Viva Verdi!

The Story of a Love Affair

Walter Clemons

I came to Verdi backwards. Otello was the first of his operas I ever paid close attention to. Somebody had told me it was his masterpiece, and I was hot for masterpieces in my studious youth. There was a lot of this going around when I was in college; maybe there still is. Beethoven’s last quartets were said to be his greatest, and so I went straight to Opus 131; it was years before I listened to a Beethoven quartet earlier than Opus 127. Winthrop Sargeant said in a Life magazine article that Don Giovanni was the greatest opera ever written, and it was years before I learned that The Marriage of Figaro was the Mozart opera I really loved.

When I sat down with Toscanini’s recording of Otello, bilingual text in hand, I was properly attentive, but I was studying how Boito had turned Shakespeare’s play into a libretto, and how leanly and economically Verdi had set the words. I went at Otello the way I went at Wozzeck around the same time—in search of cultural uplift rather than pleasure.

If Otello occupies a special place in the thinking man’s introduction to Verdi the tragic dramatist—I’m not yet talking about any honest musical response, you’ll notice, only snob appeal—his last opera, Falstaff, has an even odder, stronger cachet for a literary listener. Boito again provided Verdi with a Shakespearean libretto of unusual intelligence. Verdi in old age set it to music that surpasses even Otello in subtlety, rapidity and economy. Falstaffs most famous aria, “Quand’ero paggio,” is thirty seconds long, and the opera progresses fleetly through complex ensembles and pointed dialogues that combine chamber-music delicacy with a quality rougher, grander, and more robust; one can scarcely grasp it on first hearing. Verdi’s final opera, and not his penultimate Otello, has in recent years become the test of connoisseurship. There now appears a live recording of a production of Falstaff that attracted international attention last year. The conductor, Carlo Maria Giulini, had absented himself from opera houses since 1968, and his return to live operatic performance is an event to be heard. I grew up on Karajan’s first recording, with Tito Gobbi’s magniloquent Falstaff and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf’s mispronounced Alice Ford, and got to Toscanini’s recording only later.

But during this early listening period, my real preference in Italian opera was still Puccini. I was chagrined, though not deterred, when Joseph Kerman, in Opera as Drama, called Tosca a “shabby little shocker” and even blasted Turandot, which some of us were clinging to as our Puccinian ace in the hole. “Puccini makes my hair stand on end. Verdi doesn’t,” I said to a college mentor and ardent Verdian, the composer Edward T. Cone. Cone was very patient with me. He just said, “Maybe Verdi will.”

This happened in an unexpected way the first time I saw Otello. I was pretty well studied-up in Otello's Great Moments by now—the kiss motif, the hollow, reedy “Dio! mi potevi scagliar” (Shakespeare’s “Had it pleased heaven to try me with affliction”), the enormous Act 3 ensemble, the bare, tense music of the last act that breaks open in Desdemona’s naked cry to Emilia. But something else took me utterly by surprise. To the strumming of harps, Otello’s “Ora e per sempre addio” (“Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content! /Farewell the plumed troop, and the big wars / That make ambition virtue!”) made my hair rise the way I’d claimed only Puccini could, and the concluding Act 2 duet of Otello and Iago brought me to my feet. The scene doesn’t work quite that way on recordings. It is a theatrical happening. I was emboldened to write an exam paper arguing that Verdi’s Otello is a greater dramatic achievement than Shakespeare’s play. This is no longer hot news, but I was highly excited by my discovery. When Shakespeare’s Othello speaks these lines, however eloquently, he is a broken man. With the simultaneity of feeling that music drama can effect, Verdi gives him back, in memory, the martial music of his days of glory. I was also responding, though I didn’t know it yet, to the visceral rhythmic energy in Verdi’s music that first made him famous—and then, played to death on hurdy-gurdies, brought him into disrepute.

In the days of 78 recordings, when I was growing up, Verdi was a household staple, so I wasn’t ignorant of his existence: the Rigoletto quartet with Caruso and Galli-Curci, Toscanini’s fine-drawn preludes to the first and last acts of Traviata, Caruso’s “Celeste Aida,” Galli-Curci’s “Caro nome,” the Schipa/GalliCurci “Parigi, ocara.” Traviata, performed by the humble traveling San Carlo Opera Company, was the first opera I saw as a child. The main thing I remember is that a nervous understudy as Violetta sat down without adjusting her hoops, so that her skirt flew right up in her face. I was too busy making my own discoveries on the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts—Debussy’s Pelleas, Wagner’s Tristan—to listen to Verdi. When the Met made its first visit to Houston after World War II, I chose Dorothy Kirsten in Madama Butterfly over Aida. As it turned out, this wasn’t bad thinking. I now recognize that Aida is one of Verdi’s greatest scores, but in more than thirty years of trying, I’ve never seen a decent production.

The rehabilitation of Verdi has been one of the prime changes in musical taste during my lifetime. I’ve cast this essay in autobiographical form because I thought my stumbling progress might be of use to other Verdi slow learners. I have a brilliant friend, for example, who would sit through the most imperfect late operas of Richard Strauss before she would undergo a performance of II Trovatore. Of the three masterpieces that followed close upon one another as Verdi approached forty— Rigoletto, II Trovatore, and La Traviata—I believe nobody has trouble appreciating Traviata. To anyone impatient with Rigoletto, I would simply recommend the Toscanini recording of the last act. The most belabored of all tenor arias, “La donna e mobile,” goes with a lilt and freshness that make us understand why the tune was a carefully kept secret before the premiere, and why its first hearers responded with wild enthusiasm.

II Trovatore is the hardest of this triad of great operas to take seriously, especially after what Gilbert and Sullivan in The Pirates of Penzance and the Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera did with it. Mixed the babies up and threw the wrong one in the fire? Talk about your bad luck! And those blaring tunes with bigbanjo orchestral accompaniment? Aida, with a live camel onstage on a summer night at Rome’s Caracalla, is a less severe test for the fastidious. We simply have to learn to hear this music freshly.

I can direct you to recordings that opened my ears. Some of these are by Maria Callas when she still had her voice and her unexampled attentiveness to every detail of a long musical line. Her Traviatas recorded live at La Scala in 1955 and at Covent Garden in 1958, the last year she sang Violetta, are revelatory. Her “Tacea la notte placida” on the first side of the Angel Trovatore conducted by Karajan is the essence of what I want from a Verdi performance: tension, expectation, the accomplishment of a long-breathed melody reaching out beyond our ability to guess where the composer may take us. The first time I ever felt this was in Claudia Muzio’s famous 1935 recording of Violetta’s “Addio del passato,” from the haunting reading of Germont’s letter to the shockingly abrupt, breathless conclusion of the aria. Muzio’s final recording session, made at her own expense about a year before she died at forty-seven, has been steadily in print over the past thirty years. I haven’t read anywhere that Callas studied Muzio’s records, but she must have. The tenor Lauri-Volpi’s description of Muzio, “with that unique voice of hers made of tears and sighs and restrained interior fire,” exactly describes the power Callas brought to Verdi heroines. The ingenuous Gilda in Rigoletto, the earthy Aida, were unlikely Callas parts, and she seldom sang them in the opera house. But I would rather hear her on records in these roles than any other singer. Muzio, like Callas, was an unlikely, heroicvoiced Mimi in Puccini’s La Boheme. But when Muzio’s “Mi chiamano Mimi” broadens in the passage describing the arrival of spring, she surely gave Callas a vital clue to the role. Like Muzio’s—and, most recently, Teresa Stratas’s—Callas’s Mimi is not demure.

I have two heroes among Verdi singers of living memory. Tito Gobbi’s acid-voiced, tender Rigoletto, his very funny, beautifully sung Falstaff, and his butch, crew-cut Iago— in Rome in the early 1960s—were the best performances of these roles I ever hope to see. They are all recorded. But I was very slow to realize that Carlo Bergonzi is the best Verdi tenor of my lifetime. Only this spring he sang a creditable Ricardo on a Met broadcast of Un Ballo in Maschera. I never went to much trouble to see Bergonzi onstage. Unlike Callas and Gobbi, he wasn’t an exciting actor, and he wasn’t prepossessing in appearance. Franco Corelli, with his good looks, famous legs and big voice, seemed the very model of a Verdi hero. Now, on records, I hear what I should have paid closer attention to: Bergonzi was a stylish Duke in Rigoletto, a very masculine Alfredo in Traviata, perhaps the best Don Carlo on any recording, and one of the few Rhadameses I’ve ever heard sing the final notes of “Celeste Aida” softly, as Verdi requested.

Two Bergonzi recordings are of especial interest. A complete Ernani with Leontyne Price, and the late Thomas Schippers conducting, makes us understand the excitement this early, often absurd Verdi work caused when it was new. But Bergonzi’s principal monument, an ambitious, three-record set, Carlo Bergonzi Sings Verdi: 31 Tenor Arias from 25 Operas, is currently out of print, for which Philips should hang its head. This is too valuable an album not to reappear. Bergonzi sings at least one aria from every Verdi opera except Nabucco and Stiffelio. The extreme of Bergonzi’s virtuosity comes on the album’s sixth side. He follows an excellent account of two of Otello’s major arias with an entirely plausible, virile performance of the youthful Fenton’s last-act aria from Falstaff, “Dal labbro il canto estasiato vola.” I’m not aware of any opera house in the world having cast one singer in both roles. Bergonzi is a tasteful, exacting artist who should be far more celebrated than he is; eventually, through his records, he will be.

I’ve long had a favorite Verdi opera, Don Carlo—a mature work, nobly and ambitiously designed, much revised by Verdi and still unwieldy to perform. (One whole segment of it, a ballet composed for the original Paris performance in 1867, has been successfully given a life of its own as Balanchine’s Ballo della Regina in the repertory of the New York City Ballet.) A reason for this personal preference is my having been invited to a performance of Rudolf Bing’s production at the old Met in the 1950s without having heard a note of the opera before. There was only the complicated plot summary in the program to prepare me for an overwhelming evening. Philip II, the most darkly complex of the opera’s five leading characters, was Cesare Siepi, at the height of his powers.

On first hearing, I knew that the Flemish deputies’ chorus in the auto-da-fe was one of those long, consoling, opulent Verdi melodies I would want to hear over and over again. Next came what still seems to me the most gripping scene in any Verdi opera: Philip II alone before dawn in his chambers, singing “Ella giammai m’amo,” lamenting his wife’s love for his son and envisioning himself buried in the Escorial. The entrance of the ninety-year-old Grand Inquisitor, to a sinister, peculiarly ponderous movement in the orchestra, should stifle forever, if the opening of the Nile scene in Aida won’t suffice, the canard that Verdi was an unsubtle orchestrator. The scene moves from strength to strength, through an eloquent, hugely organized quartet to a broken exchange between the queen and her faithless lady-in-waiting, the Princess of Eboli, to Eboli’s bringthe-house-down curtain aria, “O don fatale.” Such is the cumulative effect that when Grace Bumbry, at a recent Met performance, ended a full note flat, in bloodcurdling discord with the orchestra, she was able, with the self-possession that never deserts her, to win a thunderous ovation.

Schiller’s play, on which Verdi based his opera, ends with a bleak, entirely apposite coup de theatre: Philip II turns his son over to the Spanish Inquisition. Verdi’s opera ends instead with a messy huggermugger that leaves the audience scratching their heads. In older productions, a friar used to rush out, wrap Don Carlo in his robes, and hustle him into sanctuary. Who was this rescuer—the supposedly dead King Carlo V living in retirement, his ghost, a friar impersonating him? John Dexter’s current Met production solves this unsatisfactory ending as well as I’ve seen it done: the stern voice of Carlo V brings the arrest of the prince to a halt, the witnesses topple over paralyzed as the hero enters the cloister gates, but members of the audience still turn and ask each other, “What the hell was that?” The original Schiller ending has been staged in a 1951 London production, with only the elimination of a few lines of dialogue. I would give a lot to see it tried again. The personal betrayals, the conflict between father and son, and the struggle for supremacy between church and state in Verdi’s darkest opera seem to move inexorably toward this tableau.

Verdi tirelessly reworked Don Carlo and never got it entirely right. I’ve seen it in four acts, I’ve seen it in five; I’ve owned five “complete” recordings and given some away, for shelf space, that I wish I’d kept. I no longer own, for instance, a recording of Boris Christoff’s mighty Philip. I long preferred the energetic Solti performance, with Tebaldi’s past-her-best, still gorgeous Elisabetta and Bergonzi’s Don Carlo. I’ve now come round to agreeing that Giulini’s recording, based on Visconti’s 1958 production at Covent Garden, is the one to live with. I once thought it too tamely “correct.”

continued on page 122

Continued from page 89

Giulini’s new Falstaff (Deutsche Grammophon) is also disconcertingly formal and correct on first hearing. It’s hard to believe that the first several sides are a record of a live performance, so forthrightly square is the conducting, so unjoyous is the action. But the reading gradually comes to life. Something amazing happens in Renato Bruson’s singing of Falstaff’s monologue in the courtyard of the inn at the opening of Act 3. As he tries to recover his spirits after his dousing in the Thames, Falstaff’s “Mondo ladro. Mondo rubaldo. Reo mondo!” (“Thieving world. Rascal world. Evil world!”) is a deep growl from a man facing old age. His call for a consoling glass of wine and the world-encompassing trill from the orchestra that accompanies his drinking of it become elements in a tragic monologue, from Verdi’s deepest resources of pessimism. Even by Gobbi, I haven’t heard this episode better performed. Giulini’s conducting of Nannetta’s Windsor Forest song, with his delicate attention to orchestral detail, is another act of re-creation that makes this recording, for all its sobriety, one that any lover of Falstaff will want to hear.

There is, however, an astounding performance I hadn’t heard until recently—simply because Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as Falstaff seemed like such a bad idea. Leonard Bernstein, with the Vienna Philharmonic, is the conductor, and his full-blooded vivacity makes this a landmark among Verdi recordings. Nothing could be more surprising than Bernstein’s reading of the final scene in Windsor Forest. Karajan plays it for delicacy: we might be in the realm of Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night's Dream. Bernstein conducts the scene as a countryside practical joke. We always know that these maskers are Falstaff’s neighbors, transparently disguised. Bernstein sacrifices mystery and magic for rural reality. The whole opera moves with confident comic verve.

The story of the composition of Falstaff is one of the most touching in musical history. Verdi was in his late sixties when Arrigo Boito tempted him out of semiretirement with a libretto for Otello. This opera was such a triumph for the seventythree-year-old composer that he cannily resisted Boito’s suggestion that he top it with just one more work, in an area he’d never conquered and hardly attempted: comic opera. In letters Verdi admits that he’s working on Falstaff, but only for his own amusement; he won’t promise to finish it, he may not allow it to be performed even if he does.

He produced, of course, something entirely unexpected. “I am not a learned composer, but I am a very experienced one,” Verdi said in later life. Born the same year as Wagner, he was an essentially conservative workman who underwent the double indignity of first being declared old hat, and then being accused of having learned from and copied his German contemporary at a time when Wagner’s operas struck European hearers as the last word in modernism. But Verdi’s development was consistent and self-generated. One of our opportunities in recent years has been the availability on records and in stage revivals of such long-submerged early Verdi operas as the dark, absorbing / Due Foscari, I Masnadieri, and the extraordinarily interesting Stiffelio, which immediately preceded Rigoletto. Verdi’s long, fertile career can now be seen to have been as remarkable in its steady progress and deepening insight as that of Dickens.

The energetic, anticipatorily modern Falstaff is nonetheless an astonishment. It seems to have no precursor, even in Verdi’s career; it has no clear heir. On early acquaintance, the work seemed to open out into recognizable lyric statement only in the final act, with Fenton’s aria (set to a strict Petrarchan sonetto) and the entry of Nannetta disguised as Queen of the Fairies. Bernard Shaw, who greatly admired Falstaff and wrote a perceptive early essay on it after reading the score, thought Verdi’s melodic gift had dried up with age and been replaced by fastidious attention to orchestral coloring and ingenious detail, “the whole fabric being wrought with the most skillful elegance.. .to bring thought and knowledge and seriousness to the rescue of failing vitality.”

Nearly a century later—after the stringencies of Stravinsky and Berg, for instance, who were once thought unmelodic—we can hear Falstaff differently. It is prodigal in its dispersal of Verdian melodies, gone before we can applaud them—Alice Ford’s soaring, parodic voicing of a sentence from Falstaff’s double love letter to her and to Mistress Page, the quick quartet of the wives of Windsor, even the mincing little violin tune to which Falstaff, dressed up for seduction, reenters at the end of the first part of Act 2 with all the plump, pleased delicatesse of Oliver Hardy at his courtliest.

Listening to all the recordings of Verdi I’ve had time to play during the past several weeks, attending even an inadequate performance of Don Carlo, have stirred me to renewed certainty of his greatness. Isaiah Berlin, in a famous essay, carefully defined Verdi’s “naivete”: “Homer, Aeschylus, Shakespeare, even Goethe, are poets of this kind. They are not, as poets, self-conscious.... Verdi’s art, like that of Bach, is objective, direct and in harmony with the conventions which govern it.” There is something hard, clear and sunlit-square about Verdi’s music that makes it at first difficult to appreciate, if romantic mystery is what one looks for. The value of this honesty and clarity grows with acquaintance. That’s why I like, love and admire him. ¾