The Life of Verdi (review)

The Life of Verdi. By John Rosselli. (Musical Lives.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. [x, 204 p. ISBN 0-521-66011-4 (cloth); 0-521-66957-X (pbk.). $49.95 (cloth); $17.95 (pbk.).]

The spirit of John Rosselli's biography, issued just in time for the centenary of the composer's death, hearkens back nearly a half century to Frank Walker's exemplary The Man Verdi (New York: Knopf; London: Dent, 1962; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). Walker provided an exceptionally solid portrayal of Giuseppe Verdi the individual, although he focused on only a half-dozen core issues in his life. More than any other English-language biographer since that time, Rosselli interprets the man Verdi anew, with information drawn from the wealth of research produced in the last decades. It is all the more remarkable that this slender volume paints a broader picture than Walker's, judiciously balancing issues of historical biography, stylistic assessment of selected works, reception history, and analysis of recent research.

Rosselli is well qualified to write about Verdi, having authored several important studies that examine the cultural milieu of nineteenth-century Italian opera. It comes as no surprise that one of the strong points of this new volume is the placement of Verdi's life and works in the broader context of ottocento culture. Rosselli focuses, in particular, on a group of cultural issues that shifted drastically during the course of Verdi's career and that, in turn, profoundly affected it. These include a new conception of the opera composer as an artist rather than a craftsman, an increasing preference for repertory works rather than new or recent operas, and upheavals in the music publishing industry, with the gradual adoption of international copyright and a royalty-based payment system rather than a flat fee per work. The volume also offers an excellent discussion of Verdi's relationship to the censorship issue in various regions of Italy and how it changed after the revolutions of 1848.

Rosselli's treatment differs vastly from that of the most recent major English-language biography of the composer, Mary Jane Phillips-Matz's sprawling Verdi: A Biography (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), which runs the risk of drowning the reader in a plethora of details packed tightly into its nearly one thousand pages. Rosselli's new volume offers a polar opposite, paring down biographical discussion to main essentials while providing a clear sense of connecting themes. Verdi emerges as a bold visionary who transformed musical and theatrical conventions, astutely assimilating, shaping, and developing stylistic and philosophical trends through his innate passion for drama. He is shown to be a shrewd businessman in the management of his musical career and his landed estates, and a cultural icon in his later years, promoting theatrical and educational reforms that eventually took root and blossomed in the decades following his death. The frequent peppering of colorful, short quotes from the composer's correspondence adds to the vivid portrayal of his complex personality. The new volume also differs from Julian Budden's study for the Master Musicians series (London: Dent, 1985; rev. ed., 1993; reprint, New York: Schirmer Books, 1996), another recent English-language biography, by fully integrating a discussion of the music within the biographical narrative rather than treating it as a separate entity, and by focusing on unique or outstanding features of a few seminal works rather than detailed overviews of entire compositions.

While Rosselli incorporates much recent research on the composer, he does not present it uncritically. He takes issue, for example, with the suggestion by Phillips-Matz that Verdi's adopted daughter Filomena was actually his natural daughter; with the overall tenor of Birgit Pauls's Giuseppe Verdi und das Risorgimento: Ein politischer Mythos im Prozeß der Nationenbildung (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1996), which challenges the role of Verdi's music in the Italian Risorgimento; and with Edward Said's interpretation of Aïda as an orientalist opera. Rosselli also tackles the difficult issue presented by...