Verdi, Giuseppe

8. Life, 1879–1901.

In June 1879 Giulio Ricordi and Arrigo Boito mentioned to Verdi the possibility of his composing a version of Shakespeare's Othello, surely a canny choice given Verdi's lifelong veneration for the English playwright, and his attempts after Macbeth to tackle further Shakespearean topics, notably King Lear. Verdi showed cautious enthusiasm for the new project, and by the end of the year Boito had produced a draft libretto, one full of ingenious new rhythmic devices but with an extremely firm dramatic thread. After almost ten years without an operatic project, Verdi again started to create musical drama.

The project was long in the making. First came two other tasks, extensive revisions to Simon Boccanegra (effected with the help of Boito) and to Don Carlos, both of which can be seen in retrospect as trial runs for the new type of opera Verdi felt he must create in Italy's new artistic climate. After many hesitations and interruptions, Otello was finally performed at La Scala in February 1887. Some two years later, Boito suggested a further opera largely based on Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor. Verdi was immediately enthusiastic about the draft scenario Boito concocted, made relatively few structural suggestions, and by August 1889 announced that he was writing a comic fugue (quite possibly the fugue that ends Falstaff). Composer and librettist worked closely together during the winter 1889–90, and by the spring of 1890 the libretto of Falstaff was complete. As with Otello, composing the opera took a considerable time, or rather involved short bursts of activity interspersed with long fallow periods. The opera was first performed, again at La Scala, in February 1893. These years also saw the appearance of various sacred vocal pieces, some of which were later collected under the title Quattro pezzi sacri.

Verdi continued to divide his life between Milan, Genoa and Sant'Agata, where he oversaw his lands and added to his property. In his last years, he devoted a considerable amount of money and energy to two philanthropic projects: the building of a hospital at Villanova sull'Arda Piacenza and the founding of a home for retired musicians, the Casa di Riposo, in Milan. In November 1897 Strepponi died at Sant'Agata. In December 1900 Verdi made arrangements for his youthful compositions (including, one assumes, those ‘marches for band by the hundred’) to be burnt after his death, and left Sant'Agata for Milan. On 21 January he suffered a stroke from which he died on 27 January. He was buried next to his wife in Milan's Cimitero Monumentale; a month later, amid national mourning, their bodies were moved to the Casa di Riposo. Before the procession left the Cimitero, Arturo Toscanini conducted a massed choir. They sang, of course, ‘Va pensiero’.

Verdi, Giuseppe

9. The last style: ‘Otello’ (1887) and ‘Falstaff’ (1893).

(i) An intangible divide.

In spite of the chronological gap, critics have tended to see Verdi's last two operas as a logical continuation (and almost always as the ‘culmination’) of his previous work, thus stressing stylistic continuity across his entire career. There is much to be said for such an approach. Although Verdi was now firmly established as an international figure who could – and did – dictate his own terms, he continued to compose in the old manner: from sketches to continuity draft to ‘skeleton score’ to full orchestration. He also continued to pay careful attention to the singers at his disposal, and was willing to adjust passages to accommodate them: the Act 2 quartet in Otello was transposed down a half-step in the passage from continuity draft to autograph, clearly to ease its tessitura; and the role of Quickly in Falstaff was amplified at a late stage after Verdi had heard (and approved of) the singer destined to create the role. Verdi also continued his unshakable allegiance to the grandest of the traditional Ottocento set pieces, the Largo concertato, examples of which occur in the revised Boccanegra, Otello and Falstaff.

However, the strain and difficulty with which a suitable concertato was eventually accommodated into Otello indicates a fundamental change in Verdian dramaturgy. At some time during the fallow period between Aida and Otello we might hazard that Verdi passed an intangible divide, and now saw the basis of his musical drama residing in continuous ‘action’ rather than in a patterned juxtaposition of ‘action’ and ‘reflection’. (It was the difficulty of embedding comprehensible ‘action’ into the Act 3 concertato of Otello that continued to pose problems, even causing Verdi to revise the number for the opera's Parisian première in 1894.) The long Act 2 duet between Otello and Iago is a good example of how the new hierarchy worked. The duet itself cannot usefully be parsed as a set piece in contrasting ‘movements’; and the true set pieces – the Credo, Homage Chorus, Quartet and Racconto – are embedded within the larger structure, acting as interruptions rather than points of arrival.

The dynamics of this change, this crossing of the ‘intangible divide’, are intimately linked to Verdi's relationship with his last librettist.

(ii) Verdi and Boito.

It seemed at first an unlikely collaboration, though it started smoothly enough in 1862, when Verdi and Boito worked together briefly on the Inno delle nazioni for the Great London Exhibition. But in the cultural context of the 1860s a more likely exchange occurred a year later. Boito, a leading figure in the scapigliatura, a nascent Italian branch of the bohemian movement, improvised an ode ‘All'arte italiana’ that described the ‘altar’ of Italian art as ‘defiled like the wall of a brothel’. Not surprisingly, Verdi took this personally. Perhaps, though, the acrimony Boito's comment generated holds a key, in that one of the most significant aspects of the Verdi-Boito collaboration was precisely that they came from different generations, and thus had sharply divergent attitudes to the Italian operatic tradition. That the collaboration happened at all is in part thanks to the patient and sensitive manoeuvering of Verdi's publisher Giulio Ricordi; but it also reflects the fact that Boito had mellowed by the late 1870s. His magnum opus, the opera Mefistofele, had failed disastrously at La Scala in 1868, and when he restaged it seven years later, he toned down many of its most radical aspects, replacing them with more traditional operatic solutions. Here was rapprochement of a kind.

But the generational gap remained, and it is hardly surprising that the early days of work on Otello were punctuated by some remarkably basic differences of opinion about the structure of the opera. In Verdi's first letter commenting on Boito's draft libretto, the composer suggested that the ‘dramatic element’ was missing after the Act 3 concertato in which all on stage react to Otello's striking of Desdemona. His solution was a radical departure from Shakespeare in which, true to the theatrical conventions of his past, an external event (a resurgence of the warlike Turks) would lead the musical drama onwards. Boito strongly disagreed: for him Otello was above all a modern, claustrophobic, psychological drama, one that took place essentially within the psyche, in the realm Wagner liked to call that of the ‘inner drama’, a place of dense symbolic meaning in which characters are trapped, deprived of autonomy. To have Otello heroically rally his troops would have shattered the spell. But what is most striking about the difference of opinion is that, as on many other occasions, Verdi – earlier a veritable tyrant in his dealings with librettists – gave way to Boito, trusting the younger man's perception of what modern drama needed. This trust obliged him to do nothing less than re-invent his operatic language, to find a newly flexible mode of musical expression.

(iii) Technical features.

This need for the music to react minutely and spontaneously to constant changes typical of spoken dialogue brought about a loosening of the traditional links between prosody and music. Boito was particularly adept at constructing verses that, although obeying the rules of Italian prosody, could simultaneously be read in a variety of verse metres, thus offering something like the flexibility of a prose libretto. There was also an inevitable decrease in periodic structures, and when aspects of the ‘lyric prototype’ can be found, they are usually placed in a dynamic harmonic context that obscures their origin in Verdi's earlier style. Vestiges of the old Ottocento forms are – with the exception of the Largo concertato, which continued even into Puccini's last works – equally hard to locate. Some have found shards of the old four-movement structure in the Act 1 love duet between Otello and Desdemona; but the divergences and anomalies are apt to make such demonstrations of continuity a little desperate.

On rare occasions, Verdi may have sought to replace these losses with purely musical structures: the sonata-form subtext of the opening scene in Falstaff, or its closing comic fugue, are likely examples, although both forms are, as it were, placed in inverted commas, ironically drawing attention to their structural difference from the norm. The necessary level of purely musical coherence was, however, often supplied by local increases in harmonic, motivic and orchestral activity, all of which carried further the developments seen in the period between Les vêpres siciliennes and Aida. Passages such as the Act 3 orchestral prelude to the revised Don Carlos (1884) show how a short motivic fragment is now sufficient to construct large spans of music, so extensive is Verdi's control over orchestral nuance and chromatic detail.

Clearly, recurring motivic and harmonic aspects are sometimes found on a larger level. The so-called ‘bacio’ theme in Otello, which first occurs near the end of the Act 1 love duet and then appears twice in the final scene of the opera, has a function difficult to compare with previous recurring themes: unlike those in Aida, which fade away as the drama reaches its climax, the final statement of the ‘bacio’ theme seems like a musical summing-up of the dénouement, thus having more in common with famous Puccinian endings, in spite of its restraint. More than this, the ‘bacio’ theme's harmonic character, with its typical late Verdian device of a pre-dominant pause on a tonally distant 6-4 chord, also casts an influence over earlier confrontations between Otello and Desdemona. Other motifs can approach a level of Wagnerian density over shorter spans: the Act 3 prelude to Don Carlos has already been mentioned; the ‘jealousy’ motif that winds through the prelude to Otello Act 3, and the ‘dalle due alle tre’ motif that underpins Ford's famous monologue in Act 2 of Falstaff, are further instances.

(iv) Meanings for the last works.

A common view of Verdi's last works sees them as divorced from everyday concerns, a trope often used in discussing an artist's final creative stage: as one commentator put it, Otello and Falstaff are ‘the old man's toys’. The image chimes well with those famous pictures of Verdi in the 1880s and 90s: the felt hat, the simple frock coat, the all-knowing, gentle smile. So far as Falstaff is concerned, Verdi himself encouraged such interpretations, frequently reiterating in letters and interviews that ‘in writing Falstaff I haven't thought about either theatres or singers. I have written for myself and my own pleasure’. It may be comforting to nurture this picture of serene old age, and it is indeed true that neither of Verdi's last operas much resembles any other work, whether by Verdi or by anyone else. However, there is much evidence suggesting that the composer was far from serene about the political and artistic direction his country was taking, and that the last operas in some ways reflect this dissatisfaction.

Perhaps a key to Otello in this regard is offered in a late letter by Verdi himself:

Desdemona is a part in which the thread, the melodic line, never ceases from the first note to the last. Just as Jago has only to declaim and laugh mockingly, and just as Otello, now the warrior, now the passionate lover, now crushed to the point of baseness, now ferocious like a savage, must sing and shout, so Desdemona must always, always sing.

Taking up the terms of this interpretation, we might suggest that Verdi managed to channel Boito's tendency towards the symbolic and the interior to his own ends, making the conflicts between the main characters in Otello into a story about the violent upheavals of Italian fin-de-siècle musical drama. The opera's principals vocally embody the violently conflicting demands of the lyrical and the declamatory, the old style and the new. Iago, the modern man, is constantly in the declamatory mode – when he sings beautifully, it is merely to deceive; and Desdemona is a symbol of that lost time when bel canto was at the centre of theatrical communication. Otello, like Verdi himself, is caught between the new and the old; but, despite or even because of this, the composer managed to renew himself, perhaps in part by symbolically recreating his creative struggle within the very fabric of the opera's central concerns.

Falstaff, an opera that begins with a mock sonata form and ends with a fugue, is in one sense easier to decode, gesturing as it so vividly does to those admonitions for young Italian composers to study counterpoint and avoid the ‘symphonic’ at all costs. Needless to say, the further we move from large formal units to more detailed technical observations, the less easy it is to fashion such neat parallels. For example, Falstaff is more highly chromatic than any other Verdi opera, but equally it is obsessed by cadence, forever punctuated by unequivocal gestures of closure. Related to this, but on a larger level, is the contrast between the work's enormous variety of expression and looseness of form on the one hand, and on the other its many periods of massive closure, its huge orchestral climaxes that seem to overwhelm what precedes them. Perhaps these matters can cautiously be related to Verdi's complex reaction to musical modernity, to his desire to progress from his own past, harmonically and formally, but also his need aggressively to counter what he saw as the disastrously dispersive tendencies of his younger contemporaries.

Whatever the case, the story does not quite end with Falstaff. During this last period, Verdi wrote a number of religious choral works, some of which were collected under the title Quattro pezzi sacri. It is certainly no accident that in these pieces Verdi made gestures to two figures from the Italian past that he considered central to the cultural unity of the country. Most obviously there are texts by Dante. But in pieces such as the so-called ‘Laudi alla Vergine Maria’, the musical gestures – both in contrapuntal treatment and word painting – are to Palestrina, the composer whose style should in Verdi's view have remained an essential point of departure for Italian musical art. This last, ‘antique’ style might well suggest an old man's retreat from the world; but on another level it speaks yet again of Verdi's passionate concern for the national traditions into which he had been born, and with which he had so constantly engaged.