The Pursuit of Italy

by David Gilmour

  The Roman Republic was also aided by another former exile, Giuseppe Garibaldi, who had worked for thirteen years as a sailor and soldier in South America. Returning to Europe in the revolutionary spring of 1848, he had led without special distinction a volunteer force against the Austrians in the foothills of the Alps. Surprised to find that the local population was unwilling to join his irregular troops, he had been outmanoeuvred by the enemy and forced to take refuge in Switzerland. The following year he went to Rome, where the republic was being besieged at the request of the pope by French, Austrian and Neapolitan troops. Against the odds, Garibaldi managed to defeat both an army from Naples and an over-confident force from France, but in the summer, at the Battle of the Villa Corsini, his tactic of ordering repeated frontal attacks left the French victorious. His eternal instincts – ‘Never retreat’ and ‘When in doubt, charge with the bayonet’ – on this occasion failed him.

  The outcome of the siege was, of course, as inevitable as that of Venice. With Rome on the verge of capitulation, Garibaldi refused to surrender and marched out of the city to continue the struggle in the hills of central Italy. The republican defeat was greeted with much joy by Piedmontese politicians such as Gioberti and Cavour, who had even advocated dispatching troops from Turin to assist in the denouement. For them, Mazzini and Garibaldi were as much the enemies of Italy as the Austrian Empire. Even Azeglio compared the Roman Republic to a comic interlude in an opera whereas in fact – together with the siege of Venice and the insurrections in Lombardy – it was one of the most serious episodes of 1848–9, a subject that might have been worthy of an opera by Verdi.

  OPERATIC ITALY

  By 1848 Italian opera had gained a reputation that few people could have predicted two generations earlier. In the early years of the century the musical form, invented by Florentine composers over 200 years before, had appeared to be dying: Domenico Cimarosa was dead, Giovanni Paisiello had stopped composing, the eighteenth-century tradition of opera seria – with its dazzling arias, its skimpy drama and its invariable happy endings – seemed to have passed away as terminally as the royal courts that had sustained it. At the time of Cimarosa’s death in 1801 the glories to come could not have been anticipated. Gioacchino Rossini was eight, Gaetano Donizetti was only three, Vincenzo Bellini had not quite been conceived, and the parents of Giuseppe Verdi were still children.

  The resurgence of Italian opera was accomplished almost single-handedly by Rossini, a sparkling composer with a talent for comedy who became famous with two operas produced in Venice in 1813, Tancredi and L’italiana in Algeri (The Italian Girl in Algiers). He dominated opera in the peninsula for the next decade and for several years afterwards, even when he was living abroad as a French composer writing for the Paris Opéra. Although his Romanticism was reluctant and even alien to his nature, Rossini became acknowledged as the father of Italian Romantic opera. At the age of thirty-seven, after he had produced Guillaume Tell, he stopped writing operas, but by then his reputation was unassailable.

  At the time of Rossini’s retirement, two younger and more naturally Romantic composers were waiting to take over. One was Donizetti, who wrote with a grace and a facility to rival the master: while Rossini had taken sixteen days to write Il barbiere di Siviglia, he allegedly needed only fourteen days to compose L’elisir d’amore. The other was the Sicilian, Bellini, who made audiences swoon with his plangent melodies and his melancholy lyricism. Both men triumphed soon after Guillaume Tell, Donizetti with Anna Bolena in 1830, Bellini a year later with Norma, although he had to wait until the second night for acclamation: at the première at La Scala in Milan the Druid priestess flopped, thus inaugurating an unhappy tradition for tragic women on first nights that went on to engulf La traviata in Venice in 1853 and Madama Butterfly in 1904. In his final opera, I puritani, Bellini created the character Elvira, the role that a century later ensured the fame of the great Greek-American soprano Maria Callas.

  The works of these three – and of several lesser composers such as Giovanni Pacini and Saverio Mercadante – transformed Italian opera from a courtly entertainment with mythological figures such as Orpheus into a middle-class passion that demanded historical and romantic tragedies. All of Verdi’s operas end in tragedy (except of course for his two comedies); even in Simon Boccanegra, in which the lovers – almost uniquely – remain united and alive, the heroine is forced to witness the murder of her father in the final scene.

  Foreign observers were astonished by the passion for opera in the peninsula: Italians used theatres as Englishmen used clubs, as places where they could meet each other and chat; the fashionable ladies of Milan were thus reduced to opening their salons only on Friday, when La Scala was closed. The energy and enthusiasm of operatic culture reinforced the northern European view that Italian was the language of passion, pleasure and melodrama. Many Italians were doubtless content with this, but some wondered whether the obsession with musical melodrama was injuring their sensibility to art and the subtlety of fine writing. The Sicilian aristocrat Giuseppe di Lampedusa, who was born in the year of La bohème (1896), claimed that ‘opera mania’ had for a century ‘absorbed all the artistic energies of the nation’. There could be no symphonies and no successful plays because ‘music was opera, drama was opera’, even painters had abandoned their canvases to design Don Carlos’s prison and the sacred groves of Norma. By 1910, when the frenzy diminished, Italian intellectual life resembled ‘a field which locusts had visited for a hundred consecutive years’.11

  The popularity of opera prompted a wave of theatre construction. In the half-century after the fall of Napoleon, over 600 playhouses were built in Italy, half of which were large enough to put on operas.12 Cities such as Venice and Milan had several theatres where opera could be performed, and most towns of the north and centre had at least one, however small: the orchestra pit in Lucca’s Teatro Giglio is so narrow that the harpist and percussionists have to play from adjacent boxes. Yet it was easier to build opera houses than to people them with adequate musicians. In the heyday of Donizetti and Bellini, Italy possessed some great singers yet its orchestras were so poor that they sometimes broke down during performances; the madcap overture of Guillaume Tell was apparently never played correctly in the peninsula because no orchestra had enough cellists. The most successful composers were thus eager to have their premières only in the finest opera houses – the San Carlo in Naples, La Fenice in Venice and La Scala – before they earned enough renown to have them in Paris. In spite of La Scala’s claims to sempiternal pre-eminence, the best opera house before 1860 was usually the San Carlo. While the Bourbons did not personally enjoy going to the opera, they spent a lot of money on their theatre, providing the best orchestra and many of the best singers. It was the favourite Italian venue for both Rossini and Donizetti.

  Around 1840 the great operatic revival seemed in danger of petering out. Bellini, perhaps the most talented of the composers (and the one most admired by Wagner), had died in 1835 at the age of thirty-three. Rossini had another three decades of life but he was depressed and overweight, composing nothing except an occasional bolero or canzone and refusing to write anything of note until the Petite messe solennelle in 1863. Donizetti was just still going, and in 1842 he produced an opera in Vienna and accepted the post of court composer to the Austrian emperor. But this kind and attractive man was already dying from the effects of syphilis; in 1844 he was declared insane and four years later he died in his home town of Bergamo. Italy was plainly in need of a new star.

  Giuseppe Verdi was born in 1813 in the hamlet of Roncole, close to the River Po and to the town of Busseto. As France had annexed the region, he began life as a French citizen and was christened Joseph; the following year, after Napoleon’s abdication, he became a subject of the Austrian grand duchess who ruled Parma. In middle age he enjoyed calling himself ‘a peasant from Roncole’ although actually he was the son of an innkeeper wealthy enough to employ labourers on his land and to purchase a second-hand sp
inet for his musical offspring. Giuseppe’s infant life was subjected to a further myth that he never bothered to refute. His so-called birthplace, his casa natale, was declared a national monument in 1901 and is today a museum, yet he was not in fact born in it. His parents moved to the ‘casa natale’ when he was a teenager.

  The boy went to school in Busseto, found a patron who sponsored his music studies in Milan and began a career that was almost overwhelmed at its start by family tragedies. After losing his only sibling at the age of nineteen, Giuseppe married his patron’s daughter when he was twenty-two but had lost through illness his entire young family – daughter, son and wife – by the time he was twenty-six, the age when his first opera (Oberto) was performed at La Scala. After his wife’s death, he tried to get out of composing his second, a comedy, but the impresario insisted – perhaps out of kindness – that the contract should be fulfilled, and Un giorno di regno (King for a Day) was duly staged in Milan. Considering the misery Verdi was going through, and the fact that he had little sense of humour anyway, it is a surprisingly attractive and light-hearted piece which owes much to the work and spirit of Rossini. Unfortunately, the audience at La Scala did not agree. The première was such a fiasco (the word then favoured to denote a first-night flop) that it was taken off next day. The composer did not write another comedy for over fifty years.

  Verdi’s career was rescued by Nabucco, which was performed seventy-five times at La Scala in 1842, produced at nineteen other playhouses the year after, and repeated at twenty-five more in 1844.13 This was later proclaimed the first of Verdi’s ‘Risorgimento operas’, since Italian nationalists asserted that audiences living under the Austrian ‘yoke’ identified themselves with the Hebrew slaves sighing for freedom from the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar (Nabucco), who had removed them from Jerusalem. There is not much contemporary evidence, however, to suggest that audiences made this connection or that the composer intended them to do so. The opera became popular chiefly because it was a strong and moving work by a striking new talent.

  Nabucco was followed by another so-called ‘Risorgimento opera’, I lombardi alla prima crociata (The Lombards on the First Crusade), the spectators of which were allegedly persuaded to think of themselves as crusaders and the Austrians as their Saracen foes. After that, Verdi composed his most beautiful early opera, Ernani, succeeded by three others (I due Foscari, Giovanna d’Arco and Alzira) which were written hurriedly and carelessly and are among his least memorable works. Next came the third ‘Risorgimento opera’, Attila, in which the audience is supposed to have considered itself Roman and even to have joined in with encouraging shouts when the Roman general tells the King of the Huns, ‘You will have the world, leave Italy to me.’ Early in 1847 Verdi returned to form with Macbeth, enjoyed some success with I masnadieri (The Bandits) at Covent Garden in the presence of Queen Victoria, and followed them up with Il corsaro (The Corsair), one of the weakest of all his works.

  Verdi was subsequently acclaimed as ‘il maestro della rivoluzione italiana’, the great patriot whose music inspired people to man the barricades or rush to Garibaldi’s banner in 1848 and 1849. Yet the only opera he produced in ‘the Year of Revolutions’ was an apolitical drama about pirates performed in Trieste, a city of the Austrian Empire. He himself did not go to Trieste but nor did he spend much of 1848 in Italy. Since August of the previous year, he had been living in Paris, converting (not very successfully) I lombardi into Jérusalem for the Opéra. Although the work had its première in November, Verdi remained in Paris even after the risings in Sicily and elsewhere, apparently preferring to witness a revolution in France rather than one in his homeland. Not until after the ‘Five Days’ in Milan that ejected Radetzky did he travel to the Lombard capital.

  The composer was of course a patriot with strong sentimental feelings about an independent Italy. At stirring moments he himself could be stirred. From Milan he wrote to Francesco Piave, the librettist of Ernani and Macbeth, regretting that he had missed the fighting and willing to honour the heroes who had driven out the Austrians. ‘The hour of liberation’ was nigh, he proclaimed, as if writing a portentous libretto, no power could resist the people’s wish, and within a few years, perhaps only a few months, Italy would be ‘free, united and republican’. Piave, he sternly told his correspondent, must not again talk to him about writing music.

  What has got into you? Do you think that I want to bother myself now with notes, with sounds? There cannot be any music welcome to Italian ears in 1848 except the music of cannon! I would not write a note for all the money in the world: I would feel an immense remorse, using music-paper, which is so good for making shells.14

  Later in the letter, after noting that Piave had become a national guard in Manin’s Venetian Republic, Verdi confided that, if he had been able to enlist, he would have been a common soldier rather than a ‘wretched tribune’, but he did not explain why he had been unable to enlist; he was only thirty-four, fifteen years younger than Azeglio, who had managed the transition from artist to officer without difficulty. The real explanation doubtless came in the next paragraph when he told Piave he had ‘to go back to France because of obligations and business’, which he clarified as meaning two operas to write and a lot of money to collect. Verdi was thus a patriot so long as patriotism did not interfere with work or business. Subsequently it transpired that the chief purpose of his Italian visit had been not to applaud the revolution or tour the barricades but to buy a farm near Roncole, which later became his home. By the middle of May, he was safely back in France, after just over a month in Italy and just before the battle for Lombardy began.

  From Paris Verdi wailed at the armistice that followed the Piedmontese defeat in the first Battle of Custoza. ‘What a wretched time we live in! What a pygmy time! Nothing great: not even great crimes!’ He himself composed the music for a battle hymn, ‘Suona la tromba’ (‘Sound the Trumpet’), which had been written by the young poet Goffredo Mameli and which Verdi sent to Mazzini in the hope that it would ‘soon be sung on the Lombard plains, to the music of cannon’.15 Mazzini had requested the hymn in May, but the composer did not send it until the autumn, by which time both Lombardy and the Italian cannons had been silenced. Although it might have been used in later campaigns, the work never caught on, and a different poem by Mameli, ‘Fratelli d’Italia’ (‘Brothers of Italy’), set to music by Michele Novaro, eventually became the Italian national anthem. Mameli himself was killed in 1849, at the age of twenty-one, fighting with Garibaldi’s forces in Rome.

  While he was in Paris, Verdi wrote his one indisputable ‘Risorgimento opera’, La battaglia di Legnano, a work that celebrated what his librettist called ‘the most glorious epoch of Italian history’ – the twelfth century. Staged in January 1849 in the Rome of Mazzini’s republic, its composer left France with reluctance to conduct the opening performances; again he stayed in Italy for just over a month and again he left before the real fighting – Garibaldi’s defence of the city – took place. In the circumstances of the moment, the opera could hardly have failed to be a success. From the opening chorus, which declared that Italy was ‘at last … a single people of heroes’, to the final act (‘To Die for the Fatherland’), for which an encore became obligatory, the applause was so loud that the music could hardly be heard.

  Verdi was evidently the composer laureate in Rome at the beginning of 1849, but he does not appear to have been regarded as such in other parts of Italy during the revolutions. Some patriots wondered why his previous three operas had been about brigands, pirates and a Scottish usurper married to a murderess. Others were puzzled that, at such a critical time, he had chosen to write about a medieval battle instead of a more recent event such as the ‘Five Days’ of Milan. Following the proclamations of the new constitutions early in 1848, a few towns staged Attila and Ernani, but elsewhere Verdi’s name on the posters was absent. As the musicologist Roger Parker has shown, patriots had little appetite for the ‘Risorgimento operas’ even in the mos
t important year of the Risorgimento. The people of Bologna, one theatrical journal observed, preferred to sing nationalist songs themselves rather than watch I lombardi, while the arrival of Nabucco in Naples was a disappointment because audiences were not at that moment interested in ‘the traditions … of the ancient Orient’. Considering a production of Attila in Ferrara, the author of another article wondered why it was necessary to ‘recall an epoch so humiliating for Italy’ rather than stage an opera ‘more suitable to the current times’ that would ‘recall only those facts that lend glory to our most dear homeland’. Parker also discovered that Verdi’s music did not feature in the concerts performed in liberated Milan between the ‘Five Days’ and the return of Radetzky four months later. Instead of listening to the most talented Italian still composing, the Milanese preferred choruses from lesser musicians that urged ‘Italians into the fray’ and told them not to sleep ‘until Italy belongs to us’.16

  None of this would have surprised Verdi, who never thought of himself as the ‘maestro della rivoluzione’. He had patriotic and republican instincts, he had given his children names from ancient Rome (Virginia and Icilio Romano) that seemed to reflect this, he considered himself to be Italian and he wanted Italy to be free. Yet he had no passionate animus against Austria. In 1836 he had composed a cantata for the Habsburg emperor’s birthday, and his first visit abroad was to Vienna, where he conducted Nabucco, a work that evidently did not upset the Austrians. On his return to Parma, he conducted the same opera before the Austrian archduchess, Marie-Louise, who granted him an audience and gave him a present. Subsequently she became the dedicatee of his next work, I lombardi.