Verdi, Giuseppe

7. Interregnum: the 1870s and the ‘Requiem’ (1874).

After Aida in 1871 there was to be no Verdian operatic première for 16 years. The creative stagnation was not, of course, quite so complete. In 1873, while supervising performances of Aida at the Teatro S Carlo in Naples, Verdi wrote and had privately performed the String Quartet in E minor. And in 1874 came the Messa da Requiem, composed in honour of Alessandro Manzoni. But the fact remains that the 1870s and early 80s, years in which we might imagine Verdi at the height of his creative powers, saw no new operas. The reasons for this silence are of course complex: his increasing financial security no longer made work a necessity; more of his energies went into the development of substantial land holdings, and – increasingly – into various charitable causes. He also spent considerable time supervising and directing performances of Aida and the Requiem, in 1875 undertaking a mini-European tour (Paris, London, Vienna) with the latter work. At the same time, his personal life underwent an upheaval brought about through a continuing public scandal that caused much private anguish between him and his partner. The reason was his relationship with the soprano Teresa Stolz, who had been the first Leonora in the 1869 version of La forza del destino, the first Aida in the Milanese première of that opera (1872), and for whom Verdi wrote the soprano solo in the Requiem. Matters between her, Strepponi and Verdi came to a crisis in 1876 but eventually resolved with the status quo intact, Stolz remaining a close friend of Verdi, perhaps also of Strepponi, for the rest of their lives.

But surely the most serious obstacle to continued creative activity was an increasing sense of disenchantment with the direction of newly-cosmopolitan Italy. Early in the 1870s Verdi was asked for advice about a revised curriculum for the reformed Italian conservatories. His suggestions were austere in the extreme: students should submit to daily doses of fugue and study only the old Italian masters; budding composers ‘must attend few performances of modern operas, and avoid becoming fascinated either by their many beauties of harmony and orchestration or by the diminished 7th chord’. On many other occasions he voiced his discontent at the cosmopolitan direction Italian music was taking, in particular its newest ‘fascination’ for the Germanic and ‘symphonic’. It is easy to see how such a reaction further fuelled the reluctance to compose which Verdi had already shown in the 1860s. It would take all the ingenuity of his closest friends to coax him from this self-imposed retirement.

The 1870s did, though, produce the Requiem, and that is no small achievement. As already mentioned, the origins of the piece began in 1868 with Verdi's suggestion for a composite Requiem in honour of Rossini, to be written by ‘the most distinguished Italian composers’. This was duly completed but plans to perform the piece came to nothing; in April 1873 Verdi's contribution, the ‘Libera me’ movement, was returned to him. It seems likely that about that time he decided to write an entire Requiem himself, a decision perhaps precipitated, perhaps strengthened, by the death in May of Alessandro Manzoni, to whom the work was dedicated.

In the circumstances, it is probably inevitable that the theatrical nature of the Requiem should be a principal matter for debate: Hans von Bülow famously referred to it as an ‘Oper in Kirchengewande’ (opera in ecclesiastical dress) even before its first performance. Such sentiments can only be strengthened by the knowledge that a duet for Carlos and Philip, discarded from Don Carlos during rehearsals in Paris, formed the basis of the ‘Lacrymosa’ section of the Dies irae. More operatic still is the manner in which the soloists occasionally take on what can only be called ‘personalities’. This is most noticeable in the final ‘Libera me’, in which the soprano, isolated from the other soloists, seems in active dialogue with both the chorus and the orchestra, for all the world like a beleaguered heroine trying finally to make sense of the world in which she has been cast.

On the other hand we should not exaggerate. The main theme of the ‘Lacrymosa’ may have originated in an opera, but it develops in a markedly different fashion, without the vocal contrasts that almost invariably fuel Verdian musical drama. In fact, none of the ensemble scenes or choruses (of which there is an unoperatic preponderance) remotely resembles the texture of their operatic equivalents, in particular by their frequent employment of contrapuntal writing and by the relative lack of differentiation between individuals. What is more, the levels of purely musical connection (particularly in motivic and harmonic gestures) are far greater than Verdi would have deemed appropriate in a drama, where contrast and tension between characters is so important a part of the effect.

But the presence of that counterpoint may perhaps recall those admonitions to future conservatory pupils, to study fugue rather than ‘modern [i.e. foreign or foreign-influenced] operas’, which might in turn recall that Verdi's original idea for a composite Requiem was as a celebration of Italian art and artists during a period he thought of as in cultural crisis: as he said in his first letter about the project, ‘I would like no foreign hand, no hand alien to art, no matter how powerful, to lend his assistance. In this case I would withdraw at once from the association’. In that sense, the decision to write a Requiem, and thus to celebrate through counterpoint a glorious era in Italy's musical past, makes the work as ‘political’ as any of the composer's operas.