VERDI, GIUSEPPE (b. nr. Busseto, Italy, 10 Oct 1813 d. Milan, 27 Jan 1901)
Verdi is a towering figure in nineteenth-century composition for the voice. As well as his operas, he is remembered for his remarkable Requiem, with its beautiful settings for soloists and chorus.
His parents were poor and his musical education began with the help of the local organist. Antonio Barezzi, a wealthy music-lover, then arranged for him to study. He later sent him to Milan.
There Verdi failed to gain an entrance scholarship to the Conservatory but stayed on to study privately. He then returned to Busseto, where he assumed the post of music director, and married Barezzi's daughter.
At the age of twenty five, Verdi had his first opera performed at La Scala. It was partly instigated by Giuseppina Strepponi, a young soprano who believed in him as a composer and took the lead in the production.
The management wanted three more operas; but the tragic deaths of his wife and two children, and the failure of another piece, so depressed Verdi that he tried to cancel his contract. He was persuaded to continue his work. The result was his first masterpiece Nabucco, performed in 1842.
Thereafter, Verdi wrote constantly for the leading Italian theatres. Soon he became equally in demand abroad. In 1847 I Masnadieri (The Bandits) premièred in London with Swedish soprano, Jenny Lind. Stiffelio followed in 1850. Meanwhile, in Paris, Verdi had again met Giuseppina Strepponi. They married in 1859.
Rigoletto, (1851) and Il Trovatore (The Troubadour) (1853) mark the beginning of Verdi's maturity as an opera composer. La Traviata followed, also in 1853. It was rejected by the critics, but, from the outset, appealed to the public. In it Verdi abandons the conventional forms of Italian opera to find a smoother, more flexible, language to express his naturalistic subject.
Verdi continued to write operas prolifically until the 1860s, when he became a member of the new Italian Parliament. In the five years of his parliamentary career he had time to compose only one opera, La forza del destino (The Force of Destiny) (1862). Macbeth, originally written in 1847, was revised and presented in Paris in 1865.
In 1867 Don Carlos was performed in Paris. Aida followed in 1871, at the Cairo Opera House. In this Verdi returns to the Italian style which he had exchanged for the French with Don Carlos.
Otello (1887) continues Verdi's love affair with Shakespeare, started with Macbeth in 1847 and bringing his operatic career to a triumphant close with Falstaff, composed when he was 79.
