Giuseppe Verdi (1813 – 1901): Rigoletto
Despite his status as one of Europe’s best-loved and most iconic opera composers, Giuseppe Verdi also had a reputation for being the kind of man you did not mess with. It was a side to him his various collaborators – impresarios, librettists, singers or publishers – would all come to accept over time, recognizing his unspoken prerogative to discard them for someone else if he didn’t like their terms.
He would take much the same approach to the Austrian authorities who occupied much of his native Italy in the mid nineteenth century, and who still dictated what could and could not be presented on an operatic stage.
Shortly after the stunning success of his breakthrough opera Nabucco, Verdi had composed another for Milan’s La Scala theatre, I Lombardi. With rehearsals well under way, a copy of the libretto landed on the doorstep of one Karl Kajetan von Gaisruck, the Archbishop of Milan, who was aghast at what he found. Taking sharp exception to the many sacred elements in the storyline – there were churches and processions involved, for goodness’ sake, plus a conversion and a baptism – the good archbishop lodged a formal complaint, claiming it was sacrilege to portray such things in a secular entertainment. He entreated the director of police to intervene, and if he did not do so, Gaisruck would personally take the matter to the emperor himself.
A messenger duly arrived at La Scala, summoning Verdi, Bartolomeo Merelli (the theatre director) and Temistocle Solera (the librettist) to appear before the Milanese police. But while the latter two were terrified, Verdi quickly dismissed the whole thing as a “nonsense”. Finally he told his two colleagues, “you go. As far as I am concerned, the rehearsals are advanced, the opera goes well, and I will not change either a note or a word of it. It shall be played as it is, or it shall not be played at all.”
Buoyed by Verdi’s defiance, Merelli and Solera presented themselves at the police station before making their pitch: that following on from Nabucco, I Lombardi was another great opera in the making, and moreover, after a great deal of collective labour, all the costumes had now been made, the scenery painted and the music painstakingly rehearsed. Listening in sympathy, the police commissioner suggested one minor and entirely incidental alteration, while promising to square matters with the feisty archbishop. He would prove true to his word: I Lombardi was allowed to proceed with no further official interference.
Verdi doing battle with Austrian censors would become a common theme of the 1840s. Yet the latter were not entirely wrong to scrutinize some of the material in his operas, and not least their nationalistic or patriotic allusions – eager Italian audiences had started to do the same, with the result that even the smallest insinuation could now threaten a major political cause célèbre.
For example, in Verdi’s 1846 opera, Attila, the opening chorus sings of an Italian city, recently conquered by Attila the Hun, but destined, we are told, to one day rise up against its oppressors. At another point, a Roman general attempts to bargain with the invading Attila: “you can have the universe but leave Italy to me.” In the event, Attila is killed before his armies can take Rome, to (we presume) much cheering in the galleries.
From the five-act Macbeth, written the following year, we have Macduff lamenting, “the homeland betrayed, we cry, brothers, let us run to save the oppressed.” Macduff is of course referring to Scotland, but the early performers of this opera would do little to quell the unspoken comparison, provocatively fixing tricolour cockades to their headwear among other things. One particular rendition of this aria (which involved most of the audience joining in) invoked such a heightened mood of nationalist fervour that Austrian grenadiers had to be called in to restore order.
Matters could sometimes get out of hand in more unexpected ways. At an early performance of Verdi’s Ernani (1844), the audience was startled to see a man dressed in national costume bounding onto the stage, shouting, “Bis! Viva Italia!” He then proceeded to strip off his cap, tunic and waistcoat, hurling them all into the orchestral pit, where anxious players feared the next projectile coming their way would be the patriot himself. But having signed off with an impromptu finale – brandishing a huge sword before embedding it dramatically into the stage – the man was finally led away by a burly policeman.
Still young and somewhat fiery himself, Verdi appeared to take such incidents very much in his stride. Even as he avoided any overtly Risorgimento* themes in his operas, in person he could express himself directly and forcefully. He was particularly excited when both Milan and Rome rose up against their Austrian rulers in 1848, temporarily driving them out of each city: “You talk to me about music!” he wrote eagerly to his librettist friend Francesco Maria Piave. “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 the cannon! I would not write a note for all the money in the world: I would feel immense guilt at using up music paper, which is so good for making shells.” For good measure, he added that they must “banish every petty municipal idea! We must all extend a fraternal hand, and Italy will yet become the first nation of the world…I am drunk with joy! Imagine that there are no more Germans here!”
*Literally “resurgence” – Italy’s popular political movement towards reunification and independence during the first half of the nineteenth century.
It is sometimes argued that a part of artistic greatness is being the right person in the right place at the right time. And just as the sunny, colourful operas of Gioachino Rossini in the 1820s had been ideal for a weary nation, exhausted after two decades of Napoleonic wars, so the more edgy, impassioned music of Verdi twenty years later appeared the perfect emblem for a country fighting to re-assert its cultural and political identity.
It was something noticed even by one of Verdi’s own contemporaries, a contributor to the Il Pungulo music journal, who in 1861 wrote that “from 1848 onwards, during ten years of national strife and protests, Verdi… carried on politics in music, because, perhaps, without being himself conscious of it, he drew from the restlessness and tumult of his soul a kind of music which responded precisely to the restlessness and the tumult of our minds.”
That Verdi possessed the rare power to move a nation was also down to the near divine status conferred on him by his early operas. The huge, unexpected triumph of Nabucco had given him, at the age of just thirty, a free hand to stamp himself on his country’s cultural scene in almost any way he wished.
“After a success such as you have just obtained”, Bartolomeo Merelli had written to Verdi in the aftermath of Nabucco, “I cannot propose terms; it is for you to make your own. Fill up the engagement; what you insert shall be carried out.” Impresarios around the country, and the further afield, in France and Britain, were soon offering much the same conditions, while further favourable negotiations with Verdi’s publishing house, Ricordi (who would also be closely associated with Rossini, Donizetti and Puccini during the nineteenth century), would leave the composer almost unassailable – and very wealthy – by the end of the 1840s.
He no longer bothered with the standard practice of adapting to whatever was on offer from theatre directors, librettists and singers. Verdi preferred to do things his own way, and it was down to collaborators to fall in line behind with him. He would even write his own operatic plots (with appropriate stage directions), leaving the librettist the relatively simple (if less creatively interesting task) of turning his extended synopses into finished verses. And he usually reacted badly if anyone tried to alter his desired order of things, even if such alterations were being proposed by the Austrian police.
But while Verdi was well respected, he was not always liked. Many were left disappointed after meeting the cool, socially awkward creator of such inspiring music, and to the world at large he could seem shy and secretive. According to Belgian musicologist, François-Joseph Fétis, “it is evident to any person who has seen the composer of Rigoletto and Trovatore, or even a portrait of him, that never did the physiognomy of a composer in a less degree reveal talent. That icy exterior, that impassibility of feature and bearing, those thin lips, that ensemble of steel, might well indicate intelligence; a diplomatist might be hidden beneath it; but no one could discover in it the passionate impulses of the mind which alone preside over the creation of the grand works of the most inspiring of the arts.”
Inevitably there was also some jealousy towards Verdi’s meteoric rise. Certain critics grumbled about him turning out corrupted versions of Italian folk-songs, while others claimed he couldn’t write a melody at all. Then there were questions over his supposedly “noisy orchestration” and general lack of musical finesse (almost the exact same accusations thrown at Rossini a quarter of a century earlier).
Whether or not it was a front, Verdi seldom seemed care much about personal or professional attacks (even if he did not ever forget those who had made them). Having embarked on a serious relationship with the operatic soprano Giuseppina Strepponi in 1847, the couple initially lived together without being married. For two years in Paris (where Verdi wrote his opera Jérusalem) this would prove to be just fine. But back in Verdi’s old hometown of Busseto – where he had recently bought several properties and built himself a house – the somewhat more conservative townsfolk frowned upon the arrangement, with Giuseppina finding herself shunned both on the streets and at church. Even as Verdi could take such things in his stride, he did not fully recognize how hard it could be on his partner, and not least since women were usually judged more harshly for such things. Thankfully the two would eventually tie the knot in 1859, with their long and (generally happy) marriage enduring up to Giuseppina’s death in 1897. She would prove to be his closest musical advisor and critic, while her relative fluency in French and English would prove extremely useful when it came to translating possible operatic texts.
It was while Giuseppe and Giuseppina were first living in Busseto that the former received a commission to write a new opera for the Teatro La Fenice in Venice. As ever, he was largely allowed to choose his own subject, and Verdi was in the mood for something weighty, perhaps even with Shakespearean overtones. After a long consultation with his librettist Piave (with whom he had already collaborated on five operas, including Ernani and Macbeth) they finally hit upon Victor Hugo’s La Roi S’Amuse (The King Amuses Himself) a controversial play from 1832, depicting a corrupted and womanizing French monarch from the 16th century, Francis I, whom many thought a veiled portrait of France’s current king, Louis Philippe I. Although an anxious Louis Philippe had promptly banned the play in France, Verdi was bowled over by it, calling it one of the greatest dramas of all time. He was particularly fascinated by the moral complexities of its main character – not Francis I but his humpbacked, satirical jester Triboulet – a multifaceted protagonist he judged to be on a par with one of Shakespeare’s creations.
With the play still outlawed in France, Verdi and Piave must have guessed that their own Austrian censors might take a somewhat dim view of the storyline, as indeed proved to be the case (“a repugnant [example of] immorality and obscene triviality” was one early piece of feedback).
Verdi dispatched Piave to negotiate with the authorities, while just as quickly losing patience with the whole process, as neither side proved willing to make any real concessions. The composer began to dig in his heels in his usual implacable way – do it my way, or not at all, he told them.
The opera was then saved by the unlikeliest of figures – a commissary of police who had happily built a career on persecuting Italian patriots. But he also happened to be a Verdi fan. Now turning into a diplomat par excellence, the commissary suggested moving the opera’s action from French royalty to a now defunct Italian dukedom – of Mantua in Lombardy – thus removing the dangerously republican overtones from the original. It was also at this time that the name of the hunchbacked jester was changed from Triboulet to Rigoletto.
The only remaining problem was the considerable delay caused by the lengthy impasse. Everyone involved now found themselves working round the clock to get the opera ready in time, including its composer: Verdi duly shut himself up in Busseto where he completed the work in just 40 days. Having brought the score with him back to La Venice in early 1851, the tenor playing the villainous Duke of Mantua immediately noticed a gap in his part where he was supposed to sing a solo. “There is a piece missing”, he told Verdi.
“There is plenty of time, I will give it to you”, replied the latter. Every day the tenor inquired about his missing solo and each time got the same reply, until he began to feel anxious and impatient with the performance fast approaching.
Finally on the night before the first orchestral performance, Verdi brought him the promised music, a canzone with a catchy-looking tune. But why all the mystery? Verdi now entreated his star tenor, “you give me your word of honour that you will not sing this melody at home, that you will not hum it, that you will not even whistle it – in a word, that you will allow no-one whatever to hear it?”
The tenor might reasonably have asked when or where he was meant to rehearse his prized canzone; but like everyone else, he knew not to ever argue with the maestro.
Verdi then went a step further, asking the orchestra and even the entire theatre staff, if they could keep the melody a secret until after the first performance? After a decade of turning out successful operas, Verdi was now streetwise enough to know when he had written a hit – and even a little paranoid about it. The melody in question, La Donna è Mobile (Women are Fickle), would quickly become one of the most famous things he ever wrote.
First performed on March 11th 1851, Rigoletto was an instant success, soon being performed all across Italy, before reaching Britain in 1853 and America in 1855. But for all its popularity, its primary themes of social alienation, sexual debauchery and murderous retribution – a morally ambivalent plot where the bad guys go unpublished – hardly made it cozy viewing.
At its centre is Rigoletto, a satirical, cruelly mocking court jester by day, and a loving and protective father by night. In an attempt to save his daughter Gilda from the advances of his boss – the playboy Duke of Mantua, who treats women as objects of sexual gratification while throwing their protesting husbands in prison – Rigoletto firstly tries to hide Gilda, and then when that fails, he arranges to have the Duke assassinated. Needless to say, his plans go horribly awry and his daughter dies instead. But while Rigoletto descends into a grief-stricken madness, the Duke goes on his merry way, still smugly singing La Donna è Mobile and largely oblivious to the carnage he has just caused.
Aside from its dark storyline, Rigoletto also marks a new sophistication in Verdi’s operatic language, and not least in the way the action is allowed to proceed naturally and organically, without artificial breaks for vocal set-pieces or show-stopping arias. Indeed Verdi was to state “my intention was that Rigoletto should be one long series of duets, without arias and finales”. The conventional operatic format is now ever more subjugated to the demands of the narrative.
Another striking feature of Rigoletto is Verdi’s superb use of the orchestra, not only in setting the mood but in amalgamating the background colours more closely into the plotline. This is particularly evident during the storm scene of act three – rather than write an appropriate showpiece for the orchestra and give the singers a rest, Verdi incorporates the orchestra’s stormy effects (including a wordless chorus to suggest a howling wind) around the singers, thus allowing it to become a central part of the action, and the opera’s tragic denouement.
Although best known for La Donna è Mobile, the opera’s most impressive number is probably the quartet Bella Figlia Dell’ Amores (Beautiful Daughter of Love) where Gilda, having fallen in love with the faithless Duke, discovers he has other women on the go. The two ensuing conversations (between Rigoletto and Gilda, and the Duke and his lover) become entwined in a way that would be impossible to replicate in spoken dialogue.
It was something that Victor Hugo noticed when he first heard the work a few years later. Despite his annoyance at seeing his (still) banned play turned into a successful opera, he could not help but be impressed by the Bella Figlia quartet. “If I could only make four characters in my plays speak at the same time”, he wrote afterwards, “and have the audience grasp the words and the sentiments, I would obtain the very same effect.” Even Verdi would say of the quartet, “I never expect to do better.”
And the opera as a whole? For Verdi, it was “the best, the most effective subject I have so far set to music.” He would immediately follow Rigoletto with two further undisputed classics, Il Trovatore, and La Traviata, both premiered in 1853 and both building on the fast-paced, formal innovations of their immediate predecessor.
Giuseppe Verdi was now nearly forty years old and reaching the very height of his powers. But there was still a long road ahead for him: he may not have guessed it then, but he would still be busy writing operas in another forty years.
Suggestions for Further Listening
For a complete recording of Rigoletto (with English subtitles) I would recommend this 2016 performance from the Opéra National de Paris.
For Macbeth, probably Verdi’s greatest tragic opera of the 1840s, you may enjoy this fine 2001 performance from the Zurich Opera House.