Giuseppe Verdi (1813 – 1901): Nabucco
In the popular imagination, Giuseppe Verdi was carved rough-hewn from the Italian soil, his destiny inseparably linked to that of his beloved homeland. With Italy occupied and partitioned by foreign powers (mainly Austrian ones) for the first half of his life, he longed for a time when his country could be unified and independent once more.
Although never directly involved in his country’s Risorgimento (resurgence) movement, Verdi’s majestic operas would come to embody and celebrate the Italian spirit like none other, while their patriotic allusions served as a rallying cry for his subjugated countrymen. In time their creator would be regarded as a national icon.
An essentially shy and private man, Verdi endured his ensuing fame as stoically as he could, even as he took a seemingly perverse delight in embellishing his own legend.
For example, he would claim that his home village of Le Roncole, situated at the foot of the Apennine mountains close to Parma, had once been overrun by marauding Austrian soldiers in 1814. Verdi was an infant at the time, and he and his mother had only escaped death by hiding in the belfry of a local church. A plaque later placed inside the church stated that Verdi’s mother had “preserved for Art, a sublime Archangel for the most wished for redemption of Italy, a powerful bard, to the earth of Le Roncole a shining everlasting glory.” But the story is something of an elaborate exaggeration. Although Napoleonic troops were at the that time being driven out of the area by the Austrian military, there is no evidence that the latter ever brutalized civilians In Le Roncole, or anywhere else in the vicinity.
Another tale in the Verdi repertoire was the time when, as an altar boy, a priest had struck him so hard that he had fallen down some steps and concussed himself. Verdi claimed to have cursed the violent priest for his action, the latter having then died dramatically a short time later after being hit by lightning.
But Verdi’s favourite invention was to tell anyone who cared to listen that he hailed from a family of humble peasants. “Although I have been so long in the world”, he pronounced in old age, “and have experienced all matter of fortune, I have learnt very little; the peasant exterior always remains and that peasant lad from Le Roncole often looms large.” Yet his parents Carlo and Luiga were actually from the top ten percent bracket of Italians who could read and write. They were also tradespeople and modest landowners who owned an inn and a grocery store. They would earn sufficient money from their business to be able to afford a decent education for their son.
From the age of four they arranged for young Giuseppe to start taking lessons in both Italian and Latin from a local teacher, before enrolling him in the local school two years later. Already showing an unusual passion for music, Giuseppe was soon also involved in the local church, initially as a singer and then as organist.
When he was seven, his parents saved up enough money to buy him a spinet (a small harpsichord), which Verdi described as a “wreck… already old at the time”, even as “it made me happier than a king.” He would keep the battered old instrument for the rest of his life.
By the age of ten, Giuseppe had been sent to nearby Busseto to continue his education. This small, provincial town would become his base of operations for the next fifteen years, right up to the point when he was on the brink of fame. Two of Busseto’s most prominent musicians would offer the talented young man priceless support during this formative period. One of them was Ferdinand Provesi, a one-time opera composer, now maestro di cappella of the town cathedral as well as musical director of the local Philharmonic Society orchestra. He would not only teach Verdi counterpoint and composition (for free), but also delegate more and more of his musical duties to him.
Finding himself obligated to write a regular supply of music for both the orchestra and a local band (who would perform in the town square on Sundays after Vespers), Verdi took his first steps as a composer in the most practical and down-to-earth of environments. As he later recalled:
From the ages of thirteen to eighteen I wrote a mixed assortment of pieces: marches for the band by the hundred, perhaps as many sinfonia [symphonies] that were used in church, in the theatre and at concerts, five or six concertos and sets of variations for pianoforte, which I played myself at concerts, many serenades, cantatas (arias, duets and very many trios), and various pieces of church music, of which I only remember a Stabat Mater.
As Verdi’s reputation began to spread through the area, the neighbouring towns and villages would demand that he and his band of musicians should come and perform for them too, something that ensured the young man remained very busy throughout these years.
Verdi’s other guardian angel in Busseto was Antonio Barezzi, a successful businessman and keen amateur musician, founder and president of the Philharmonic Society. Barezzi immediately welcomed Verdi into his home, allowing him to practice on his Viennese grand piano. Later on, he would give him free board and lodging. And when romance began to blossom between Giuseppe and Barezzi’s daughter Margherita, he simply encouraged it, stating that he couldn’t imagine a better future son-in-law. Margherita and Giuseppe were eventually married in 1835, with Verdi saying of her father, “I owe him everything”.
At the age of nineteen, Verdi applied for a place at the Milan Conservatorio but was unexpectedly turned down. The conservatorio directors found him to be deficient as both composer and pianist, but other technicalities went against him too. At the time there were few available places at the institute, while Verdi was already almost past the upper age limit permitted for new students. Most bizarrely of all, the conservatorio regarded Verdi as a foreigner, given that he lived outside the state of Lombardy (mostly under the jurisdiction of Austria, Italian states at that time had their own currency and laws, and one required a passport to travel between them).
Verdi never forgot this rebuff and, in something of a feisty “I’ll show you” spirit, kept the conservatorio’s rejection letter for the rest of his life.
But he was at least able to continue his studies in Milan by taking private lessons with Vincenzo Lavigna, a former maestro concertatore at La Scala. Verdi later paid tribute to his last teacher of note: “profound were the studies in musical grammar and language… In a word, a completely practical instruction, solid, serious, without exaggeration, without allowing the youthful mind to create idols which could later be imitated.” Lavigna in turn found his student’s compositions “very promising”.
It was through Lavigna that Verdi was introduced to an amateur choral group, the Società Filarmonica, who were led by Pietro Massini. Verdi attended the Società and was soon involving himself as a continuo player before stepping in to conduct a rehearsal at short notice and impressing everyone in the process.
As director of the Philodramatic theatre in Milan, Massini told his young assistant that if he could write him an opera, he would do his very best to have it staged. Having completed his studies, Verdi returned to Busetto for three years, becoming director of the municipal music school, resuming his Philharmonic duties and in his spare time writing a two-act opera for Massini which he titled, Oberto, Conte di San Bonifacio.
Having finally completed the work in 1839, Verdi took it back to Milan, only to discover that Massini was no longer director of the Philodramatic and could not fulfil his original promise. But the latter then redeemed himself by promoting the opera with such vigour around Milan that it eventually caught the attention of one Bartolomeo Merelli, an impresario at La Scala. Merelli was so impressed by the work that he arranged to have it performed at his own illustrious theatre in the autumn of 1839.
According to Verdi, although Oberta did not have “enormous success” it still managed to do “fairly well, with enough performances for Merelli to see the profit in staging a few extra outside the subscription period.” It eventually ran to fourteen performances, while the rights to the work were bought by the publisher Giovanni Ricordi for 2000 lira.
After this impressive debut, the theatre director made Verdi a handsome offer – a contract to undertake “at intervals of eight months, of three operas, to be produced at La Scala…” Merelli gave Verdi 4000 lira for each opera, with profits from the published scores to be divided equally.
Verdi was on his way… or so he thought. He immediately began work on a two-act operatic comedy, Un Giorno di Regno (King for a Day).
But tragedy was also stalking the young composer, and with a brutality that would come close to destroying his life. Having lost his first infant child to a fatal sickness in 1838, a second would die a year later. And then worst of all, an attack of “violent encephalitis” would take his beloved wife Margherita in June 1840, aged just 26. “A third coffin was carried from my house”, Verdi lamented. “I was alone… the three people most dear to me had vanished for ever, I no longer had a family. And in the midst of this terrible anguish, to avoid breaking the engagement I had contracted, I was compelled to write and finish a comic opera!”
Perhaps it was simply impossible for Verdi to maintain his usual standards through such a gruelling time. Un Giorno was an unmitigated failure, only staged once. Verdi blamed the lacklustre performance, as well as own efforts, while he had never particularly liked the libretto. But it also felt like one setback too many. “My soul rent by the misfortune which had overwhelmed me, my spirit soured by the failure of my opera, I persuaded myself that I should no longer find consolation in art, and formed the resolution to compose no more.” He asked Merelli to cancel their contract.
But Merelli treated Verdi like a “capricious child” and refused his request. Finally he told him, “listen Verdi, I cannot make you write by force, My confidence in you is not lessened. Who know but that one day you may decide to take up your pen again? In that case it will be enough for you to give me notice two months before the beginning of a season, and I promise that the opera which you bring me shall be put on the stage.”
Verdi thanked him while repeating that his decision was final. But on a snowy winter’s evening a few months later, he fatefully bumped into the impresario again, who took his young composer by the arm and led him to his office at La Scala. There Merelli produced a new libretto depicting the Babylonian king Nabucodonosor’s tyrannical conquest of Israel in the sixth century BC. Its author was Temistocle Solera, a man whom Verdi had worked with before and admired. Although the libretto had just been turned down by the German composer, Otto Nicolai, Merelli wanted Verdi to look it over. “Take it, read it!”, he demanded.
“What the deuce do you want me to do with it?” Verdi snapped back at him, “I have no wish to read libretti.”
“Well I suppose it will not hurt you! Read it, and then bring it me back.”
At this point he thrust the manuscript into Verdi’s hands, who felt he had no choice but to take it home with him. The composer then left a vivid account of what happened next:
As I walked, I felt myself seized with a kind of undefinable uneasiness; a profound sadness, a genuine anguish, took possession of my heart. I went into my room, and with an impatient gesture I threw the manuscript on the table, and remained standing before it. In falling on the table, it had opened by itself; without knowing how, my eyes fixed on the page which was before me, and on this verse:
“Va, pensiero, sull’ali dorate”… [Fly, thought, on golden wings]
I ran through the following verses, and was much impressed by them, the more so that they formed almost a paraphrase of the Bible, the reading of which was always dear to me.
I read first one fragment, the another, but, firm in my resolution to compose no more, I tried to command myself. I shut the book, and went to bed. But bah! Nabucco ran in my head; I could not sleep. I got up and read the libretto, not once, but twice, three times, so that in the morning I was able to say that I knew Solera’s poem by heart, from one end to the other.
Verdi was still adamant that he was done as a composer and took the manuscript back to Merelli that very same day. When he admitted that he had liked the poem, Merelli replied, “well set it to music.”
“Not at all! I will have nothing to do with it.”
“Set it to music I say; set it to music.”
According to Verdi, Merelli then rammed the libretto “into the pocket of my overcoat, took me by the shoulders, and not only pushed me roughly out of his office, but shut the door in my face and locked himself in. What was I do?”
He returned home with the words to Nabucco in his pocket. From the depths of the darkest, grief-stricken despair, Giuseppe Verdi began a journey of the most extraordinary creative renewal. “One day one verse”, he remembered. “One day another, one time a note, another time a phrase… little by little the opera was written.”
Having been so forceful in helping Verdi re-find himself as a composer, Merelli might then have briefly wondered at the monster he had created. Although the impresario already had three operas on the go, Verdi now insisted that Nabucco must be premiered in the spring of 1842; he could not wait to the following season. The work’s librettist Temistocle Solera was meanwhile shut up in a small room and told not to come out again until he had rewritten a certain scene in the opera (even Verdi later admitted he had taken a risk in provoking the librettist, who was “a sort of Colossus, who would have had the best of my weak frame”).
All other possible obstacles were negotiated safely and often resourcefully. As there were budget constraints, old, threadbare costumes were patched up and “rearranged skillfully”, while sets used for a previous opera were recycled and repainted, producing an “extraordinary effect.” When the first scene (representing the temple of Solomon) was revealed the audience clapped their hand for at least ten minutes. There was further wild applause for the entrance of the military band.
In all, the opera’s momentous premiere, on March 9th 1842, would leave its audience in raptures. “I hoped for a success”, Verdi later admitted, “after the effect produced at the rehearsals, but such a success, certainly not.” He even thought that when the audience rose up shouting and cheering in the first finale that they were “making game of the poor composer.”
Verdi’s score had of course played a huge part in the opera’s success, combing beautiful melody (in the Italian bel canto tradition) with genuine emotional tension and well-paced dramatic turns. His music pushes the action along at a fair clip, never allowing it to sag or become entangled in decorative elements, while for the first time the operatic chorus is allowed to become a highly emotive centre-point of the narrative.
But it was the opera’s subject matter that particularly caught the imagination of its Italian audiences. In a plot faintly reminiscent of King Lear, the narcissistic, megalomaniacal King Nabucodonosor (Nabucco) is struck down by madness while conquering and tyrannizing the Israelites, believing he is not only a king but a god. His scheming older daughter attempts to steal his crown, while her younger, more sympathetic sibling throws in her lot with the Israelites. Despite some genuinely dark undertones, the story ends in a spirit of reconciliation and forgiveness with a restored Nabucco renouncing his former wickedness, embracing the Hebrew faith and allowing the Israelites their freedom.
But the centre-point of the opera is of course the moment where the enslaved Israelites sing an unforgettable hymn of longing for their old homeland and for their freedom (the “va, pensiero” words which Verdi claims had first caught his eye in the libretto):
O, my homeland, so beautiful and lost!
O memories, so dear and yet so deadly!
…Rekindle the memories of our hearts
And speak of the times gone by!
Or like the fateful Solomon,
Draw a lament of raw sound,
Or permit the Lord to inspire us
To endure our suffering.
For the opera’s early audiences, there was no question over the implied allegory: the Israelites were themselves, while the Babylonians were the Austrian Hapsburgs. The Va Pensiero hymn spoke to them forcefully and directly, becoming nothing less than inspirational rallying call in the years ahead – for they too believed that they could one day be free of their oppressors*.
*There has been recent conjecture – mainly from English-speaking musicologists – over whether Verdi’s early operas really were associated with contemporary Italian politics and not least the whole Risorgimento movement. This argument has been largely based upon the debunking of a popular myth – that the chorus of the Hebrew slaves, Va Pensiero, was encored by popular demand after the premiere of Nabucco (in fact the chorus encored was the Hebrew prayer, Immenso Jehovah). But it seems a little tenuous to suggest that Italian contemporary audiences could have become so emotionally caught up with a biblical story about foreign oppressors and not once made a connection to their own situation.
Italian scholars have in any case hit back at such theories. Aside from Verdi’s repeatedly avowed support for Italian independence, there is a mountain of evidence to prove that by 1848, Verdi’s operas were firmly established in everyone’s minds as a symbol of resistance against Austria.
The Austrian censors would afterwards keep a much warier eye on Verdi, even if there was only a certain amount they could do to hinder a man who was quickly becoming a national hero. After an unprecedented run of 57 performances at La Scala in the autumn of 1842, productions of the opera quickly spread across Italy, and then the rest of Europe, eventually crossing the Atlantic to reach such far-flung cities as New York and Buenos Aires.
Success, of course, brings its own pressures, and not least when Verdi was determined to follow Rossini’s example of making hay while the sun shone and then retiring early. In 1858, and after a further seventeen operas, he would complain: “Since Nabucco, you may say, I have never had one hour of peace. Sixteen years in the galleys!”
For a complete recording of Nabucco, I would look no further than this sumptuous performance from the 2007 St Margarethen opera festival in Austria.