Mini-Cast # 5 - The Future of Verdi - Final Draft

For this, our first music podcast, we're going to begin by listening to six of my favorite minutes in any opera, in Aida during the Egyptian sacrifice to P'tha.

A solemn rite as sublime as any music in the Catholic Church, conjuring a civilization dead for two thousand years. Only the slightest appropriation, how much can one appropriate musically from a culture whose music hasn't been heard in millennia... - but an invocation of a time and place for a different era who could barely imagine Ancient Egypt (how different from our Information Age when Egyptian history is a Google search), done with awed respect, not exploitation. A tribute to one culture in its prime from another. And if Ancient Egyptian sublimity seemed tyrannical and bellicose, it obviously called tyranny of modern imperial states to mind.

When I wrote this cast's rough draft, it was the day Baltimore's Charles Theater showed the second half of Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900, a five-and-a-half hour cinematic fresco about the breakdown of Italy's time immemorial way of life in the 20th century. The first half was great, the second half sucked. What matters is that the movie begins with a peasant announcing on horseback that Giuseppe Verdi died. For Italy, Verdi's death signified the nineteenth century's close; the end of old lifestyles, old achievements, old dreams.

Much as Steven Spielberg is modern America, Giuseppe Verdi was Italy of his time, perhaps much more. Born just before the Napoleonic Wars' end, his international star rose just as the 1848 revolution made Italian independence and unification inevitable, and Verdi became the cultural voice of independence as Mazzini was the political voice and Garibaldi the military. He lived to almost ninety, long after Italy turned into a democracy with a monarch as its figurehead - and if democracy was unstable... well, so is modern Italy's - even after 75 years of dysfunction modern Italy's not a dictatorship. There was little reason to foretell the turmoil which awaited. 

Verdi, like Spielberg, is emblematic of a country at the height of its achievement, and at the time of America's dominance, many couldn't get enough Verdi. American singers at the Met like Roberta Peters and Robert Merrill were on Ed Sullivan before Elvis and after Chuck Berry. It was a different era. There was not yet  the enormous catalogue of American music, and most intellectuals didn't move to New York or Chicago. So if small town intelligentsia wanted to hear music better than Top 40, they had to hear it on classical radio or television variety shows. If Metropolitan Opera divas like Beverly Sills and Joan Sutherland weren't as well-known as movie stars, they were close. Opera was mainstream, and no composer wrote with an ear for the mainstream like Verdi. 

A cynical era has so much to make fun of in Verdi: the melodrama, the sincerity, the stupidity of characters, the oom-pa-pa orchestra, the cliches of libretto, the death scenes when sopranos sing their lungs out for thirty minutes. But when a cynical era curdles into an angry era, there's still more to hate: the glorification of male rage and frail women, the exoticizing of eastern culture, the near-monopoly Verdi's held over opera for a century-and-a-half. Verdi's the face of extravagant opera productions that strew money about the stage for the rich's pleasure - sucking out money from generations of composers who never got a proper public. 

Verdi didn't used to be this. In an era when we say what we mean and mean what we say, Verdi means little, but in an era when Austra's censors guarded all art for intimation sof treason, Verdi put Italian suffering and longing for freedom into the mouths of the world's most oppressed: Jews, Romanis, Ethiopians, Moors, the disabled, and, most of all, women. The state or clerics were from far away lands, but he portrayed them both in the most totalitarian terms. In code, Verdi sang of freedom, and every Italian of his time deciphered it, along with millions who lived in the world's worst regimes. 

Except for Beethoven, there's no composer more synonymous with liberty. But towering as Verdi is, he's not quite so universal that he translates to every era. While performances of Mozart thrive more than ever, Verdi faces a clear decline in his popularity. In an era complaining about opera's interminable nostalgia, its glamorizing women's alleged frailty and men's alleged strength, its orientalizing of distant cultures, Verdi's cliched tropes are ground zero of everything which today's intelligentsia finds offensive about opera.

It's easy to forget the liberty's necessity in an era of illiberal democracy. When liberty is an oppressive force of its own enabling the rich to implement plutocracy, you can't quite blame people for finding Verdi difficult, even if you find their ideologies stupid. Verdi encountered similar pushback in the late 19th century from radical ideologues and aesthetes. Just like our era, the era of Puccini and Strauss was more decadent.

And yet a new society across the Pacific Ocean emerges with exponential quickness, one accustomed not to illiberal democracy, but to dictatorship. 40 million Chinese children learn the piano now. Their whole lives will exist in a social credit system; government by algorithm that only distributes opportunity to citizens whose activities the government finds palatable. If they long for freedom, and I imagine they do, they'll will never be permitted to express their longings aloud. As in the Soviet Union, artists and writers are policed with draconian severity. It can only be in the unspecificity of music that the Chinese may feel free, and it's only in the longings of unfathomably distant lands and eras and persons that the Chinese can find their longings articulated with specificity. However insulting and dated Verdi seems to many Americans today, he may seem very current indeed in the East. Even if Verdi leaves America, he may find a home among the non-Western people opera long orientalized.  

Quick fade at 2:10