Essays

Because of his extremely long life, Giuseppe Verdi has had the benefit of two quite proximate celebrations in the early twenty-first century. 2001 witnessed the hundredth anniversary of the composer’s death, and the commemorations were loud and large. In London, the Royal Opera House had the grandiose (but never realized) idea of performing all of his 27 operas in the years preceding 2001; in Italy and elsewhere, there were huge (and hugely expensive) celebrations, including an enormous conference involving plane-loads of Verdi scholars moving from New York to Verdi’s birthplace near Parma. The publications came thick and fast, a lot involving fairly shameless recycling, but also some moments of genuine discovery. Admittedly, as was even mooted at the time, Verdi, of all composers, was perhaps the least in need of such extravagance. His operas, after all, are permanently in revival around the world; multiple recordings exist of each of them; so people can remember him as often as they wish. Certainly, by the time of the next ‘Verdi year’ (2013, the two-hundredth anniversary of his birth), it began to feel that the most productive way to celebrate the composer might be to try to forget him for a time: try, that is, to create a pause in our memory, a way of somehow recreating the sense of newness his works once possessed. Perhaps that sentiment was generally experienced: the 2013 Verdi celebrations in both theatres and concert halls were modest in comparison not only with those of 2001, but with those dedicated to Richard Wagner (also born in 1813), around whom excess and publicity appear to collect even more easily.

            The (relatively) tiny world of musicology also reflected this absence of celebratory zeal. It’s true that New York once again hosted a conference, but there was very little activity in cash-strapped Italy; the mass critical edition of his works, started with great fanfare in 1982, rolled on, but its revolutions seemed ever slower, as if its professed monumentality was proving a greater burden. Of course, this comparative lack of energy had other reasons. For the most part, the musicological caravanserai now accommodated different travellers. In the 1970s or early 1980s, to take on Verdi as a dissertation topic was unorthodox, even a bit daring; over a generation later, he had become a monument or – perhaps better – a lieu de mémoire: a subject-heading often deemed conservative by dint of being ‘composer-based’ (an old, worn object within an old, worn category). Such disciplinary shifts should surely not be a cause for lamentation, for the rending of academic garments and the gnashing of professorial teeth? Those professionally invested in the composer may well have dropped some natural tears. But the fact that musicology as a discipline moves ever onward tells us that it is alive and well; its places in the sun are always (and should always be) temporary. What’s more, the discipline’s new enthusiasms can sometimes reflect welcome light on those of its past.

            So what of Verdi’s place in today’s sound-drenched cities, in physical and virtual spaces unimaginable in 1813 or 1901? What, to put it crudely, does Verdi mean to Italians today? When a reverent group of notables descended into the crypt of the Casa di Riposo in 1951 (another celebration year), there were those who, peering at the screen embedded in Verdi’s coffin at face level, thought (or at least wrote) that they saw a face miraculously undamaged by the ravages of time. This was surely symbolic; in spite of the uses ‘Verdi and the (heroic) Risorgimento’ had had for Mussolini’s Regime, the postwar composer and his works had remained somehow untainted, a still-triumphant symbol of a recently-disastrous nationalism. Today, though, there are signs that the situation has changed fundamentally. When La Scala showcased Wagner more prominently than Verdi during the 2013 celebrations of both composers, there were some chauvinistic outcries; but not as many as some might like (from the outside) to imagine. Indeed, some in the country found deeply offensive the fact that the foreign press, ever ready to foster easy stereotypes, strove to exaggerate this querelle and portray it as an exotic tale of operatic passion.

            In this context, I’m reminded of two circumstances. One is this: as a musicologist who has worked for some time on nineteenth-century Italian opera, I’m struck by the fact that, each time I report to colleagues that I’m off to Italy for a meeting or to do some research, the invariable reply is some version of ‘Wow, you’re lucky’ or ‘Nice life you have’. Why oh why, I ask myself, is Italy – increasingly dysfunctional politically, its economy in seemingly terminal decline, its infrastructure crumbling, its youth unemployment ever more crippling – still characterized in the academy (and elsewhere) as a land of plenty and enjoyment? The second circumstance is a bon mot reported by an Italian acquaintance. It was 2007 and Pavarotti had just died. On hearing the news, one of the acquaintance’s friends responded: ‘So now all we have left is pizza.’ Instead of ‘pizza’, this melancholy joker might well have said ‘Va pensiero’: a musical item whose continuing celebrity provides us with a way of celebrating nationalism, of forgetting its awful heritage.

            To put this another, final way: there are many good things, many wonderful things, about Verdi and his legacy, many continuing reasons to love his operas and to learn from them; but there are also bad things, dangerous habits of mind, and one of the worst is that, for some – even for some musicologists, who ought to know better – Verdi’s image helps to keep Italy ever passionate, ever sunny, ever exotic.

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