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Verdi would have blogged
By Kaufmann | April 7, 2008 1 Comment »
Emerging from a beautifully sung performance of Rigoletto at the Washington Opera, I thought that the composer, Giuseppe Verdi, ever the creative non-conformist, would have been a blogger today. He would be taking advantage of the blogosphere to fight censorship, and to push the artistic (and other) boundaries of the day (and the tomorrow).
Verdi started to feature freedom from opression themes in his operas in the 1840s, early on with Nabucco, and thereafter with Macbeth, when he flaunts ‘bel canto’ conventions, providing a glimpse into the musical revolution that was afoot: Rigoletto is not merely Verdi’s coming out party as a mature musical genius, but it also represents the advent of opera as realistic drama, as music theater, presaging Italian verismo and Wagnerian musical drama.
In fact Verdi never intended for the opera to be called Rigoletto, an innocuous name for a court jester. In 1850, only 37-years old, he was commissioned to write the main opera for the following season at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice. Verdi, ever challenging convention, wrote to his librettist, Piave, that he wanted to base the next opera on Victor Hugo’s (who also wrote ‘Les Miserables’) play entitled ’La Roi s’Amuse’. Victor Hugo’s play was a critique of the corrupt nature of the French monarchy. The play had been banned by the French censors twenty years earlier (and would remain censored for yet another 30 years). Undaunted, Verdi submitted his opera based on Hugo’s play, daringly yet accurately entitled ‘La Maledizione’ (‘the Curse’), to the Austrian censors ruling over Northern Italy at that time.
Following a long wait, the bureaucrats wrote back announcing their ban of Verdi’s opera. Incensed, he wrote back, and following difficult negotiations, he managed to get his opera staged in Venice. But not without concessions: he had to change the name to Rigoletto, although the curse remained as a central theme within (how chillingly potent the sights and sounds of the ‘Maledizione’ are when performed by great singing actors!). And he was forced to downgrade the highest ranking character in the opera from the King to a mere Duke, who in turn could only rule over Mantua rather than France… [In the era of blogging, with a better and more quickly informed citizenry, Verdi may have had to wait much less and concede little, and Victor Hugo may have managed to get his play staged more than once, somewhere, decades earlier...]
Verdi was not an overt political agitator, though eventually he became a member of Parliament and Senate, and he sympathized with 19th century freedom campaigns. In fact, in Nabucco, based on the Babylonian King Nabucodonosor and his oppression of the Jews, Verdi presents a message on statecraft, freedom and leadership — alluding to the Italian predicament at the time. Nabucco is best known for the chorus ‘Va Pensiero’ (‘Go, my thoughts’), adopted by the Italian people as their underground national anthem immediately following the first performance, 166 years ago.
Through his dramatic music, Verdi provided a resonant language understandable to all the italian people, giving them with voice and song in their call for liberation and unity around a leader. Following the 1859 premiere in Rome of “Ballo”, the spontaneous exclamation of “Viva Verdi!” was born, which actually stood for “Viva Vittorio Emanuele Re d’Italia!”, thereafter encrusted in multiple graffiti around the city (a simple form of early blogging back then?). Victor Emanuel, the head of the house of Savoy, was to become the first monarch of a united Italy a couple of years later.
Until today music and theater have continued to provide with a voice against injustice, oppression and censorship. Yet at times they are themselves subject to tight control and bans by authorities in various corners of the world lacking in freedom of expression. At least in our day and age blogs (and text messages) would have something to say about such manifestations of control and censorship, enabling information to quickly spread around the globe. Together with a few of his noted librettists, Verdi would have joined the blogosphere, literally and figuratively.
Topics: Corruption, Voice and Human Rights | | 1 Comment
April 8th, 2008 at 10:10 pm
you nicely illustrate with Verdi the importance that music has historically played for raising awareness about political causes and struggles against oppression. beethoven’s ode to joy in his 9th Symphony is another example perhaps.
but one has to wonder if today the people in the US would really ‘get it’ with music, unless it is hard rock? opera in italy has historically been for the people, here in the us opera and classical music is known only by few.