[119] Walter Niemann: Die Musik seit Richard Wagner, Berlin, 1914.
CHAPTER XIII
VERDI AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES
Verdi’s mission in Italian opera—His early life and education—His first operas and their political significance—His second period: the maturing of his style—Crowning achievements of his third period—His contemporaries.
I
One can hardly imagine the art of music being what it is to-day without Bach or Mozart or Beethoven, without Monteverdi or Gluck or Wagner. It has been said that great men sum up an epoch and inaugurate one. Janus-like, they look at once behind and before, with glances that survey comprehensively all that is past and pierce prophetically the dim mists of the future. Unmistakably they point the way to the seekers of new paths; down through the ages rings the echo of their guiding voice in the ears of those who follow. So much is this so that the world has come to measure a man’s greatness by the extent of his influence on succeeding generations. The test has been applied to Wagner and stamps him unequivocally as one of the great; but a rigid application of the same test would seem to exclude from the immortal ranks the commanding figure of his distinguished contemporary, Giuseppe Verdi.
Yet, while it is still perhaps too early to ascertain Verdi’s ultimate place in musical history, there are few to-day who would deny to him the title of great. Undoubtedly he is the most prominent figure in Italian music since Palestrina. The musical history of his country for half a century is almost exclusively the narrative of his remarkable individual achievement. Nevertheless, when he passed away, leaving to an admiring world a splendid record of artistic accomplishment, there remained on the musical soil of Italy no appreciable traces of his passage. He founded no school; he left no disciples, no imitators. Of all the younger Italians who aspired to inherit his honored mantle there is not one in whom we can point to any specific signs of his influence. Even his close friend and collaborator, Boïto, was drawn from his side by the compelling magnetism of the creator of Tristan. Some influence, of course, must inevitably have emanated from him; but it was no greater apparently than that exercised even by mediocre artistic personalities upon those with whom they come immediately in contact. It is curious to note, in contrast, the influence on the younger Italians of Ponchielli, a lesser genius, and one is inclined to wonder why ‘the noblest Roman of them all’ inspired no one to follow in his footsteps.
The reason, however, is not far to seek. Verdi was no innovator, no explorer of fresh fields. He had not the passionate desire that Wagner had for a new and more adequate form of expression. The fierce contempt for conventional limitations so common to genius in all ages was unknown to him. Verdi was temperamentally the most bourgeois of great artists. He was conservative, prudent, practical, and self-contained. The appearance of eccentricity was distasteful to him. He had a proper respect for established traditions and no ambition to overturn them. The art forms he inherited appeared to him quite adequate to his purposes, and in the beginning of his career he seems to have had no greater desire than to imitate the dramatic successes of Rossini, Mercadante, and Bellini. His growth was perfectly natural, spontaneous, unconscious. He towered above his predecessors because he was altogether a bigger man—more intelligent, more intense, more sincere, and more vital. He was not conscious of the need for a more logical art form than the Italian opera of his time, and unquestioningly he poured his inspiration into the conventional molds; but as time went on his sure dramatic instinct unconsciously shaped these into a vehicle suitable to the expression of his genius. It thus became the real mission of Verdi to develop and synthesize into a homogeneous art form the various contradictory musical and dramatic influences to which he fell heir; and, having done that, his work was finished, nor was there anything left for another to add.
The influences which Verdi inherited were sufficiently complex. The ideals of Gluck and Mozart were strangely diluted by Rossini with the inanities of the concert-opera school, of which Sacchini, Paesiello, Jommelli, and Cimarosa were leading exponents. Il Barbiere, it is true, is refreshingly Mozartian and Tell is infused with the romantic spirit of Weber and Auber; but even these are not entirely free from the vapidity of the Neapolitans. With Rossini’s followers, Bellini, Donizetti, and Mercadante, Italian opera shows retrogression rather than advance, though Norma is obviously inspired by Tell and La Favorita is not lacking in traces of Meyerbeer. The truth is that Italian opera during the first few decades of the nineteenth century was suffering from an epidemic of anæmia. It was not devoid of spontaneity, of inspiration, of facile grace; but it was languid and lackadaisical; it was like the drooping society belle of the period, with her hothouse pallor, her tight corsets and fainting spells and smelling salts. To save it from degenerating into imbecility there was necessary the advent of an unsophisticated personality dowered with robust sincerity, with full-blooded force and virility. And fortunately just such a savior appeared in the person of Giuseppe Verdi.