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

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 cliches of the libretto, 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's held over opera for a century-and-a-half, the fact that Verdi's the face of extravagant opera productions where money's 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 didn't used to be all this. In an era when we can say what we mean and mean what we say, Verdi means very little, but in an era when Austra's imperial censors guarded all art 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 sang 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. 

Except for Beethoven, it's difficult to think of a composer more synonymous with liberty. But towering as he is, Verdi is not quite so universal that he translates well into every time and place. While performances of the still more distant Mozart thrive more than ever, the once inevitable Verdi has faced a clear albeit relative decline in his popularity, and in an era which complains about opera's interminable nostalgia, for its glamorizing of women's alleged frailty and men's alleged strength, its orientalizing of non-Western cultures, the cliched tropes of Verdi is ground zero of everything about opera which today's intelligentsia finds offensive about it.

It's easy to forget the necessity of liberty in a zeitgeist of illiberal democracy. In an era when liberty is sometimes an oppressive force of its own that allows the rich to implement a plutocratic tyranny, you can't quite blame people for finding Verdi a difficult pill to swallow, even if you find the ideologies which motivate them incredibly stupid. Verdi encountered something like a similar pushback in the late 19th century from more radical ideologues and aesthetes of a more decadent era than the one which grew him to fame.

And yet today, a new society emerges with exponential quicknessacross the Pacific Ocean, one accustomed not to illiberal democracy, but to still less liberal authoritarianism. 40 million Chinese children currently learn the piano. They will exist their entire lives in a social credit system, a government by algorithm that bases their opportunities over whether they partake in activities the government finds palatable. If they long for freedom, and I have to imagine they do, hundreds of millions will never be allowed to express their longings for freedom aloud. As in the Soviet Union, artists and writers might be policed with draconian severity until all that remains is state propaganda. It may only be in the unspecificity of music that the Chinese may feel free, and it is only in the longings of unfathomably distant lands and eras and persons that the Chinese may find their longings articulated with any specificity. However insulting and dated Verdi seems to so many Americans today, he may seem very current indeed in the East. Even if Verdi leaves America, he may well find a home among the kinds of non-Western people many Westerners think opera has long orientalized.