The complete idiot's guide to classical music (55 page)

That aphorism about opera being great “except for the singers” has sometimes been attributed to Giuseppe Verdi, and it would make equal sense. Like Rossini, Verdi had more than occasional contretemps with wayward prima donnas; both saw superb operas turned into opening night fiascos by singers who forgot their parts, lost their voices, or fell through trapdoors. Both suffered through productions where soloists cut their music or (even worse) added unwritten roulades, which bludgeoned their most tender arias into athletic displays of vocal bravura.

There are those who say that Verdi got even with his singers by writing extremely difficult music for them. He would cast much of it in an extremely high range, often devising arias where the poor soloist has to sing steadily from beginning to end without so much as a two-bar rest for breath-catching purposes. In his young years as a music critic, George Bernard Shaw turned Verdi to task for having ruined a whole generation of Italian singers. “He wrote so abominably for the human voice,” said George Bernard Shaw, “that the tenors all had goat-bleat (and were proud of it); the baritones had a shattering vibrato and could not, to save their lives, produce a note of any definite pitch; and the sopranos had the tone of a locomotive whistle, without its steadiness.”

 
Music Word
In vocal music, a
roulade
is a series of rapid musical notes inserted into a composition, usually on a single syllable, as a decorative embellishment.

Well, singers must have found a way around those booby-traps because there are any number of superb Verdi performers around these days; and do they have great stuff to sing! Verdi’s music has such strength and dramatic sweep, and such a limitless fountain of glorious melody, that the best of his works stand among the mightiest creations in opera. Verdi had his weaker pieces, but even they have their moments, and given the roster of unquestioned masterpieces, his batting average is right up there with the best of them.

 
Important Things to Know
Do you enjoy soaring love duets and lively choruses? How about virtuosic soprano arias and heroic outbursts for the tenor, with plots that smack more than faintly of political and social satire? If so, Verdi might be your man, since those qualities and more, help give his stageworks their special dramatic power.

Unlike so many composers, whose early works are resounding duds, Verdi’s first opera,
Oberto
was a big hit. His second was the resounding dud, an alleged comedy called
King for a Day
that got so badly hissed by the audience at the premiere that it was withdrawn and never performed again. At least not until 1951, by which time Verdi couldn’t really care much about it one way or the other.

Back in 1840, meanwhile, Verdi cared about it so deeply that he tore up all his remaining contracts and swore off writing operas altogether. It took a sneaky trick by the impresario at La Scala to get Verdi back on track (he pushed a libretto into the composer’s pocket, figuring that curiosity would get the better of him. Which it did. “What could I do?” Verdi recalled many years later. “One day I did a line, the next day another; now a note, now a phrase. . . .” Within three months, the opera was done, and the resulting production of
Nabucco
was such a smash hit that Verdi never turned back again. He did, though, swear off comic operas, not tackling another one until at the ripe old age of 80. He dipped into Shakespeare once again (
Otello
had been produced eight years earlier) and created his breathlessly exciting and brilliantly witty setting of
Falstaff
.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
Richard Strauss, not given to over-praising other composers’ works, except Wagner sometimes, referred to Verdi’s
Falstaff
as “the greatest masterpiece of modern Italian music” and “a work of artistic perfection.”

In between those two comedies came a barrage of unforgettable dramas, their successes marred only by Verdi’s constant battle with the censors. They forced him to change titles, locales, and plot elements. For example, the French King in
Rigoletto
became an Italian Duke and the Swedish King in
A Masked Ball
got converted into a Governor of Boston. (The fact that Boston didn’t have a governor, and that not too many folks in Massachusetts ran around with names like Riccardo, Renato, and Silvano, didn’t bother the censors in the least.)

And then there were those darn singers, again, like the soprano who decided to go on her honeymoon just before she was to sing the premiere of
Sicilian Vespers
. (She didn’t get married until a year later, but first things first.) Another singer who, Verdi said, “Screamed in a way that would have rendered her invaluable as a shepherd in the Pyrenees Mountains.”

There was Marianna Barbieri-Nini, who kicked up a fuss before the first performance of
Macbeth
because Verdi made her rehearse one number 150 times. While the audience was already in its seats, he made her put a cloak over her costume and go out into the foyer for run-through number 151.

And let us not forget Fanny Salvini-Donatelli, who sabotaged the premiere of
La Traviata.
She took the part of the beautiful, consumptive courtesan even though she was plain and plump. Every time she sang about how she was wasting away, the audience howled with laughter, and when she collapsed at the end of the last act, she sent up an enormous cloud of dust. “The premiere,” reported one critic, “marked an epoch in the history of colossal fiascoes.”

No matter, Verdi’s music would eventually triumph over all, and it continues to do so today. The composer received innumerable awards and honors, and when he died, schools were closed and all Italy mourned the loss of a national hero.

“Verdi,” said the musical historian Paul Henry Lang, “has given us opera which exemplifies the essence of the lyric drama; the transliteration of human emotions from a literary sketch into pure music.” Even without Rigoletto’s hump, La Traviata’s glittering ballroom, the horde of spear-carriers in
Aida
, the costumes, swordfights, and stage effects that enliven performances in the opera house, Verdi’s music stands high in its ability to convey drama on its own terms.

Of his nearly 30 stage operas, nos. 16, 17, and 18 are among the most popular ever written:
Rigoletto, Il Trovatore,
and
La Traviata
form an astonishing trilogy. He also had three popular Shakespearian tragedies,
Macbeth, Otello,
and
Falstaff.
And where would we be without the Triumphal Scene in
Aida.

Other Verdi operas to explore include
A Masked Ball, Don Carlos, La Forza del Destino
(The Force of Destiny), and
I Vespri Siciliani
(Sicilian Vespers), and if you’re not hung up on a good story, there’s the operatically grand
Requiem Mass
. You can, of course, stay instrumental altogether, dipping into the many fine Overtures and ballet sequences from the operas or, for something a little different, Verdi’s only string quartet.

“I love small things,” said Giacomo Puccini, who then went and wrote ten great big operas. But with that love of intimacy, came an urge to communicate large emotions. The music of those small things, he explained, must be “true, full of passion and humanity, and touch the heart.” It is this quality of direct and urgent communication that has given enduring life to so many of his operatic characters.

Puccini was born three days before Christmas, in 1848, in the town of Lucca, Italy, somewhere between Pisa and Florence. He was born into a family of church musicians, though none seemed to have ventured much beyond the town walls. Apparently, the musical lucre in Lucca wasn’t sufficient for the lad, for he is rumored to have trudged the 13 miles to Pisa just to get to a performance of Verdi’s
Aida.
(Let’s hope he didn’t have to settle for standing room.)

At the age of 22, Puccini wrote a
Glory Mass
that was good enough for him to apply for admission to the Milan Conservatory.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
Nearly 40 years earlier, the guardians of the gates at the Milan Conservatory, in their infinite wisdom, had rejected the application of another young student named Giuseppe Verdi. His compositional skills were inadequate, the registrar reported, and his piano technique was lacking. By now, fortunately, the Conservatory had a new registrar, so Puccini was accepted.

In Milan, Puccini unveiled his first opera,
Le Villi
, and that was good enough to gain him a commission from the fabled La Scala Opera House. Puccini was on his way, right? Unfortunately, no. At least not yet. His second opera
Edgar
laid an egg, and Puccini existed as so many artistic legends had before him, desperately short of cash and rarely able to vary his diet of onions and beans. “I am sick of this eternal struggle with poverty,” he wrote to his brother, while storing up memories for
La Boheme.

Puccini’s first grand success came in 1893 with
Manon Lescaut
, the press hailing the composer as “a truly Italian genius, whose song is the song of our artistic sensualism. It caresses us and becomes part of us.” Finally, things seemed to be looking up, and Puccini enjoyed a couple of years in the public eye and reverence.