All told, there is ample evidence in this first great work of Verdi's Third period to show that the composer is still wholly himself. That faculty, which was particularly Verdi's, of expressing extreme emotion, and of raising his audience to the highest pitches of sensational excitement, is present, notably in the finale of the second act. Then the composer's old command of melodious imagery and pathos, together with the expression of varied and conflicting passions, stamp the work from beginning to end—the love duet in the second act, between soprano and tenor, a romance in the third act, a soprano and contralto duet, a quartet and chorus, and all the music, from the consecration of Radamès down to his victorious return with Aïda's captive father, being particularly Verdinian. Even the composer's supposed weaknesses are present in Aïda. The whole subject is melodramatic; the principal characters are killed, as usual; his alleged morbid preference for dismal dirge-music finds ample vent in the funeral of the lovers, and other tragic parts of the opera; from beginning to end can be heard melodic suggestions recalling the old familiar operas. All this, and page after page of imaginative, fancy tone-painting, Aïda contains, and yet we have been asked to believe that it is not Verdi!
The student of comparative musical science will see in Otello a further development of style. The composer confirms Aïda, and while further stultifying the detractory criticism passed on Aïda, furnishes ample proof of a marvellous vitality, and a freshness and originality, with depth of learning, which his greatest of admirers could scarcely have expected. Even with Aïda thrown in (as a sort of operatic abnormalism) many still regarded Verdi as the mere seductive, melodramatic Italian melodist; the profound musician never. Otello settled matters. The majesty, power, inspiration, and learning, the command of theoretical device, and orchestral technique, were overwhelming. Nobody expected it from Italy, still less from Verdi. Quite a surprise! Here was a work wherein all the lights and shades of human passion were depicted with a truthfulness and reality which no living musician could equal. The greatest of the world's poets and dramatists was set in a fashion to dispute which, or to disparage, would be useless. There could be no other conclusion, and whether performed in Italy, France, or in England, one opinion only has been possible as to the Otello music. This must be held to be a great triumph for the justly famed, though long abused, musician, especially when, as we contend, this perfected art-style is Verdi's own—the man's musical genius, characteristics, and great learning at their highest pitch, uninfluenced, unaffected (save in that legitimate manner which experience brings) by any foreign composer or school. The developed mind and man in Verdi's case gives us the splendid spectacle of the developed musician, particularly en evidence in Otello. If we delight to watch the growth and ripening of Verdi's genius from Oberto, Conte di S. Bonifacio, to the Missa di Requiem, we can become still more interested in pondering over the nuova maniera which marked Aïda, a manner which is heightened in the Otello masterpiece, and accentuated in Falstaff.
Otello is a perfectly modern opera, thoroughly up-to-date in design, material, and construction. Of its four acts, the last is distinctly the most masterly; the second being a little inferior to the third. The initial act is marked with Verdi's matured manner less than either of the others. Though somewhat fragmentary in places, the opera holds together with perfect homogeneity, and it must be regarded as a wholly uninfluenced score, more so than Aïda. The "Love duet" and Iago's "Credo" are the only pieces in the opera that recall Wagner, and they have too much of the Verdi and the intensely Italian about them to be mistaken. No! Otello is an opera which only an Italian could write; a work which will always rank as a brilliant example of latest Italian grand-opera. In advanced thought and reasoning, together with depth of learning and exercise of the declamatory branch of vocal art, it is somewhat superior to Aïda, but it is doubtful whether it will ever become as popular, because it lacks the glorious picturesqueness and inspiration of that grand work.
Had Verdi's career ended with Otello there would have been no difficulty in determining his place—a very forward one—in the world's history, and notably in the world of dramatic music. With the production of Falstaff, however, the wonderful vitality, resource, and inspiration of the giant mind broke out afresh, bewildering everybody concerning the art-possibilities that were still in store behind the more than octogenarian composer. It is the swan-song perhaps of the illustrious master, and a great song it indeed is. To think that such a score should be the easy pleasurable outcome of the brain of a man bordering upon his eightieth year was, at the time, one of the most extraordinary features in connection with the production of Falstaff, and the fact will ever stand amongst remarkable efforts in musical annals. Il Trovatore is a monument of melody, a standing example of what passionate tune can be and is as an element of art; Otello was an extraordinary development in breadth of style and usage, vocal and instrumental; but Falstaff surpassed all. It sums up all that is best in Verdi's musical mind and method, and will ever serve as a standard of Italian national art, nemine dissentiente. It is the most brilliant, the most masterly, of all his operatic productions. Gorgeous in its wealth of invention and consummate skill, it places Verdi on his highest artistic pedestal. Like Aïda and Otello it is pre-eminently a musician's work, and shows the widened style of the composer, which used to be regarded as a Wagner imitation more than either of its predecessors. With all its delightful, unceasing humour the work does not appeal readily to the popular mind, the fact being that to understand and enjoy it the taste must be educated. Like Wagner's operas, Falstaff is a score that taxes the critical sense, and the more musical and highly cultivated the listener is, the more will Verdi's latest music command attention. Nor does this mean that the opera will not live. On the contrary, as musical knowledge becomes more and more spread, Falstaff and Otello, the advanced handiwork of Verdi, will prove to be music of a far more satisfactory nature than that luxuriant passionate sort which abounds in Trovatore, Traviata, and other young Italy operas.
If the music of Falstaff proved a revelation to those who first heard it, it was also a revolution. Nobody had ever credited Verdi with the preponderating quality in this opera; it was Mozart come to life again! The humanity of the man who had ever depicted the morbid, treacherous, worst-passioned natures was suddenly reflected in the light-hearted, innocent frolic of youth, music as light and babbling as a child's speech. All that was so cheerful in Le Nozze di Figaro, the fun of the Barbiere di Siviglia, with much of the Verdi characteristic, shot out in Falstaff in a way that simply electrified the musical world. The tragic, melodramatic Verdi was no more: in his place stood the exalted, the chastened master of art. No other composer had ever made such a change of front, a change that brought him on good terms with the whole musical world. Falstaff was indeed a new apocalypse. Perhaps the most striking feature of the Falstaff music after its jovialness is its consistent character—one of high quality and finely detailed workmanship. It is not a case of sandwiching a good tune, dramatic chorus, or an overwhelming ensemble, between a mass of meagre indifferent writing, but from first to last the music is of a most elevated, high-pitched order—tune, harmony, scholarship, ensemble—these abound; but the whole is so well balanced and dexterously planned, as to make the opera a delightful study for the theatrical musician as well as for the careless listener. As has been well said, "Falstaff is not a mere string of pretty tunes, ensembles, and choruses of every-day pattern, but a colossal work, a mass of intricacy, such as musicians alone can dive into and comprehend whilst uncultivated listeners can yet find enchantment upon the surface. For to the cunning of a Wagner has here been allied the simplicity of a Mozart."
Undoubtedly Falstaff is the most remarkable example of the master's genius, and when we reflect that while it was being evolved there was a gaping world, with ears all open, waiting to learn how much of Wagner would resolve into Verdi, it becomes truly astonishing that its composer has steered so clear of any appreciable influence or model. It is the unaided work of the one master-hand. Assuming that Verdi has anywhere imitated Wagner, then in Falstaff the Italian is certainly further removed from the German than in any other of his operas. There is hardly a recurring theme in the whole opera; and the everchanging, constantly varying tints of emotional expression, the brilliant ensembles, the ingeniously contrived pieces, where three and more rhythms are expressing chattering views and sentiments at one and the same time; beautiful solo pieces, duets, and notably an accompanied quartet—all these, and the highly dramatic and well-judged finales, have no more to do with Wagner, or any other composer save Verdi, than they have with Homer. As a whole, Falstaff is an astounding masterpiece. In form, construction, scholarship, and musicianly result, it is the finest opera Verdi, or any Italian, has written. Its vocal and instrumental play and device are such as were never thought to be in Verdi, and, like its two immediate predecessors, it places Verdi in the first rank of the world's operatic composers. Falstaff must ever be regarded as a wondrous specimen of humorous music, constructed upon perfectly legitimate and classical lines. No nobler work could crown an artist's life-efforts; no other work shows so well the advanced and chastened style of Verdi's Third and matured period. Falstaff, as a creation, has immortalised Verdi. It has done more. Finem respice! It has saved artistic Italy in this fin de siècle age. This last work of Verdi's furnishes the culminating point in the history of Italian opera.
How then can the punishment which Verdi received at the hands of his first English musical critics be explained? How came it that a composer, who had lovingly placed many splendid tributes upon the high altar of his art, was so estimated, by at least one responsible critic, as to merit severe castigation of such a character as this:—
"Signor Verdi is the one prophet of Italian opera, and since this paragraph was penned, the waning of the coarse light of his star is pretty distinctly to be observed. It is hardly possible to imagine his violence outdone by any successors; yet this would seem to be the law of Italian movement in such shows of art as are to be popular."[77]
Thirty and forty years ago, music here was hardly deemed worthy of criticism in newspaper columns, albeit a journal here and there—the Athenæum, for instance—recognised the art. If, however, there were then few musical representatives of the English Press, the disadvantage appears to have been atoned for by the character of the criticisms. Some few of the musical scribes deigned to notice, and were deemed capable of considering, Verdi. These began, from the first, to hunt him à outrance, neither discerning nor expecting any good from the Italian. Never was there a more abused man than Verdi. If "best things are moulded out of faults," then to distinguish "faults" in such a musical renegade was out of the question. The whole was, according to certain critics, hopelessly unregenerate!
"Verdi's career in this country has been curiously chequered. If artistical anathemas could have annihilated his fame, then would he have long since ceased to have been heard of; but he appears to enjoy a cat-like vitality amongst our amateurs. Never was there one of his works produced, either at Her Majesty's Theatre or at the Royal Italian Opera, but he received a terrific castigation from criticisers, and the musical public were assured, after these awful denunciations of indignant journalism at the performance of such 'unmitigated trash,' that the name of Verdi could be no more uttered in this musical metropolis. And yet the thus extinguished composer—on paper—the very next season was sure to be brought forward in the shape of a revival of one of his 'failures,' or in the representation of his latest continental novelty. What then is the key to this anomalous state of things, wherein it is found that Verdi's defenders, amongst writers, are so few, and his partisans still more rare, and still Verdi is not shelved? Is it that amongst opera frequenters there is a fiat in his favour, which is sufficiently strong to maintain his name in the repertory? Or is it that the general body of amateurs feel that the dead-set against the only composer left in Italy is based on prejudice, intolerance, and injustice?