Giuseppe Verdi (Le Roncole, today Roncole Verdi (Parma), 10th October 1813 - Milan 27th January 1901) was one of the most famous Italian composers of the XIXth century, opera composer whose dramas are part of the opera repertoire of the theatres of all the world.
Peppino - as he was lovingly called - was born with the name of Giuseppe Fortunino Francisco from Carlo Verdi, host, and Luigia Uttini, spinner, in Roncole (today Roncole Verdi), small hamlet of Busseto in the former State of Parma governed from France.
He approached the music very young, encouraged from his father who bought an old spinetta to learn the first principles. It cannot be said that he was a genius child like Mozart: it is sure - even tough only after having written notes on the keys in order to learn them better - his first music compositions dates back to the adolescence.
Father Pietro Baistrocchi gave him the first music lessons at the organ of the church and still adolescent, thanks to the interest of Antonio Barezzi (grocer and patron, whose daughter Margherita married Verdi in 1836), was sent to Busseto, the village near Roncole, in order to attend the gymnasium; while he studied music from master Ferdinand Provesi, director of the Filarmonica Society. In 1828 he composed a symphony inspired to the one of "The barber of Seville" by Rossini.
He obtained in 1838 a contract with musical company Ricordi, Verdi made his debut as opera composer the following year with contrasting outcomes. La Scala theater manager, Bartolomeo Merelli, after the success obtained the 17th November 1839 at debut (Oberto, count of Saint Bonifacio, revision of a previous work of 1837, Rocester), commissioned him other two operas. The debut, performed the 5th September 1840, was a burlesque melodrama called "A day of reign" and was hardly hissed to the point that did not have even another performance. The other was a work on a booklet by Temistocle Solera: Nabucodonosor (known as Nabucco) will decree Verdi's success on 9th March 1842.
It was the beginning of a shining and long career. For more than ten years Verdi composed a work per year, during those years he defined his prison years, in which he was forced to compose to live. All these operas do not enjoy a particular critical fortune today, but when music is shaky, the dramatic sense does not lack.
Just at the beginning of this period the composer was hit from a serious of familiar mournings that saw the death in few years of his wife Margherita Barezzi and two sons. He then gave himself body and soul to job.
From "Lombards to the first crusade", performed always at La Scala the 11th February 1843, to Stiffelio, staged at Teatro Grande in Trieste the 16th November 1850, was however an uninterrupted stream of successes. Verdi was thirty-seven and his works were performed in the theatres of all Europe. In the 1847 he tested for the first time the Parisian Grand Opéra genre, putting on scene the "Lombards" in the new version of Jérusalem.
Between 1851 and the 1853 three different works but joined with the same fortune are put on stage: Rigoletto, Trovatore, Traviata are three masterpieces that close a phase of Verdi's artistic life.
In the meantime Verdi, whose origins were of Piacenza, bought an estate near Piacenza, in Sant' Agata, a hamlet of Villanova on Arda, little far away from Busseto, where he settled down in the spring of 1851 with his new girlfriend, the soprano Giuseppina Strepponi, married in 1859. Here he dedicated with passion to agriculture, cultivated his interest for the arts, the poetry, the economy and politics. He was also elected town councillor of Villanova on Arda and councillor in the committee of Piacenza province.
After the popular trilogy Verdi tried to have success in Paris, as other italian composers made before him. His relationship with the French theatrical taste was not however easy and the works composed for Paris, or however based on the French model, met very little the taste of the audience. It was a period of sufferings. Verdi finally could compose without haste, but the musical world was slowly changing, even in Italy, and renewal was not easy. This period of experimentation culminated in 1871 with Aida, the work set in the ancient Egypt, commissioned from the Khedivè Ismail Pascià for the Opera Theatre of Cairo, opened in 1869 with Rigoletto.
After Aida Verdi chose to retire. The reasons of this choice were complex. Perhaps he felt that the his creative inspiration was reaching a critical point. But at same time he didn't like the way in which the italian theatrical and musical world was changing, and was deeply irritated from the epithet of being a wagnerian that the Italian press saddled to every composer who was trying something new. Therefore, Verdi declared the desire to return to do the peasant and withdrew to Sant'Agata.
Arrigo Boito, the young italian poet and composer who offered to write a booklet for him, set him free from isolation. The subject would have been drawn from his favourite writer William Shakespeare. After eight years (1887) Otello was finalized, followed six later years from an other shakespeariana work, still on booklet of Boito: Falstaff. Without Boito probably Verdi would not have composed his last two masterpieces, since only in the great Venetian scholar Verdi could find a collaborator of his same level: of enormous cultural preparation, great versifying adaptability and himself a musician, who is able to think the poetry dependent upon music.
The two works, both performed at La Scala, had a various outcome. Otello immediately met the taste of the audience asserting permanently in the playbill. Falstaff viceversa astonished his fans and the italian music lovers: not only, for the first time after the ill-fated and juvenile "A day of reign" Verdi tested again the comic theatre, but sweeping away in a blow all the formal conventions of the Italian opera. It is not by chance if its popularity by the great audience never catch up that one of Aida or the popular trilogy, Falstaff was always loved from the composers and it exercised a decisive influence on the young opera composers, from Puccini to the composers of the Generation of the Eighties.
Giuseppe Verdi's life has been characterized from two periods: a juvenile one where he experienced troubles and mournings, and the one of the full maturity, rich of serenity and creative inspiration. He lived his last years in Milan. On the 16th December 1899 he founded the Religious charity - House of Rest for Musicians: he wanted to assure the maintenance to those people "who did their best in the Music Art" and who were in poor conditions. According to his will, the first hosts will enter the rest house after his death. The composer was buried in the oratory, next to his wife Giuseppina Strepponi, the 27th February 1901.
The day of his funeral, Piazza Duomo and roads nearby, were strewn with straw so that the pawing wouldn't have disturbed his rest.
