Therein the choruses are exceedingly attractive with their striking contrasts, while the brilliancy of, say the bravura, "Lo vedi," and the pathos and fire of other solos and concerted pieces, combine to produce a truly fine opera. Verdi has also so developed the situations and heightened the interest, that a climax of overwhelming effect is reached in the last act. The orchestration is replete with richness and variety. The whole style of Luisa Miller is musician-like to a degree, despite occasional reflections of his own and other men's compositions. The alleged defect of Luisa Miller was a lack of melody. None of the fervour and force that were heralded in Nabucco were wanting, but the composer's melodic vein appeared to be drying up! So thought the critics. Not quite! Verdi was contemplating greater things, and in a while was to step into a new plane of creative musical art. His first opera had been unrestrained melodic settings—after the Italian fashion—of morbid and gloomy stories. He was to curb all this; and what in Luisa Miller were merely indications of this change became realities in Rigoletto.
In a critical examination into Verdi's artistic development, Rigoletto occupies an important place. In it the composer, throwing off his early First style, adopts a less popular mould, which, while new in the history of Italian operatic art, was more characteristic of himself. As it has been well put—"Verdi is the rough, fiery composer no longer. Charm and grace are more to him now than mere noise and hubbub. In Rigoletto and Trovatore he gets rid of all that. Consequently we, who have often blamed him, have now only praise to bestow upon him—a change that he himself has brought about, and on which we congratulate him sincerely."[71]
This criticism describes exactly the situation. Not only was melodic exuberance stemmed in Rigoletto for a mixture of tune and recitative or musica parlante, but the orchestration had met a chastening process. While vocally the score was adjudged poor in melody and entirely deficient in pezzi concertanti, the orchestration was decidedly less noisy— its general character being uniformly calm and tranquil.
The Trovatore music is an excellent embodiment of Verdi's Second period style. It is less studied and more spontaneous than Rigoletto, but it sustains the advance in style. Uninviting as the libretto was, it had striking situations, with its black story and its gross improbabilities, which afforded Verdi scope for passionate expression and effect in more than one vivid scene. It found the people's favour immediately, and continues to hold audiences, despite the dinning suggestions that it is "not popular," "is dying out," and should be "placed on the retired list."
Though the public stamped Il Trovatore with the imprimatur of its approval, it did not altogether please the critics. There has ever been an endeavour to depreciate the opera, probably because so vast a success was gained by such simple means. Thus it has been described as "from beginning to end a direct plagiarism of Beethoven,"[72] as if such a charge could be sustained either to the discredit of Verdi, or to the credit of the Bonn master. Notwithstanding censorship, the work has proved one of those few operas that have been "the rage" all over Europe, and we repeat it still possesses the power to charm and attract large, if not fashionable, audiences. Yet, what a span divides it from Otello! No two of the master's works show his change and development of style more distinctly than these operas. To say nothing about conception and construction, the vocal and instrumental music in one and the other is as removed as a storm is from the rippling of a rivulet. The two works have to be heard in the same week—as they were at Covent Garden during the 1895 season with the hidden orchestra—to realise and appreciate rightly, the mighty step (especially in the instrumental department) between the two operas. La Traviata foreshadowed something of what was to be accomplished in Aïda, Otello, and Falstaff. There was the familiar appeal to the popular ear, through that never-failing and ever-welcome channel—melody; and the construction was similar to the Trovatore; the treatment orchestrally and vocally, if curtailed and controlled, being much after the old Verdinian manner. There was undoubtedly a lessening of excessiveness, due more to the melancholy nature of the book probably, than to a striving for a fresh style.
Basevi, the Italian critic, has thus written of La Traviata: "It is a composition which, by the quality of the characters, by the nature of its sentiment, by the want of spectacle, bears semblance to a comedy. Verdi has discovered a third manner, which in several points resembles the French method of the Opéra Comique. This style of music, although it has not been tried on the stage in Italy, is, however, not unknown in private circles. In these latter years, we have seen Luigi Gordigiani and Fabio Campana making themselves known principally in this style of music, called da camera. Verdi with his Traviata has transported this chamber-music on to the stage, and with happy success, to which the subject he has chosen well lends itself. We meet with more simplicity in this work than in the others of the same composer, especially as regards the orchestra, where the quartet of stringed instruments is almost always predominant; the parlanti occupy a greater part of the score; we meet with several of those airs which repeat under the form of verses; and, finally, the principal vocal subjects are, for the most part, developed in short binary and tertiary movements, and have not in general the extension which the Italian style demands."[73]
That the music indicates another and Third style in Verdi's musical manner we prefer to forget; such a classification would need to rest upon this single score, and would involve us in a Fourth style, if we wished to classify the operas of the composer's closing years. Three periods in which to locate Verdi's art-progress and work are quite sufficient. Wagner was yet not influencing Verdi! No one will doubt that its music gave the opera its permanent position. Not only the nervous débutante, but every prima donna has seen in the character of Violetta a rôle admitting of the finest touches and varied emotions which a leading lady can be called upon to express in the exercise of her art. From the day when Piccolomini roused the excited habitués of Mr. Lumley's house to a fever enthusiasm, a long list of singers—including a Patti, Nilsson, and Albani—have studied and played the part with varying advantage and delight, and whatever the verdict has been, the grace and charm of the music has always commanded the admiration of opera-singers, whether soli or chorus. And vocalists are as a rule better judges than are reporters and critics of what music should be.
Notwithstanding criticisms, good, bad, and indifferent, the fact remains that La Traviata, like Il Trovatore, is still with us; and although we have long been warned that it is "declining in popularity, like other operas of its period,"[74] it defers its final departure! Why does the music continue to please the public?—the uneducated section let us say. How is it that the cantatrice and queen of song loves the part still? The answer is found in the natural and graceful character of Verdi's music, and in nothing else. To us it has always seemed a more original and satisfactory opera than Il Trovatore. More equal throughout in quality, it contains some of the most touching natural music that has ever been heard from the opera stage.
Spontaneous beauty and brilliant period were not wanting in Les Vêpres Siciliennes, or in Un Ballo in Maschera, albeit the master-mind appears disturbed. No Italian opera music could be more thoroughly Verdi's than the numbers, "Giorno di Pianto," a reflection of the Donna è mobile canzone, and "Ma se m'e forza perderti" romanza in Les Vêpres Siciliennes and Un Ballo in Maschera respectively.
As has been already suggested, in La Forza del Destino and Don Carlos came unmistakable traces of a change in Verdi's manner. Although in these operas his habit of portraying human passions at their strongest pitch—in their noblest and sometimes their basest moods—still remains, Verdi's mature or Third period works embody to the fullest extent all that was generating in his mind nine years previously. Aïda in form and conception is clearly based upon La Forza del Destino and Don Carlos. Strikingly successful as the master has been with his First and Second period operas, they were not productions that reflected the fullest power of the high-minded musician. Profitable financially they had indeed proved to their composer; but they did not take Italian art one great step onwards. Verdi was keenly sensible of this. The desire to achieve something that would really advance his country's art taking possession of him, therefore, and what was more, finding grand, speedy expression at a time of life when most successful men seek repose—all this was, indeed, most admirable and artist-like.