Verdi Onstage in the United States: I Lombardi alla prima crociata

Though Verdi's fourth opera, I Lombardi alla prima crociata (The Lombards on the First Crusade),was his first to be staged in the United States, in New York on 3 March 1847, it was preceded in the city on at least three occasions by excerpts sung in concerts. And the earliest of these, on 12 May 1846, was possibly the first public performance of Verdi's music in the United States. At the city's Apollo Theatre, the Italian artist Rosina Pico, just back from Havana, where Verdi's Ernani and I Lombardi recently had received their hemispheric premieres, introduced the composer to New York audiences by singing "Ernani involami" and, from the last act of I Lombardi, Giselda's ecstatic assertion that a vision of her beloved in paradise was not a dream, "Non fu sogno!" ¹

Pico sang the Lombardi aria again on 20 May in Castle Garden, at a grand concert of the New York Philharmonic that was widely reviewed because in its second part it presented the U.S. premiere of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. To precede the symphony, the Philharmonic offered three overtures, a piano concerto, and three operatic arias, two by Donizetti and one by Verdi. Despite the program's length, Pico with "Non fu sogno!" was reported to have "sung gloriously" and won "a rapturous encore"—though the New York lawyer George Templeton Strong, who was present and "sadly disappointed" in the symphony, described the arias in his diary as merely "some tolerabiles ineptia from Verdi and Donizetti." ²

The other selection from I Lombardi sung in public before the opera's premiere was the "conversion" trio for soprano, tenor, and bass that closes act 3, "Qui posa il fianco" (Here set yourself down). A young Muslim prince, dying and in love with Giselda, a Christian, for her sake converts and is baptized by a hermit with water from the River Jordan. A solo violin introduces the scene with a miniature concerto—opening statement, three tiny movements, and coda—and, even after the voices enter, the violin continues to interject its message of hope and salvation. In the United States, this trio would surpass even the Crusaders' famous chorus of lament, "O Signore dal tetto natio," as the opera's most frequently excerpted number. ³

Its first public performance here apparently was in New York, on 7 January 1847, at a farewell concert given by the Austrian-French composer and pianist Henri Herz. The newspapers, of course, focused their reports on the pianist, leaving unstated whether the trio was presented entire or shorn of its violin introduction. Even Herz's part of the program, however, was mostly operatic. In addition to his popular grand fantasia based on Lucia di Lammermoor and his variations on "The Last Rose of Summer," he introduced two new fantasies on Semiramide and I Puritani,and with fifteen other pianists onstage thumped out an eight-piano, thirty-two-handed version of the overture to William Tell. ⁴

The premiere of I Lombardi,staged by a group of Italian singers led by Antonio Sanquirico, their basso buffo, followed on 3 March at Palmo's Opera House, one of New York's smaller theaters, which seated about 1,100. A former public bath, it stood on Chambers Street facing City Hall Park. Its reconstructed interior, though horseshoe-shaped, was unpretentious: only eight boxes, four to a side and close to the stage, a parquet (or orchestra floor), a raised parquet circle, and a balcony, all with plain boards for seats, uncushioned and without arms. Though the seats were numbered, the numbers were placed too close, so that a bench, when filled, held fewer people than numbered seats, and likely much of the seating was treated as unreserved. The house was lit by gas chandeliers designed to resemble candles and, like candles, they could not be dimmed; the stage had a drop curtain...