The Operas of Giuseppe Verdi by Abramo Basevi (review)

Verdian studies are enriched by the recent translation of Abramo Basevi’s Studio sulle opere di Giuseppe Verdi (Firenze: Tofani, 1859) into English by Edward Schneider and Stefano Castelvecchi as The Operas of Giuseppe Verdi. The Schneider–Castelvecchi edition, the first complete translation from the Italian since Basevi first published his “analytic criticism” 154 years ago, brings a most important source on Verdi’s operas to English-speaking readers—scholars and aficionados alike.

The Operas of Giuseppe Verdi offers twenty-first-century readers analyses of Verdi’s operas by a passionate and articulate music critic and aesthetician in nineteenth-century Florence, Abramo Basevi. Basevi chronologically organizes his opera analyses as twenty book chapters, with one chapter per opera, beginning with “Nabucodonosor” and concluding with “Aroldo,” and then bookends them with a preface and a conclusion. Stefano Castelvecchi illuminates Basevi’s life and work in his editor’s introduction, which includes a short biography, a guide to the Studio, an analysis of his critical approach, and a glossary of terms known to nineteenth-century readers (along with a few terms unique to Basevi’s “idiolect”) (p. xxv) that are perhaps less familiar to today’s students of Verdi.

In his introduction, Castelvecchi presents three compelling features of the Studio: (1) an author who possesses exemplary credentials as a music critic, (2) analyses that pioneered a high “degree of technical detail” (p. x), and (3) cultural insight, both general and operatic, supported by Basevi’s extensive knowledge of the operatic repertoire. Castelvecchi gives a short biographical sketch that portrays Basevi as a comprehensive scholar, with intellectual interests that ran the gamut from medicine to philosophy, and an impresario and music entrepreneur whose varied roles included music critic, music journal founder and editor, event organizer, musical society founder, and founder of and advisor to the Liceo Musicale (which became the present Conservatorio di Musica Luigi Cherubini and to which he donated his extensive library, called the Fondo Basevi).

Perhaps the highlight of Castelvecchi’s introduction is his explanation of Basevi’s analytical method, called “critica analitica” (“analytic criticism”) (pp. xx and 8). This method is based upon a “concrete, practical relationship with music,” writes Castelvecchi (p. xx). The editor continues by asserting that Basevi is far more technical than other critics of his time, breaking down a whole work into its parts in something of a “play-by-play” approach. Reconstructing these pieces is akin to a “paratactic” process, in which parts are organized into larger sections. Here Castelvecchi explains that Basevi’s method, defined by “the nature of the musical material” (p. xxi), has its limits. Its success lies in its organic approach to sections of the opera, but it is less effective at the global level. This is because the thing that unifies each individual opera is not a musical idea but rather an overarching dramatic character, or “tinta.”

Basevi himself addresses his analytical approach to Verdi’s operas in the preface to his Studio: “Because music comes into being in a concrete, individual way each time it takes form in a composition, and in this individual form functions as an organism, the type of criticism I deem necessary above all is analytic criticism—the only type that, as a form of inquiry into music’s ‘anatomy,’ can lead us to the study of its ‘physiology’ ” (pp. 8–9). Basevi appropriated terms and concepts from his medical training— “anatomy” and “physiology”—to describe his analytical approach to each individual opera. By “anatomy” and “analysis,” Basevi conveys his concern for the “minutest details” (p. 9), which allow each opera to stand on its own terms as an organic musical entity. “Physiology” and “synthesis” refer to the inverse process of putting the details together into larger sections, a process that he uses only where it functions as a natural conclusion of his analysis.

Basevi devotes...