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In the meantime he had composed the three operas that have done most to familiarize his name: Rigoletto, Il trovatore (The Troubadour), and La traviata. In Rigoletto he made an important advance toward a coherent presentation of the drama in music. There is less distinction between the recitatives (part of the score that carries forward the story in imitation of speech), which tend toward arioso (melodic, lyric quality), and the arias, which have lost their rigid formality and are skillfully dovetailed into what precedes and follows them, and the musical interest is concentrated mainly in a series of duets. These culminate in the famous quartet, in effect a double duet for Gilda and Rigoletto on one side of a wall and the Duke and Maddalena on the other. Il trovatore, with its violent heroic action, evoked a different kind of music, powerful and less subtle in its outpouring of impassioned melody. Even greater is the contrast of style in La traviata, with its intimate mood and lyrical pathos--a vein that Verdi had previously exploited in Luisa Miller (1849), which was based on Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe.
These three great successes of Verdi’s middle years were not achieved without tribulation. The composer was now strongly suspect to the censors, and the plot of Le roi s’amuse, Hugo’s poetic drama from which Rigoletto was derived, contained the attempted murder of a king, which was politically taboo, and a curse, which was blasphemous. Only after the king’s reduction in rank to a duke and various other modifications was the text approved. Traviata was a different matter. With La dame aux camélias (The Lady of the Camellias) Alexandre Dumas had just caused a considerable scandal in Paris, and Verdi’s operatic version, though at first performed in 17th-century costumes, too obviously broke away from the type of remote subject considered proper for opera. For this reason and also because a particularly stout prima donna was cast as the consumptive heroine, the first performance in Venice was a fiasco. “Is it my fault or the singers’? Time will show,” was Verdi’s characteristically laconic comment.
Verdi was now an international celebrity, and the change in his status was reflected in his art. From 1855 to 1870 he was mainly occupied in producing works for the Opéra at Paris and other theatres conforming to the Parisian operatic standard, which demanded spectacular dramas in five acts with a ballet. Verdi, always a conscientious craftsman willing to provide what his patrons demanded, set himself to compose “grand” operas on the Meyerbeerian scale, though he groaned under the Opéra’s lavish demands. His first essay in the new manner, Les Vêpres siciliennes (The Sicilian Vespers, 1855), represents a sad falling off from the quality of Rigoletto and La traviata. The fault lay partly in the libretto by Eugène Scribe, who refashioned an old piece he had written for Donizetti.
Two operas for Italian theatres, Simon Boccanegra (Venice, 1857) and Un ballo in maschera (A Masked Ball, Rome, 1859), affected in a lesser degree by the impact of the grand operatic style, show the enrichment of Verdi’s power as an interpreter of human character and a new mastery of orchestral colour. Boccanegra, despite a gloomy and excessively complex plot, holds the attention by the subtle presentation of character and not, as in most of the early operas, simply by means of melodious music and sensational dramatic strokes (coups de théâtre). Un ballo in maschera, a romantic version of the assassination of Gustav III of Sweden, was potentially a better drama, but again the censorship barred the murder of a king and so made nonsense of the story, which was transported from 18th-century Stockholm to Puritan Boston, a hundred years earlier. This was Verdi’s last encounter with a foreign censorship. In 1860, Italy, apart from the papal states, was united as a kingdom. Count Cavour, the political architect of the new state, was anxious to obtain the services in Parliament of distinguished Italians outside the world of politics. Verdi reluctantly agreed to stand for election to the chamber of deputies, which he dutifully attended in Turin, but he took no active part in politics, and after Cavour’s death in 1861 he resigned his seat.
In 1862 Verdi represented Italian musicians at the London Exhibition for which he composed a cantata to words by the poet and composer Arrigo Boito. In the same year his next grand opera, La Forza del destino (The Force of Destiny), was produced at St. Petersburg. This was followed in 1867 by Don Carlos (based on Schiller’s tragedy) at the Paris Opéra. Again there is evident an advance in subtlety of characterization and in the orchestration. These qualities were brought to the highest pitch in Aida, which was commissioned by the khedive of Egypt to celebrate the opening of Cairo’s new Opera House in 1869. (Verdi had earlier rejected a commission for an inaugural hymn celebrating the opening of the Suez Canal.) Aida was finally produced in Cairo in 1871. For this masterpiece, as for Macbeth, Verdi wrote a detailed scenario; Antonio Ghislanzoni was commissioned to turn it into verse, the form of which was often dictated by the composer.
When Rossini died in 1867, Verdi proposed that a requiem mass in his honour be composed by himself and a dozen of his contemporaries for performance at Bologna, Rossini’s spiritual home. The project, however, hardly got beyond the committee state, and Angelo Mariani, who was to have conducted the performance, seemed to Verdi less than wholehearted in his support. Verdi, who could not bear being thwarted, visited his wrath on the unfortunate Mariani, the most distinguished Italian conductor of the day and hitherto one of Verdi’s closest friends, who further annoyed Verdi by arranging and directing a commemoration of Rossini at Pesaro, his birthplace. The quarrel reflects little credit on Verdi. He could never forgive an injury real or imagined, as attested to by his lifelong hatred of La Scala and its audience, which had rejected Un giorno di regno. The breach with Mariani was widened when the conductor refused to go to Cairo to direct the first performance of Aida. He pleaded illness and was indeed suffering from cancer, of which he died in 1873. Fuel was added to the fire by a scurrilous libel in a Florentine paper that accused Verdi of stealing Mariani’s mistress, Teresa Stolz, the soprano who was to be the outstanding Aida in the Italian performances of the opera. There is not a vestige of evidence to support this story, though some years later, after Mariani’s death, Verdi does seem to have developed a warmer attachment to the singer, causing his wife some distress. But if infatuation there was, it passed, and the happy relationship between Verdi and his wife was reestablished.
In 1873, while awaiting the production of Aida in Naples, Verdi wrote a string quartet, the only instrumental composition of his maturity. In the same year, he was moved by the death of Alessandro Manzoni, the Italian patriot and poet, to compose a requiem mass in his honour, into which he incorporated the final movement he had written for the abortive Rossini mass.
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