Mini-Cast #5: The Future of Verdi - First Half

As I write these words I'm getting ready for a late night showing of 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. More on that in another podcast, but what matters in this one is that the entire movie begins with a peasant announcing on horseback that Giuseppe Verdi is dead. 

As much as one might be able to say that Steven Spielberg is modern America, Giuseppe Verdi was the Italy of his time, perhaps even much more so. He was born just before the end of the Napoleonic Wars, came to international superstardom just as the 1848 revolution made the movement for Italian independence and unification an eventuality rather than mere radicalism, and Verdi became the cultural voice of Italian independence just as Mazzini was its political voice and Garibaldi its military. He lived to nearly ninety, long after Italy turned into a democracy with a monarch as its figurehead - and if Italian democracy was obviously unstable... well, so is modern Italy's, and even after seventy-five years of severe dysfunction modern Italy has not become a true dictatorship, so there was little reason to foretell the turmoil which awaited Italy in twenty years. 

Verdi, like Spielberg, is emblematic of a country at the height of its prosperity and achievement, such as it was..., and at the time of America's dominance, a lot of people couldn't get enough of Verdi. American stars at the Metropolitan Opera like Roberta Peters and Robert Merrill were on Ed Sullivan right before Elvis and right after Chuck Berry. It was a different era. There was not the enormous back catalogue of American music to listen to, and intellectuals didn't automatically move to New York or Chicago. So if the intelligentsia of small towns wanted to experience 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 astonishingly close. Opera was a mainstream phenomenon, and no composer wrote with an ear for the mainstream of taste like Verdi. 

There is so much for a cynical era to make fun of in Verdi: the melodrama, the stupidity of his characters, the oom-pa-pa orchestra, the complete sincerity, the death scenes where sopranos only die after thirty minutes from singing their lungs out. And when a cynical era curdles into an angry era, there is still more to hate: the glorification of male rage and frail women, the exoticizing of eastern cultures, the near-monopoly Verdi has held over the opera stage for a century-and-a-half, the fact that Verdi is the face of extravagant opera productions where money is strewn about the stage for the sole pleasure of the rich - sucking out money from generations of composers who never got a proper public. 

But Verdi did not used to be all this. He wrote for a very different era to which our era would have enormous trouble relating. In an era when Austra's imperial censors guarded opera for any intimation of treason, Verdi put Italian suffering and longing for freedom into the mouths of the world's most oppressed people: Jews, Romanis, Ethiopians, Moors, the disabled, and, most of all, women. The state or clerics might be from far away lands, but he portrayed them both in the most totalitarian terms. In code, Verdi spoke of freedom, and every Italian of his time deciphered it, along with hundreds of millions of people around the world, often living in the world's worst regimes.