There is no need to ask "Who is Verdi?" He is that Italian master who has put a girdle of melody literally round the world. Not to the accomplished musician, the cultured amateur, the plodding student, and the happy home musical circle is he known only, but, to take England alone, he is familiar by name and tune to thousands of the poorest and lowest, whose only music is the street organ, and whose main musical literature is the opera-house announcements on the theatre doors and public hoardings. Men and women who cannot pronounce the name of Mendelssohn articulate Verdi, and outcasts and arabs, whose opera-house is the wide, wide metropolis, and whose only orchestra is engined by the Saffron Hill fraternity, have the Italian maestro, in name and tune, at their tongue-tips. All this may not be art, but it is magnificent.
Verdi becomes a great art-study. He stands distinctly an epoch-making musician. A composer who in 1845 had not been heard in England, and who at the present time commands the lyric stage of this and every European country, to say nothing of other continents, furnishes necessarily solid ground for critical musical inquiry. His artistic career is most instructive in its steady growth to mature ripeness. His efforts, too, have been almost entirely confined to opera, and if we examine Verdi's operas from first to last, it will not be difficult to trace the change that has taken place in the fashion of opera during the past three-quarters of a century. This has been as progressive as it has been emphatic, and no composer's works reflect it so decidedly as do Verdi's. The man and the musician went on in company. As he matured, so his art-work ripened. The three periods of his artistic career furnish a history of nineteenth-century operatic fashion and style.
While the most popular musician of the nineteenth century, he is, of all Italy's famous exponents of dramatic-musical art, indisputably the greatest. The land of song has produced many notable musicians, many wondrous melodists; but not one of them, not even Rossini, has so modified and influenced the national art as has Verdi. The entire extent of his impress will only be fully known when the Italians come to write their country's musical history. Verdi will be found to be the master who made Italian opera a grand national art-form, something of a social requirement in this closing nineteenth century.
To win a reputation such as belongs to Verdi, even if some discover it to be ephemeral only, is, indeed, a great achievement. Other pre-eminent musicians have laboured in every branch of their art—sacred and secular, vocal and instrumental, oratorio and opera, symphony and quartet, song and dance—with all which some of them have hardly become known during their lifetimes outside the range of their own country. There seems to be a profound musical problem here, but the solution is at hand. The greatest of the great composers were each and all before their time. Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and Schumann came in an age that was all unprepared for them. Verdi, on the other hand, whose phenomenal success is unlike theirs, was born at the moment. The musical world was waiting with open arms for him; for it had been satiated with opera music of a meretricious order, though written by his own countrymen, from which any deliverance could not fail to be a relief. The rescuer proved eventually to be Verdi.
Certain critics seem assured that Verdi copied, imitated, and transferred Bellini, Donizetti, Rossini, and other composers. If this be true, then, in a sense, they stand indebted to him; for Verdi is the best-heard Italian composer to-day. Verdi, however, was something more than a musical chef, with the knack of serving up the rechauffés of brother musicians.
The public, apt to be blamed for the majority of its judgments, made no mistake concerning Nabucco. Verdi's countrymen were "lifted along" by the magic music, and, from Nabucco to Falstaff—an unparalleled instance of consistent artistic unfolding—this distinct power of the master's has acted similarly upon thousands who have flocked to hear the Verdi operas. Their passion, fire, and strong dramatic character have proved irresistible.
The Milanese had heard Rossini, Mercadante, and Bellini to the full; of the melodious phrases of Donizetti they were already tiring, when, suddenly, a musician with rare force and passionate melodiousness came upon them. Donizetti, mainly through his melodic prolificness, had brought Italian grand opera to a level of triviality and mediocrity; Verdi, with his depth of feeling and breadth of melody, promised an exactly opposite musical manner. The public, ever ready for some new thing, seized hold, willing to stand by him only as long as he could stir and amuse them. This he has ever been able to do.
The natural qualities which characterise Verdi's music so decidedly, stamped his first work, as they mark his latest. The underlying secret of it all is furnished in the word Advance. It is not only Verdi's superior, or particular melody and harmony which operate; it is the common-sense, up-to-date way in which the composer has always regarded his subject. By intuition, he took a greater and a deeper view of Italian opera than any of his predecessors, and he went on advancing with the times. His countrymen had melody mainly at their pen-tips. Verdi used this and much more, and, while Wagner, for example, came along "great guns" with his German national opera, Verdi was proceeding to show that Italian grand opera could be brought to equal importance, musically and materially. Verdi, in his first work, unquestionably gave the lovers of opera something more than they had ever had before. That "something" was below the surface, and did not affect the outward forms so much as the hidden soul of the music. It was, however, discernible enough. In this direction mainly did Verdi's early operas differ from other Italian dramatic musical compositions. His later works, dating from Aïda, are illustrations of the new Italian national operatic art-form, which can never be surpassed, and will rarely be approached in Italy.
I Due Foscari, a colourless, tame work which followed Nabucco, did not enhance its composer's reputation. Of all Verdi's operas, it would be difficult to find one showing fewer traces of his undoubted steady development of style than this. Giovanna d'Arco, Alzira, Attila, Macbeth, I Masnadieri, Il Corsari, La Battaglia di Legnano, were all on the accepted Italian lines of Bellini and his predecessors; but in Luisa Miller there came a decided and suggestive advance. There was a greater heightening of the dramatic interest, while many of the vocal and instrumental combinations had never been equalled in Italian opera. Certainly, Verdi was already doing more than perpetuating the accepted Bellini-Donizetti method. It was yet early to give the world an Aïda; but Verdi, we shall believe, was feeling his way towards a more perfect Italian opera-form. What did the country's opera lack that was so distinctly a born quality in him? Dramatic fire, continuity, oneness of conception,—a whole, instead of a piecemeal dramatic-musical composition. The first strivings after this—a perfection that has been so undoubtedly attained in Verdi's most advanced operas—were apparent in Luisa Miller.