His first essay in the new manner, Les Vêpres siciliennes (1855; The Sicilian Vespers), is a rather cold piece that had only lukewarm success from its premiere on. Two pieces for Italian theatres, Simon Boccanegra (1857) and Un ballo in maschera (1859; A Masked Ball ), affected to a lesser extent by the impact of the grand operatic style, show the enrichment of Verdi’s power as an interpreter of human character and as a master of orchestral colour. Boccanegra includes powerful scenes and creates a special windswept atmosphere appropriate to its Genoese pirate protagonist. Much more successful with the public was Ballo, a Romantic version of the assassination of Gustav III of Sweden.
In 1862 Verdi represented Italian musicians at the London Exhibition, for which he composed a cantata to words by the up-and-coming poet and composer Arrigo Boito. In opera the big money came from foreign commissions, and in the same year his next work, La forza del destino (The Force of Destiny), was produced at St. Petersburg. The epic-style Forza, includes the most extended religious scene in a Verdi opera and his first substantial comic role. Don Carlos (1867) is a setting of another play by Schiller in which religion is portrayed much more harshly, and much more in accordance with Verdi’s lifelong strong anticlerical sentiments, than in Forza; it is regarded by some as Verdi’s masterpiece.
Verdi felt that both operas with foreign commissions required revision for Italian theatres; this he accomplished for Forza in 1869 and Don Carlo (as it is now usually called) in 1884 and 1887. He needed none with the piece in which at last he fashioned a libretto exactly to his needs, Aida. Commissioned by the khedive of Egypt to celebrate the opening of Cairo’s new Opera House in 1869, Aida premiered there in 1871 and went on to receive worldwide acclaim.
In 1873, while waiting in a Naples hotel for a production of Aida, Verdi wrote a string quartet, the only instrumental composition of his maturity. In the same year, he was moved by the death of the Italian patriot and poet Alessandro Manzoni to compose a requiem mass in his honour. One of the masterpieces in the oratorio tradition, the Manzoni Requiem is an impressive testimony to what Verdi could do outside the field of opera.
After 1873 the maestro considered himself retired, at long last, from that world of opera to which he had been bound for so many years. He settled in at Sant’Agata, where he became a major landholder and a very wealthy man. His unintended and unimagined return to the stage, many years after Aida, was entirely due to the initiative of his publisher, Giulio Ricordi, who proposed that Arrigo Boito should write a libretto based on Shakespeare’s Othello. The Othello project then took shape, very slowly, on and off, until the opera finally opened at La Scala in 1887. In his 74th year, Verdi, stimulated by a libretto far superior to anything he had previously set, had produced his tragic masterpiece.
After a rapturous tour with Otello throughout Europe, Verdi once more retreated to Sant’Agata, declaring that he had composed his last opera. Yet Ricordi and Boito managed to intervene one more time. With infinite skill, Boito converted Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, strengthened with passages adapted from the Henry IV plays, into the perfect comic libretto, Falstaff, which Verdi set to miraculously fresh and mercurial music. This, his last dramatic work, produced at La Scala in 1893, was a tremendous success.
Even after Falstaff, Verdi still interested himself in composition. His list of works ends with sacred music for chorus: a Stabat Mater and a Te Deum published, along with the somewhat earlier and slighter Ave Maria and Laudi alla Vergine Maria, under the title Quattro pezzi sacri (Four Sacred Pieces) in 1898. After a long decline, Verdi’s wife Giuseppina died in 1897, and Verdi himself gradually grew weaker and died four years later.
Giuseppe Verdi: A Beautiful Italian Musical Mind
