The early middle years of Giuseppe Verdi

The prima donna who created Abigaille in Nabucco, Giuseppina Strepponi, who also had helped Verdi as early as 1839 with Oberto, ultimately became his second wife. Her love, support, and practical assistance on behalf of Verdi, over half a century, was boundless, though he was not an easy husband.

Born in 1815, Strepponi had a quite successful, if short, career. Living for a time with her agent, one Camillo Cirelli, in effect as common-law wife, she had borne three children, the oldest of whom (her only son, Camillino) was reared by her former maid. (The two other children were daughters and were given up for adoption.) When her voice began to deteriorate she set up as a teacher in Paris, where Verdi met her again in 1847 while there to produce Jérusalem. They fell in love and were soon living together, though they did not marry until 1859. Strepponi, a devout Catholic, seems to have felt herself unworthy to be Verdi’s wife, a feeling that one suspects Verdi may have shared on some level. It also seems possible that marriage was put off until her son came of age in 1859.

The new richness and depth of Verdi’s musico-dramatic characterization in these years, especially though not exclusively of women, may have developed out of his relationship with Strepponi. She is often evoked in connection with the sympathetic and radiant portrayal of Violetta in La traviata (The Fallen Woman—a rough analogy, to be sure, for Violetta the courtesan had fallen a great deal farther than Strepponi the singer). Yet Verdi showed scant sympathy for the real-life woman when he determined to move back with her to Busseto in 1849 and then to Sant’Agata, where small-town outrage at their liaison reached a peak. For some time he refused to allow her to accompany him on his many travels, which left her alone in a very hostile environment. He himself responded furiously to local censure and refused to have anything to do with Busseto and its musical activities, having first scrupulously repaid with interest the contribution made by the commune to his musical education.

In the meantime he had composed three operas that remain his best known and best loved: Rigoletto (1851), Il trovatore (1853; The Troubadour), and La traviata (1853). The tunes were better than any he had written before, the drama tighter and more exciting, and the characterization altogether original. Rigoletto makes an important technical advance toward a coherent presentation of the drama in music, especially in the famous third act; there is less distinction between the recitatives (the parts of the score that carry the plot forward in imitation of speech), which tend toward arioso (melodic, lyric quality), and the arias, which are treated less formally and dovetailed into their surroundings, sometimes almost unobtrusively. Even greater is the contrast of style in La traviata, with its intimate mood and lyrical pathos—a vein Verdi had previously explored in Luisa Miller. (Click here for an audio clip of an aria from La traviata. Click here for another excerpt, from Rigoletto, as sung by tenor Enrico Caruso. Another audio clip from Verdi may be heard at the Britannica biography of Amelita Galli-Curci.)

By this time he had honed his skills as a competitor in the rapacious marketplace that was 19th-century Italian opera—or, as he always saw it, the grim site of major battles, endless skirmishes, and equivocal victories. He drove hard bargains, complained bitterly at every reverse, stonewalled, and sued. He tried to insist that his operas be performed exactly as written, without cuts, transpositions, or substitutions.

He met his match with the censors, especially after 1848. The plot of Le roi s’amuse, the play by Hugo that inspired Rigoletto, features a curse that was deemed blasphemous and the attempted murder of a king that was politically taboo; only after the king was demoted to a duke and various other modifications were made could the text be approved. Traviata experienced problems of another kind. With La Dame aux camélias (“The Lady of the Camellias”), Alexandre Dumas fils had just caused a considerable scandal in Paris, and Verdi’s operatic version, though at first performed in 17th-century costumes, too obviously broke from operatic convention in setting a present-day subject, and a risqué one at that. For this reason and also because a stout prima donna had been cast as the consumptive heroine, the first performance was a rare Verdi fiasco. “Is it my fault or the singers’? Time will show,” was Verdi’s characteristically laconic comment. After minor revisions and a new production, the opera carried all before it.