The Complete Operas of Verdi [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION I am an arrogant and impatient listener; but in the case of a few composers, a very few, when I hear a work I do not like I am convinced it is my own fault. Verdi is one of these composers. Benjamin Britten^ The composer to whom Britten pays such graceful homage, whether in the above quotation or in his music, from the Oie//o-influenced Peter Grimes to the affectionate parody of Bottom's aria in A Midsummer Mighfs Dream, a composer in whom Bernard Shaw admired "the relevance of every bar of his mature scores to the dramatic situation", whose instrumentation, harmony and part-writing Stravinsky has been moved to praise, and whose operas are universally popular, has come a long way since those days only a generation or two ago when he and the whole of nineteenth-century Italian opera were considered to be beyond the musical pale. Verdian biography has come a long way, too. Today the facts of Verdi's life are reasonably well known. In addition to Frank Walker's The Man Verdi, a truly magnificent series of notes for an unwritten biography, there are other excellent lives including those by the conventional Carlo Gatti and the eccentric Vincent Sheean. But, since Francis Toye's pioneer work of forty years ago, there has not been in any language a full-length study of the operas themselves. That is why I have written this book. Toye's Verdi was published at a time when it was still not considered musically respectable to enjoy or even seriously to consider the operas of Verdi. A revival of interest in Austria and Germany, due largely to the efforts of Franz Werfel, was just getting under way, but, even so, fewer than a third of the operas were generally available in performance. Toye understandably concentrated on proselytising for the later and greater works, in order to gain acceptance for which he tended, in my view, to underestimate, certainly to refrain from advancing the claims of, several very fine works among the earlier operas. To these earlier works he devoted proportionately little space and attention. Although today Verdi is hardly in need of promotion, indeed precisely because what used to be thought of as his more obscure operas are now not infrequently to be encountered in stage performance, I have thought it useful to consider all the operas in some detail, in order not only to trace Verdi's development throughout his incredibly long and productive creative life, but also to explore the similarities as well as the differences between the earlier and the later works. I have 1 Opera, February, 1951, p. 115.