Verdi, Giuseppe

3. Life, 1839–53.

From the première of Oberto until at least the midpoint of his long career, the outward progress of Verdi's life is inseparable from that of his professional activities: a continual round of negotiations with theatres and librettists, of intense periods of composition, arduous travel, and exhausting preparations for and direction of premières and revivals.

The success of Oberto apparently encouraged Bartolomeo Merelli, impresario at La Scala, to offer Verdi a contract for three more operas, to be composed over two years. The first was the comic opera Un giorno di regno, which failed disastrously on its first night in September 1840. Verdi's later autobiographical glosses on this period (which are notoriously unreliable) state that this professional failure, together with the tragic loss of his young family (his wife Margherita died in June 1840; they had lost their two children in the previous two years), caused him to renounce composition. This may be partly true: his next opera, Nabucco, appeared some 18 months later, an unusually long delay. However, Verdi certainly continued a level of professional activity by writing new music for, and supervising several revivals of, Oberto.

After Nabucco, whose public success in Milan was unprecedented, the round of new operas was virtually unremitting: in the 11 years from March 1842 (the première of Nabucco) to March 1853 (the première of La traviata), Verdi produced 16 operas, an average of one every nine months. He also supervised numerous revivals, on occasion writing new music to accommodate a star performer. Although this rate of production was positively torpid by the standards of a Pacini or a Donizetti (the latter produced some 70 operas in 25 years), Verdi nonetheless found himself constantly moving from one operatic centre to another, dividing what time remained between Milan and Busseto. The years 1844–7 were particularly arduous (eight operas appearing in less than four years); his health broke down frequently, and more than once he vowed to renounce operatic composition once he had achieved financial security and fulfilled outstanding contracts. His gathering fame did, however, have its advantages. He was soon able to charge unprecedentedly high fees for supplying a theatre with a new opera, and even though copyright protection was not fully established, he would supplement this income with rental fees and sales of printed materials. As early as 1844 he began to acquire property and land in and around Busseto. The success of Nabucco opened doors in Milanese society, and Verdi soon made some longstanding friendships, notably with Countess Clara Maffei, whose salon he frequently attended. It is likely that during these early years of success he formed a lasting attachment to the soprano Giuseppina Strepponi, who was to become his lifelong companion.

Apart from a brief visit to Vienna in 1843, Verdi remained within the Italian peninsula until March 1847 when he undertook a long foreign expedition, initially to supervise the premières of I masnadieri in London and Jérusalem in Paris (his first operas to be commissioned from outside Italy). He set up house with Strepponi in Paris, staying there about two years, although with a visit to Milan during the 1848 uprisings, and a trip to the short-lived Roman Republic to supervise the première of La battaglia di Legnano in early 1849. Verdi returned with Strepponi to Busseto in mid-1849, still unmarried and causing a local scandal; in 1851 they moved to a permanent home in the nearby farm of Sant'Agata, land once owned by Verdi's ancestors.