Summary
Italian composer who had become the pre-eminent Italian composer of his day over three decades accompanying the Risorgimento, and whose Aida was the last public and political opera he wrote before Otello and Falstaff (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.139-140 / printed p.112-113).
Details
- Verdi’s development runs from Nabucco and I Lombardi in the 1840s, through Rigoletto, Trovatore, Traviata, Simon Boccanegra and Un Ballo in Maschera in the 1850s, to Forza del Destino and Don Carlos in the 1860s (PDF p.139 / printed p.112).
- His earlier operas were almost all intended as political operas, as Paul Robinson argues in Opera and Ideas; Robinson calls sheer loudness perhaps the most obvious component of Verdi’s rhetorical style, harnessed to parades, rallies and speeches heard during the Risorgimento as amplifications of real-life occurrences (PDF p.140 / printed p.113).
- Tunes in the earlier operas (Nabucco, I Lombardi, and Attila in particular) stimulated his audiences to frenzies of participation, whereas in Aida it was Egypt and Egyptians of early antiquity who were addressed, and no record of any participatory enthusiasm is connected with it (PDF p.140-141 / printed p.113-114).
- Verdi had no feelings at all about modern Egypt, in contrast with his fairly developed notions about Italy, France and Germany; Egypt’s submissive or at least indifferent presence in his life allowed him to pursue his artistic intentions with uncompromising intensity, and he fatally confused a collaborative capacity with the Romantic ideal of a seamless work informed only by a single creator, so that an imperial notion of the artist dovetailed with an imperial notion of a non-European world (PDF p.143-144 / printed p.116-117).
- The scholars Julian Budden, Frank Walker, William Weaver, Andrew Porter and Joseph Wechsberg note that Aida reuses traditional forms like the cabaletta and concertato but adds a new chromaticism, subtlety of orchestration and dramatic streamlining not found in any other composer of the time except Wagner (PDF p.140 / printed p.113).