Giuseppe Verdi
1813 – 1901 · Italy
Known for: Italian composer of Rigoletto, La traviata, Aida and Otello, and voice of the Risorgimento
“His choruses gave a divided country one voice, and the theatre a heart.”
Biography
Giuseppe Verdi was born on 9 or 10 October 1813 at Le Roncole, a village near Busseto in what is now the province of Parma, the son of an innkeeper and a spinner; he kept 9 October as his birthday all his life. Lessons in Latin and Italian from the village schoolmaster began when he was four, and at eight, after the schoolmaster's death, he became the paid organist of the local church. From twelve he studied with Ferdinando Provesi, director of the municipal music school at Busseto, and wrote marches, sinfonie and church pieces by the dozen. The Milan Conservatory refused him, so his patron Antonio Barezzi, a grocer and distiller who led the local philharmonic society, got him private lessons with Vincenzo Lavigna, formerly of La Scala. He married Barezzi's daughter Margherita, and later liked to present himself as a peasant's son, though his education had in fact been careful and long.
Verdi came to dominate Italian opera after Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti, whose work he had absorbed along with the French grand opera of Meyerbeer and Spontini. Nabucco of 1842 made his name, and its chorus of exiled Hebrews, Va, pensiero, was heard in the spirit of the Risorgimento, the movement for Italian unification with which his early operas openly sympathised; the composer himself came to stand for those ideals, and he served briefly as an elected deputy. Macbeth of 1847 has been called his first masterpiece. The three works of his middle period, Rigoletto of 1851 and Il trovatore and La traviata of 1853, brought a success that let him cut back his operatic workload and settle as a landowner near his birthplace. He was a private man who never courted popular movements, and what he asked of the theatre was character, not display.
After Aida in 1871 it was assumed his work was finished. Instead came the Requiem of 1874, written in memory of Alessandro Manzoni, and then, after a long silence, two late Shakespeare operas with the librettist Arrigo Boito: Otello in 1887 and Falstaff in 1893, a comedy completed in his eightieth year. The wealth the theatre brought went into practical things, among them the Casa di Riposo per Musicisti in Milan, a home for old musicians that he founded and endowed. He died in Milan on 27 January 1901, and great crowds lined the streets at his funeral. His operas have never left the repertoire, and the bicentenary of his birth in 2013 was marked with performances and broadcasts around the world.