character that it's often described as "an opera in disguise."
- Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893) - his late Shakespeare operas.
Legacy
Verdi also became a symbol of Italian national identity during his lifetime, with his operas' themes of freedom and struggle resonating directly with the movement toward Italian unification underway across his career. Patriots even used his name as a slogan - "Viva VERDI" was read as an acronym for "Viva Vittorio Emanuele Re D'Italia," the king of a united Italy - and he served in the first Italian parliament. Today his operas are the backbone of the repertoire in opera houses worldwide.
Where to start listening: "La donna è mobile" from Rigoletto is one of opera's most famous melodies; the "Triumphal March" from Aida shows his gift for large-scale spectacle. For his deepest music, try the "Dies irae" from the Requiem.