Giuseppe Verdi,
Joe Greene in English if you wanted to translate that,
was a very well-known composer during his own lifetime, unlike some of the
composers we've talked about in the past like Bach.
He started studying organ at the age of three, which to me is kind of
mind-boggling.
Can't even reach the pedals when you're three? So I guess he learned to play the
keyboard part and then
as he grew tall enough he could reach the pedals. By the time he was nine,
he was actually the organist in his village. So he was obviously
very good at it. And this is a fairly small village.
So how is it that this man who
who was probably a prodigy at the organ,
why is he famous for opera? Beause we certainly don't think about
Verdi as being the great organist of all time. So this is how it happened.
His family sent him to Milan, which is where La Scala,
which is the most famous opera house in the world is,
and they sent him there to go to...
to the Conservatory so he could study to be a musician.
But he was 18 by the time they sent him and the conservatory wouldn't take him because
they thought he was too old
at age 18, but they also said his piano skills
weren't good enough and, you know, if you're going to be a music major of
any sort, even today, you have to have some piano skills. So
that's something that has a very long tradition obviously.
So what he did was go to La Scala and he studied
keyboards with the keyboard player at La Scala. So he had this
in to the opera house in Milan. So
he went back to his village, he got married, then he brought his family,
which by this time was his wife, and daughter and sons,
but the daughter died right before they left and moved back to Milan
where he had his first opera produced. Unfortunately, as I said his daughter died
right before he moved,
and then his son died, and his wife died, all within a three year period.
And you can imagine how devastating that would be. He was so devastated that he
actually considered never composing again. He was just heartbroken.
But somebody talked him into composing again
and the first work that he produced was an opera called Nabucco,
which is the Italian name for Nebuchadnezzar
from the Bible. And in this story there
is a chorus that the Hebrew slaves sing.
So this opera was a very big hit. Now let's put this into a
historic context. Remember I said when we talked about
our introduction to the Romantic Period that Italy at this time was
not one country it was all these different
little princedoms and kingdoms and
dukedoms... pick a name...but all these little small entities that were
run by one person. Well
a group called Young Italy was formed and
decided that they really wanted Italy to be one
country. So that was a big movement and that movement was called the Risorgimento.
So, in 1861,
Italy actually does become a unified country. But in the process
of working toward that unification
Verdi became a very important figure. He was very supportive of the idea
and they took this chorus of the Hebrew slaves from Nabucco
and they used it as a sort of rallying cry or
you might think about it as the theme song for the Risorgimento because
it's it's a song about,
you know, overthrowing the yoke of your oppressors and you know
that sort of thing. You can imagine what slaves would be singing. So they
use this song
as sort of the guiding theme for
their movement but they also used Verdi's name.
So you could go around cities in Italy and you would see Verdi scrawled
as graffiti on a wall. They weren't trying to push
Verdi the composer but it just happened
that Verdi was a convenient acronym for
"Vittorio Emanuele, Re D'Italia," which means
Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy, and that was who was going to be the king of the
unified country.
So they could just put Verdi's name on the wall, it looks very
innocent if you don't know what it stands for but it was really
their slogan for a unified country.
Verdi actually wrote some operas that were considered political. In fact, he wrote
one
that the sensors didn't like and they wanted him to...
to move the setting. They didn't want it set in Italy because they
thought that it was a little too close to home there in terms of the
political activity, and the place they wanted him to reset this...
this is... this just blows my mind, they wanted him to set it in Boston.
I guess they figured nobody in Italy would know anything about Boston and it would be
perfectly safe to set this opera
far, far away in Boston. So
Verdi was very successful as an opera composer,
made lots and lots of money and
as we know with lots of composers, when they make plenty of money then they
feel free
to compose what they really want to compose.
They don't feel like they have to do it to make a living so...
By the time that he got to...
where he could afford to do things for himself, he still wrote a lot of operas
and those are probably some of the ones that we know
the best. So what are operas by Verdi that you should recognize the names of
at least?
La Traviata, which is basically
the same story as Camille which is a French story...
a courtesan who, of course,
dies of tuberculosis at the end because consumption was very fashionable
to die of in an opera. Il Trovatore, which is the...
Trovatores were a group of traveling singers from the Middle Ages.
Rigoletto which we are going to take a look at in a minute. Otello based on
Shakespeare's Othello,
and Aida which is a grand, grand opera.
It actually... it's set in Egypt
and when it's done to its fullest glory
there's actually a scene in there that's like a triumphal procession where
they come back from battle and they're bringing in all the people they've captured and all
the things they've captured
and if you do it really
completely they bring in animals.
In the city of Knoxville right down the road from us, they did it one year and
they they had to do it at the Civic Auditorium because they couldn't do it at
the regular theater because the stage is not big enough.
But they went to the zoo and they get elephants and giraffes and all sorts of
things and
marched them across the stage. So, to do it right,
that's the way that Aida comes across. Aida was written for the opening of
the Suez Canal,
which is why it's set in Egypt even though Verdi was Italian.
Didn't actually get performed in... it wasn't done in time for the canal to be
dedicated but it was performed very shortly thereafter.
Another work that he is very famous for is his Requiem Mass,
which we heard a little bit of when we looked at the Requiem and
we compared that to Mozart. We looked at the two Dies Irae movements if you remember that.
This Requiem was not actually supposed to have all been
Verdi's. The Mass
was commissioned for the death of a man named Manzoni
who was very big in the Risorgimento and what they had done was ask a lot
of different Italian composers
each to write a movement of this Requiem,
I guess. So this is writing a piece by committee. It was probably not the best
plan and it didn't work out very well.
But Verdi had written his movement and then he went ahead and did
the entire Requiem. That piece, if you played it in high school band, you might
have played the Manzoni Requiem which is the band
version of the Verdi Requiem. And
it just took the tunes and everything and moved it into
an instrumental production which is a very cool kind of piece.
So let's look now at Rigoletto,
which is an opera that you know a piece from, trust me!
You know at least one piece from Rigoletto. So,
I'm not sure if I've told you about this before but when you... when we have an
opera... so you've got the composer who writes the tunes,
somebody writes the words as well. It's not usually the composer, there's usually
somebody else who writes those words.
And the words themselves we call the libretto,
and the person who writes those words is librettist. So, if you go to an opera
and you are looking through the program and seeing all the stuff, it will have the composer but it will
also say
libretto by so-and-so. So, the words themselves are written by the librettist,
composer writes lyrics. Sometimes the composer does both but not usually.
So in this particular story we have four major characters.
We have Rigoletto, the title character,
who is basically a court jester and he works for our second
male character who is the Duke. That's his name in the opera,
the Duke, and the Duke is a
womanizing guy, so. So, Rigoletto works for the duke.
Rigoletto has a daughter named Gilda...
not quite sure how to pronounce that in Italian,
and so obviously he's protective of his daughter and
the Duke is not the kind of man he really wants his daughter to be around.
So, in the course of the play, some things happen and there's this
cursed placed on Rigoletto
which disturbs him greatly. So
then later his daughter meets the duke and she falls in love with him.
Yeah, he's not a good guy but women, we make bad choices sometimes.
So the people who put the curse on Rigoletto
kidnap his daughter.
But they don't know it's his daughter. They think that she's his mistress and
so
obviously his concerns going to be even far greater for his daughter than it would have
been for his mistress.
And they're kidnapping her as revenge
because this other man's daughter was kidnapped by the Duke
who had other intents and that's where the curse came from.
So Rigoletto pays Sparafucile
who is an assassin and he hires him,
he wants him to kill the Duke.
So it sounds rather soap operish now, right, we've got a lot of plot
going here.
So we have Rigoletto who has hired this man to kill the Duke,
his daughter's in love with the Duke. So, the scenes that we're going to watch
are from the last act. So
we have a new character. Her name is Maddalena. She is Sparafucile's
sister and he's got her... she's going to lure the Duke in
to be killed. So there at Sparafucile's house.
So she is basically trying to seduce
the Duke to get him.
Now, the idea is that...or this is what Rigoletto has paid the man for...
is that he's supposed to kill the Duke, put him in a bag, a big sack,
and then give that to Rigoletto so that Rigoletto can go and throw him in
the river because Rigoletto wants to have some small part
in this but he doesn't want to actually do the killing. This is important,
an important bit of information. So we are now
at the house and Maddalena and the Duke are there
and he sings an aria that everybody
probably in whole world knows and that is "La donna è mobile"...
(singing)
You know it, it's been in commercials and movies and everything in the world.
So we're actually going to watch a clip of this particular section
with Luciano Pavarotti singing the role so you get to hear
a great tenor in the process. But as you watch,
look for the other characters because you'll see that he's singing to Maddalena.
And what he's singing is about how fickle women are.
Yeah, here's a man who's got a girl in every port...
and he's talking about women being fickle. But that's what the whole song about...
is about, that they change their minds,
just on a whim, you know it's like things floating on the wind so
that's what the text is about. There's a section there where
you see out... there's a window there and outside the window is another woman
and that other woman is Gilda,
and she and Rigoletto are outside the house.
So they're sort of eavesdropping on all that. So take a look now and listen to
"La donna è mobile" from Rigoletto.
Alright so, now we've seen that the Duke is
is flirting with Maddalena and Gilda has seen this from the window.
Well, she still loves him but it's just killing her that she's watched him
trying to seduce this other woman.
So in the next section that were going to watch,
we have Maddalena and the Duke inside, Rigoletto and his daughter
outside, and they're all going to sing. And we do have subtitles on this one
so you will know what everybody is saying.
The song that the Duke is singing
is called "Beautiful Daughter of Love," so obviously he's doing
more sweet talking here. And then Rigoletto and his daughter
are making their commentary on, you know, what a bad guy he is and then
she's all hurt and there's all this intense emotion going on.
They all sing individually so you can sort of know what everybody is talking about and
then in typical opera fashion
they all sing together. We don't need to hear what everybody is saying at that point
because we know
what everybody's thinking, you know, what they're all about. So we can combine
them all
and get them all singing.
So, I'll let you go watch that in just a minute but let's see how this opera ends first.
So we've got all this, you know,
Gilda loves him despite the fact that he's obviously
flirting with other women. So what happens is that
Maddalena has convinced her brother not to kill the Duke now... she likes him...
So what they... her brother says, well, I gotta kill somebody,
you know, he's got money, he's got to kill somebody. So what they agree is that he
will kill
the first person who comes to the door. You can imagine what's coming here, right?
Well, Gilda has dressed up like a man to get into the house. So she goes to the
door. She's the first person at the door.
She gets killed. He puts her in the sack,
takes her out to Rigoletto, Rigoletto hauls her back down to the river,
he wants to make sure that the guy is dead, you know he's... he wants
to take one last look at him. He opens the bag and
there's his daughter who is not quite dead because we can't have a good
aria at the end if she is...
So she sings about how she's going to join her mother in heaven and all this
sort of thing
and of course Rigoletto is heartbroken and that's the end of the
Opera.
So that's a very typical Romantic kind of opera where you have...
you've got love story upon love story. You've got father's love for his daughter, you've got
women's love for a man, and the man who loves everybody
and then somebody dies and
then people are distraught. So that's a pretty typical kind of
of operatic ending for the Romantic Period. We said, they liked drama and emotion
right? So, now go take a look at that
scene with the quartet, which is
"Bella figlia dell'amore." That's Italian for
Beautiful Daughter of Love, and enjoy the beautiful music
of Verdi, this incredible opera composer from the Romantic period.