As Verdi settled into middle age and domestic happiness, he began slowing down the pace of production. But there was much, much more to come from Italy’s greatest opera composer.
The early 1850s marked a watershed in both Verdi’s career and his life. The success of Rigoletto (1851), Il Trovatore (The Troubadour) and (after an initial hiccup) La Traviata (both 1853) made his position unassailable at the summit of Italian opera. Now at his peak the widowed Verdi settled down with his mistress Giuseppina Strepponi on an estate near Busseto. This provoked a scandal in the provincial town, but Verdi was unperturbed by a rebuke from his late wife’s father, and dark mutterings by the townsfolk. The couple lived here happily until her death nearly half a century later.
Verdi (seated) with Giuseppina Strepponi (second from left) and friends at Sant’ Agata.
A life beyond the theatre
Verdi relished his new role as a gentleman farmer, and he balanced its demands with those of his musical activities. This resulted in a marked winding down from the extraordinary pace he had kept up during the decade following the success of Nabucco in 1842 – having created 16 operas in 11 years. These were what Verdi later described as his ‘years in the galley’, and he was happy to put them behind him.
French connection
Verdi was now an international figure and much in demand by theatres outside Italy. In particular, the Paris Opéra was keen to recruit him and he – for large fees – was willing to turn his hand to the sumptuous ‘grand’ operas that were now all the rage there. This necessitated lengthy spells in Paris, and in fulfilment of other commissions Verdi went further afield to St. Petersburg, London and Madrid. He also occupied himself during the 1850s and ’60s with revising earlier operas, and then finally with preparing those that had been commissioned abroad for the Italian stage. When Aida, which was first performed in Cairo in 1871 to mark the opening of the Suez Canal, was presented in Naples two years later, the 60-year-old composer seemed quite content to bring down the curtain on an unparalleled career. In the same year he composed a string quartet, followed in 1874 by his famous Messa da Requiem, but of new opera projects there was not so much as a murmur.
Final flowering
For the remainder of the decade Verdi busied himself with his estate, while making occasional forays abroad to supervise productions of his work. Then in 1879 came the musical miracle – Verdi was lured out of retirement to collaborate with the librettist Boito on two Shakespearean operas, Otello (1887) and finally his comic masterpiece Falstaff, which was brought triumphantly to the stage in 1893, in the composer’s 80th year.