Giuseppe Verdi (10 ottob 1813 anni – 1 dic 1901 anni)

Descrizione:

Giuseppe Verdi, born the same year as Wagner, was teh dominant figure in Italian opera. During his early years, he worked within its established traditions. Distinct numbers such as arias, duets, and choruses are effectively incorporated into larger periods of uninterrupted music. With their popular appeal, his early works became associated with the movement for ITalian independence and unification known as teh Risorgimento (Resurgence). "Va, pensiero," the chorus of Hebrew slaves in his third opera Nabucco, became the unofficial Italian national anthem.

Verdi strove for dramatic realism and the mixture of comic and serious associated with Shakespeare, whose plays he revered. Among his best-known operas are Rigoletto, Il trovatore, and La traviata. His later operas moved toward a numberless, continuous form. After a hiatus of thirteen years, he composed two final works based on Shakespeare, Otello, and the comic opera Falstaff.

Verdi's partnership with Francesco Maria Piave was by no means equal. The composer dominated the librettist mercilessly, reversing the traditional theatrical hierarchy and in so doing epitomizing the vastly heightened status of music in the later nineteenth century. The mature Verdi always had precise notions of what the dramatic situation required in terms of music. By demanding of his librettists both exact versification and an extreme economy of words, Verdi controlled his mture operas almost as completely as did Wagner.

But there the resemblance ceased. Where Wagner wanted to take opera back to its roots by emulating ancient Greek trageians, Verdi wanted to became an operatic Shakespeare through ddramatic "realism" (Verismo, or "Truthism"): the fusing of all existing dramatic genres into a single seamless idiom known as tragicomedy, the true reflector of human character and experience. Fusion had ben the watchword of Victor Hugo, who also invoked Shakespeare and the tragicomic. So did Manzoni, who remarked that "it was not any mere violation of rules that led Shakespeare to this mixture of the grave and the burlesque, the touching and the low; he had simply observed this mixture in reality and wished to convey the strong impression it made on him." The modern literary scholar George Steiner deftly summed up the difference between the epic and the tragicomic--the Wagnerian and the Verdian--by noting that "even in teh blackest hours of a SHakespearean tragedy or a Verdi opera the morning light of human laughter, the feline energies of human rebound are close at hand... the masters of the absolute--Aeschylus, Sophocles, Racine, Wagner--concentrate the sum of the world to a single immensity of encounter. Shakespeare and Verdi, on the contrary, know that the instant in which Agamemmnon is murdered (in Aeschylus's Oresteia) is also that in which a birthday party is being celebrated next door."

It is no coincidence that Verdi's tenth opera was Macbeth or that he ended his career with two Shakespeare operas, the tragic Otello and comic Falstaff. The ideal of fusion and contrast was Vesrdi's main objective in reworking the conventions of Italian opera into new configurations that depended to an unprecedented extent on contrast and irony.

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