A burgeoning interest in music theory beginning in the 1960s led scholars to settle new empires, among them nineteenth-century Italian opera. Increasing sophistication of operatic analysis has been indebted to what Thomas Christensen has called “presentist” music theory, for which the craft of the critic/theorist provides a key to principles of order and value, and, by extension, an analogue to technological progress. In the early days of the academic bull market for Verdi's stock, even Pierluigi Petrobelli, a commentator not aligned to the Anglo-American theoretical establishment, observed:

By suggesting that the “determining power” of “formal principles” is nested in a web of “complex relations,” Petrobelli posits a fertile line of investigation that seems partly to attribute the “amazing richness” of Verdi's scores to immutable laws – by implication, deeply buried and ingenious ones – waiting to be discovered by perspicacious scholars with the right tools. Is there a secret method similar to that “discovered” by Alfred Lorenz in the works of Wagner, one which will reveal the craft behind the magic?

From the beginning, the libretto (“little book” because of its small printed format) played a fundamental role in operatic structure and style. Until the mid-eighteenth century, a dramma permusica was considered a literary text, judged according to the canons of spoken theatre. It led an autonomous life, and its music constituted an aspect of staging, one that could change over time. By the nineteenth century, however, this relationship was inverted: the music became more important, and composers intervened in writing the libretto, assuming the role of “musical dramatists.” This trend culminated in Germany with Wagner and in Italy with Verdi, who did not write his own librettos but influenced their genesis profoundly. Through this reversal, nineteenth-century librettos lost importance as a literary genre. They were compared unfavorably to their literary sources (especially when these were the greatest examples of dramatic literature by Shakespeare, Schiller, and others) and criticized for unrealistic plots and purportedly bombastic, antiquated language. In the last thirty years, however, literary critics as well as musicologists and those in theatre studies have recognized the nonliterary values of the libretto and have reappraised its function in musical dramaturgy.

In considering Verdi's librettos, it is useful to distinguish between dramatic, poetic, and literary design. The fact that Verdi intervened in the first category most and the third least implies that they should be considered as being of decreasing importance.

In an oft-quoted assessment of Shakespeare's Desdemona, Verdi described her as “not a woman, but a type. She is the type of goodness, resignation, self-sacrifice. They are creatures born for others, unconscious of their own egos.” Shakespeare's play, of course, provides ample material for this sort of interpretation, as characters extol her beauty, virtue, selflessness, and other merits. And as James Hepokoski has documented, in recreating Desdemona for their own Otello (1887) Verdi and his librettist Arrigo Boito were probably influenced by nineteenth-century critical traditions represented by August Wilhelm Schlegel and by Victor Hugo, who viewed Desdemona as “saintly” and as “a spiritualist and almost amystic,” and also seem to have drawn upon such late nineteenth-century literary themes as decadentismo devotional iconology and the femme fragile. Of course devout heroines in peril were nothing new to Verdi, the Leonoras in Il trovatore and La forza del destino being prime examples, while heroines falsely accused had long been stock-in-trade, and Violetta (La traviata) provided a precedent for the physically fragile heroine. So by emphasizing Desdemona's purity, naïveté, and vulnerability, Verdi and Boito adhered to an aesthetic involving the cathartic destruction of a sympathetic female lead with which their audience could readily identify.

Like his predecessors, Verdi relied on an elaborate system of conventions – termed the “customary forms” (“solite forme”) of set pieces (or “lyric numbers”) by Abramo Basevi in 1859 – for organizing introductions, arias, duets, and finales. Gradually narrowing the diversity of approaches found at the end of the previous century, composers such as Gioachino Rossini, Vincenzo Bellini, and Gaetano Donizetti had “standardized” designs sufficiently that even a provincial critic such as Carlo Ritorni, writing in 1841 about Bellini, could formulate accurate templates for the most extended version of each form. However, while adhering to shared outlines composers also revised internal details for new dramatic effects, a process that Verdi embraced in his own operas. Whereas Rossini's lyric numbers had summarized relationships presented in the scena or reacted to its events, Verdi's take an increasingly expository role in the foreground action, weakening the traditional polarized relationship between an active scena and static lyric number. Dramatic continuity is paralleled by continuity of musical style: the more frequent appearance of lyrical melody in the scena and declamatory singing in lyric numbers allows more flexible expression and stronger characterization in both sections. Innovative treatment of individual movements within the lyric numbers also enhances dramatic momentum, undercutting traditional dichotomies between active and reflective passages and weakening musical disjunctions. Verdi made the presence of these forms less obvious and adapted them to more diverse dramatic circumstances by varying the internal designs of movements, omitting movements, interpolating additional sections (particularly in extended ensemble scenes), and changing the complement of characters within scenes.

For each of his operas, Verdi employed a complicated process that included many phases of creation and involved other individuals. Some aspects of this process remained remarkably consistent across his career. For example, despite changing conceptions of orchestration that emphasized families of instruments, Verdi continued the tradition of scoring primarily by pitch, putting violins and violas at the top of the page, cellos and basses at the bottom, other instruments in between generally in descending order of pitch range, and voices immediately above the cello line. Other procedures changed considerably over time and even from opera to opera. Consequently, any general discussion of Verdi's working methods quickly involves many exceptions, and scholars have understandably focused on the creation of single works while hesitating to postulate broad theories. In attempting this overview, I shall limit my discussion to the changes in Verdi's compositional circumstances across his career and the changes in his treatment of seven creative stages through which his works normally progressed.

Periods of composition

From the perspective of working conditions and methods, Verdi’s operas fall into four basic groups: 1) early: Oberto (1839) through La battaglia di Legnano (1849); 2) middle: Luisa Miller (1849) through Un ballo in maschera (1859); 3) “modern”:4 La forza del destino (1862) through Aida (1871); and 4) late: Simon Boccanegra (revised 1881) through Falstaff (1893). The coincidence of these groups with traditional stylistic groupings is striking and underscores the importance of considering working conditions and methods when providing an overview of his operas.5 Changes from one period to another involve his pace of composition; association with different librettists, theatres, cities, and performers; the degree of interference from censors; changes in political life and other factors external to the opera business; and Verdi’s own growth and maturity.

My essay is concerned with the overtures (sinfonie) and preludes; the storms and battle scenes; the stage music accompanying marching armies, religious ceremonies, dances, and balls; ballets, and shorter episodes of pantomime; and certain other episodes where the burden of the musical argument is carried by the orchestra. This is the music by means of which Verdi places his operas in their social frame; since so much of it functions as sounding décor and sounding spectacle, it provides some of the most thought-provoking insights into how he wished his operas to be staged; it also forms the locus for some of his boldest experiments in exploring the balance between “realism” and stylization in the operatic medium.

Verdi's overtures enjoy a life of their own – that is, independent of the operas to which they belong – less securely than those of the German tradition, less securely indeed than Rossini's overtures. One reason is certainly that they are less firmly rooted in a Classical, sonata-based symphonic ideal. Verdi knew those German overtures, and occasional traces of their influence are discernible; but in general his sinfonie occupy a space fascinatingly poised between the symphonic ideal and the idea of a potpourri, a medley or parade of themes from the body of the opera. What gives them their distinctive Verdian character is the manner in which the themes are set out: the formal framework plays on our sense of movement, alternating kinetic or transient episodes with episodes that seem suspended in time, in a manner that is surely evocative of an operatic scena. And though they may fall into several movements, they typically highlight a slow cantabile and a rousing Allegro.

In Verdi's operas words are set to music in order to produce drama, to establish communication between the stage and the audience. Words and music are never entirely separate or completely independent domains, and therefore can never be fully understood in isolation. This aesthetic principle and its interpretive corollary have not always been obvious to Verdians, but now seem to be accepted by most. However, as soon as attention turns to the ways in which the aesthetic principle has been translated into practice, which involves applying the hermeneutic corollary to concrete examples, matters become more complex. There is no simple answer to the question of how drama is produced in Verdi's operas. Communication between the stage and the audience can be established at any given moment in many different ways. Moreover, both the concept and the practice of drama evolve through time. This means not only that Verdi's ideas on how communication might be established changed during his very long compositional career, but also that our ideas of drama might be significantly different from Verdi's and from those of his original audiences.

The paths to drama in Verdi's operas are not infinite, however, since interaction of words and music is always filtered through a set of conventions. Far from being a constricting presence – and notwithstanding what Verdi might have said about the matter in his letters – conventions make theatrical communication possible, and dialectic engagement with them seems to have been the composer's attitude through most of his career. Much of this chapter will therefore be devoted to operatic conventions that impinge on the relationship between words and music. I have decided to concentrate on three areas that best demonstrate Verdian conventions and their evolution: the interaction between text and music within the movements that constitute an operatic number; the so-called “parola scenica” and other moments of especially important communicative significance; and word painting.

Within Verdi's long life and career, Italy witnessed two Wars of Independence (1848–49, 1859–60) and a social and political revolution: in 1861, the previous collection of small absolutist states became a single constitutional monarchy which subsequently enjoyed decades of rapid economic and civic development (particularly in the north) resulting from bourgeois liberalism. The theatrical world, with Verdi in a leading role, experienced corresponding changes: by the time of Falstaff, almost none of the system in which Verdi began his career – one that belonged essentially to the previous century – remained intact. To understand better Verdi's influential relationship to the opera industry and its gradual restructuring within a more modern environment before and after Italian unification, we first must examine the operatic world of 1825–40.

Although the peninsula was united by little more than an elite language written and spoken by educated citizens (and then only on formal occasions), the economic and cultural phenomenon of the “opera in musica” had become a central element of Italian identity and increasingly homogeneous since the mid-seventeenth century. Operatic style was based on widely known literary, musical, and theatrical conventions; while they differed from genre to genre and changed gradually over time, they nonetheless satisfied audience expectations and accelerated the composer's output. Operatic performances were widespread, and a growing number of theatres were open at various times of the year in both cities and smaller towns: eighty-two could boast working theatres in 1785–86 compared with forty at the end of the seventeenth century; one hundred and seventy-five different opera seasons were offered in 1830, around fifty more by 1840.

The earliest Verdi criticism, chronicling the successes and failures of his first operas, appeared in music journals, at first on the Italian peninsula and eventually throughout Europe and the Americas. La gazzetta musicale di Milano held a particularly important position as the house journal of Verdi's principal publisher, Ricordi. As early as 1846, the Gazzetta reprinted a series of reviews by B. Bermani, hailing the young composer – who at the time had written only half a dozen operas – as a major figure who stood out among his contemporaries through his “exquisite taste, an untiring elegance, and [a] marvelous instinct … for effect.” During the following decade, Florentine music critic Abramo Basevi wrote an extensive series of articles about Verdi's operas, which he collected and republished in 1859 as Studio sulle opere di Giuseppe Verdi. Basevi's detailed and systematic discussion of the early and middle operas (through Aroldo) has exerted considerable influence on modern Verdi criticism. Notably, Basevi was the first critic to suggest two different styles or “maniere” in the composer's works, with Luisa Miller as the decisive turning point.

Verdi enjoyed a reputation as the undisputed living master of Italian opera during the latter part of the nineteenth century, and during this period the quantity of critical writings about his music continued to expand prodigiously. New and fertile territory for music criticism included such diverse topics as his changing musical style, historical position, and the relationship of his music and aesthetic ideals to those of Richard Wagner and the new verismo composers. These topics engendered lively debate that was not always favorable to Verdi, since many critics, particularly outside Italy, held fast to the belief that Wagnerian aesthetics were intellectually superior to the “popular entertainment” of Italian opera.

The writings of Antonio Gramsci might seem a strange place from which to launch a consideration of the vexed topic of Verdi's ties to the Risorgimento, particularly since Gramsci disapproved of opera and never had anything kind to say about Verdi. He did, however, possess a visionary understanding of the role of culture in nineteenth-century Italy, one all the more revealing for its unfriendliness to Verdi. Gramsci saw the popularity of opera in Italy as both a substitute for and an impediment to the development of his preferred vehicle for Romantic sentiment, a popular literature that demanded a solitary and reflective mode of consumption diametrically opposed to the experience of the opera house. His suspicion of opera was aroused partly by ties he perceived between operatic song and an oratorical style that reminded him of fascist speechifying: elsewhere in the Prison Notebooks he lamented the “operatic” taste of the “man of the people,” who seeks in poetry only the singsong rhymes and “hammering of metrical accents” that he enjoys in popular oratory. It was this willingness to be swept away by the “operatic,” Gramsci argued, that militated against the formation of what he called a “national-popular” style of literature in Italy and against a truly popular Romanticism.

In accepting a commission from the Teatro La Fenice, Venice, in 1843, Verdi was breaking faith with La Scala, for which he had composed all his previous operas, and for which he had been approached to provide another for the following season. It proved a decisive departure: leaving aside Giovanna d’Arco (1845), arguably no more than a nostalgic gesture, and a revised version of La forza del destino (1869), the composer's grand homecoming to Milan would occur only after he felt secure enough to impose his own rules, with the revised Simon Boccanegra (1881), Otello (1887), and Falstaff (1893). Moving to Venice meant more than adjusting to a smaller stage; it called for a kind of personal drama for which there had been no space in works such as Nabucco or I lombardi. This in turn deprived Verdi of the rich fund of reference associated with that specific theatrical milieu, forcing him to take on the personality, as it were, of a quite different establishment. Indeed, the imprint of La Fenice can be felt at all stages of the genesis of Ernani, from censorship of the libretto to the distinctive vocal style of the score.

The success of Ernani at its premiere on March 9, 1844 – in spite of the sets not being ready, and the tenor having lost his voice and the soprano her sense of pitch – seemed testimony that the opera would stand on its intrinsic qualities. Confirmation came with its warm reception at many other opera houses, and Ernani greatly enhanced Verdi's reputation at the national and international level, establishing it as second only to Donizetti's among Italian opera composers. Verdi’s own theatrical instincts can plausibly take most of the credit: if the idea of the subject first came to Count Alvise Francesco (Nani) Mocenigo, director of La Fenice in 1843–44, it was Verdi who, exercising the right to choose his own libretto for the first time, rejected a series of suggestions (including Catherine Howard, Cola di Rienzi, I due Foscari, The Bride of Abydos, King Lear, Cromwello, and Allan Cameron) and became enthused only when Victor Hugo’s Hernani was mentioned.

Though primarily an opera composer, Verdi also wrote a number of works in other genres. Only one of these, the Messa da Requiem, has assumed a significant place in the repertory. The remaining solo songs, instrumental music, and choral works, more-or-less ignored and virtually forgotten, are infrequently performed and have not been broadly discussed in print. Consequently, this chapter will provide an overview of their history, style, and sources.

Beginning as a young boy in Busseto, Verdi composed a variety of non-operatic works, both sacred and secular. In mid-career he attested to the diversity of his youthful compositional activities: