Giuseppe Verdi

Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901) wrote operas for 50 years and became Italy's defining cultural figure — so associated with national identity that when he died, the new Italian state paid for a state funeral in Milan that drew an estimated 300,000 people. He came from nothing: born in Le Roncole, near Parma, the son of an innkeeper, not trained in a conservatory, dependent on patronage and luck to build a career. His early operas failed repeatedly. His third opera, Nabucco (1842), was the breakthrough — and the chorus of Hebrew slaves (the Va, pensiero) became an unofficial anthem of Italian nationalism almost immediately.

The middle Verdi period — Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, La Traviata, all written between 1851 and 1853 — is as concentrated a run of masterpieces as any composer has produced. Each is built around an impossible situation and a great human predicament: the cursed court jester, the love across class lines complicated by a missing brother, the courtesan who loves sincerely and is destroyed anyway. Verdi knew his audience, and his audience knew him.

The late period — Aida, Otello, Falstaff, and the revised Simon Boccanegra — is different in character: larger in scope, more psychologically complex, scored with an authority that suggests a man who had nothing left to prove. Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893) were written when Verdi was 74 and 80 respectively, and they show no falling off — they show a composer who was still finding new things to do with the form he'd defined.

StyleItalian opera at its most direct and powerful. Clear vocal lines, strong dramatic structure, ensembles that build rather than merely decorate. Moral landscape is simple; human complexity is not.

Listen: Start with La Traviata, then Otello (the second act duet alone is worth it), then Falstaff if you want to see how comedy works at 80.