Roger Parker

Verdi politico: a wounded cliché regroups

Abstract The article sums up recent and not-so-recent debates about Giuseppe Verdi and the Risorgimento. It first discusses the image of Verdis early (pre-1848) operas as ‘political’ works, one largely created in the later nineteenth century, as the newlyformed Italian state searched for national monuments. Except for a brief period in the immediate build-up and aftermath of 1848 (when many operatic events were caught up in the revolutionary cause), Verdis operas were not associated with nationalist agendas until the late 1850s, when the brief vogue of the acrostic ‘Viva V.E.R.D.I.’ set in train a larger process of mythicization of certain passages from his earliest works, foremost among them the chorus ‘Va pensiero’ from Act 3 of Nabucco (1842). The latter part of the article discusses recent attempts to rehabilitate the image of Verdi as ‘Vate del Risorgimento’, in particular considering the nature of the evidence marshaled to this cause.

The opera industry

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, regular operatic performances could be seen through much of Europe. This chapter on the nineteenth-century opera industry is organised around chronological divisions that have strong political resonance. Imperial opera began in France, the motor of political change in mainland Europe during the centurys first decade. The revolutionary turmoil of the 1790s had stimulated operatic activity in a way that later revolutions would not, at least overtly. After opening his career with farces and lighter comic operas, Gioachino Rossinis breakthrough into national and then international prominence came in 1813. Although Italian composers such as Vincenzo Bellini and Gaetano Donizetti looked towards Parisian style opera, three most influential composers of the 1850s and 1860s, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner, to some extent reinscribed a sense of national difference. The years around 1830 also saw a marked change in vocal type that occurred over much of Europe (albeit with regional variations).