Verdi, Giuseppe

10. Scholarship, dissemination, Verdi in the 20th century.

(i) Scholarship and editions.

Although there continue to be pockets of resistance, it is rare these days to meet with easy dismissals of Verdi's art. One reflection of this new standing is that scholarly attention to his music is now fully respectable. During Verdi's lifetime there were of course many valuable critiques of his work, almost all initially appearing in periodicals. The most influential has been Abramo Basevi's Studio sulle opere di Giuseppe Verdi (1859), which deals in technical detail that, although unusual for the period, chimed well with the analytical concerns of our recent past. 19th-century biographies of Verdi were all of the ‘anecdotal’ kind, the most influential being Arthur Pougin's, which in its Italian translation contained annotations by ‘Folchetto’ (the journalist Jacopo Caponi) that included a – highly unreliable – ‘autobiographical sketch’ supposedly dictated by the composer himself.

The first 60 years of our century saw an indispensable series of epistolary and biographical publications, among them the Copialettere of 1913 and volumes by Gatti, Luzio, Abbiati and Walker. Since the 1960s the most important stimulus has come from the Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani in Parma, which has assembled a considerable archive and has published a vast amount of biographical and critical writing. In the 1970s, an American Institute for Verdi Studies was founded at New York University. Much of this activity was brought to a larger audience, and magnificently synthesized, by Julian Budden's three-volume commentary on the operas; the most recent full-scale biography is by Mary Jane Phillips-Matz. The Istituto Nazionale has inaugurated a multi-volume edition of Verdi's correspondence.

The librettos of almost all Verdi's operas were first sold in printed form to those who attended performances, and were usually custom made, containing a cast-list, details of the orchestral and other executants, and the exact literary text performed; towards the end of the 19th century ‘generic’ librettos (not tied to a particular performance) began to replace these valuable documents. No critical edition of Verdi's librettos exists, and the most satisfactory editions remain those published by Ricordi, in particular the (incomplete) series issued recently under the editorship of E. Rescigno. Most modern printings of the texts obscure important information by ignoring the lineation, verse forms and indentations of the original. Tutti i libretti di Verdi (ed. L. Baldacci, Milan, 1975), which contains Italian librettos of all the operas except Stiffelio, has some useful facsimile pages and other illustrations, but also ignores details of the verse layout.

Vocal scores remain the primary means by which the musical text of Verdi's operas is disseminated. First editions usually appeared near the time of the first performance (an exception is that of Un giorno di regno, which appeared c1845). Most were first published by Ricordi, the exceptions being Attila, I masnadieri and Il corsaro (by Lucca); Stiffelio (by Blanchet) and the French operas Jérusalem, Les vêpres siciliennes and Don Carlos (by the Bureau Central de la Musique/Escudier). Vocal scores of the more popular operas were translated into many languages as Verdi's international reputation grew. Another enormously important avenue of dissemination were the numerous published arrangements of the operas (for piano, piano duet, many solo instruments, brass band, etc.) which brought Verdi's music into new domestic and public spaces during the 19th century. This considerable industry was gradually replaced by the gramophone in the 20th century.

Performance material (parts and full scores) at first circulated in manuscript copies. During the latter half of the 19th century Ricordi began to print full scores and (sometimes) parts. The first printed full score (La traviata) appeared in about 1855, and later in the century or during the first half of this century all the operas except Oberto, Un giorno di regno, Alzira, I masnadieri, Jérusalem, Il corsaro and Stiffelio appeared in this format. These editions were, however, for hire only, although some of them have subsequently appeared for sale in ‘pirated’ editions. The first printed full score on public sale was Del Monaco's La traviata (Naples, c1882). In 1913–14, Ricordi published ‘study scores’ of Rigoletto, Il trovatore, La traviata, Un ballo in maschera, Aida, Otello and Falstaff; in the 1980s a study score of La forza del destino appeared. A complete critical edition of the composer's works is in progress, published jointly by the University of Chicago Press and Ricordi under the general editorship of Philip Gossett.

(ii) Reception and posthumous reputation.

By the time Verdi wrote his last operas, he had become a national monument: the premières of Otello and Falstaff were cultural events of almost unprecedented importance, occasioning a flood of publicity all over Europe. Both works, inevitably in the circumstances, were heralded as brilliant successes, but – like so many of the operas after La traviata – neither established a place at the centre of the Italian repertory. The operatic times had changed and, in an era when Wagner and the Italian veristi were making the headlines, Otello and Falstaff, for all their ‘modernity’, were seen as sui generis, unsuitable for the common round of smaller theatres in particular.

So far as performances and purely musical reputation were concerned, the years around the turn of the century represented a low point in Verdi's fortunes. In the increasingly sophisticated, cosmopolitan atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Italy, it became commonplace to find Verdi's musical personality too simple and direct. Although Rigoletto, Il trovatore and La traviata remained the staple of smaller opera houses, they were rarely granted the prestige of important revivals. The situation was little different in other major European centres at the turn of the century. In both England and France, for example, a decisive shift away from Italian opera came in the wake of regular Wagner stagings in the 1880s and 90s. Nor did Verdi have much noticeable influence on younger generations of composers. The case of Puccini is instructive: although by his own admission an early experience of Aida was crucial to his development, Puccini's first operas show very few traces of the Verdian style, deriving predominantly from French models; the influence he struggled to overcome (we can see the struggle at its most intense in the second act of Manon Lescaut) was overwhelmingly that of Wagner.

Although there was some renewed attention to Verdi in his centenary year of 1913, the crucial change in his fortunes began in Weimar Republic Germany. This so-called ‘Verdi Renaissance’ is sometimes traced to the first production of Franz Werfel's version of La forza del destino (Dresden, 1926), or to the publication of Werfel's novel Verdi: Roman der Oper in 1924, but in fact the movement was far too widespread to be attributed to just one figure, with numerous restagings of ‘forgotten’ operas, a considerable periodical literature and several important monographs. As was recognized at the time, the ‘return’ to Verdi had much to do with an awareness that opera was in ‘crisis’ – that new works were not taking their place in the repertory – and also with a widespread reassessment (in some cases outright rejection) of the Wagnerian aesthetic. In the latter guise, as noble antithesis to Wagner, Verdi was even taken up by the avant garde: some of the most innovative stagings of the period involved Verdi revivals and an arch modernist such as Stravinsky could praise his achievement and even pay him veiled homage in works such as Oedipus Rex.

By the 1930s the ‘Renaissance’ had spread, with revivals of ‘forgotten’ works springing up all over Europe and America. Appropriated by fascists and anti-fascists alike, Verdi's music survived World War II relatively untarnished, as did his reputation as ‘vate del risorgimento’, the bard of Italy's achievement of statehood. In the 1950s and 60s his operas became the core repertory of the global opera industry, and since then the boom shows no signs of losing momentum. ‘Forgotten’ works continue to be revived, and today more Verdi operas are in the repertory than ever before. Verdi continues to inspire performers and audiences to fresh interpretations and renewed energies. It is now hard to imagine an operatic world in which they will cease to do so.