Giuseppe verdi biography summary form

More than 150 years after his death, the works of Giuseppe Verdi form a major part of today’s opera repertoire. The Drinking Song from La traviata, The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves from Nabucco and ‘La Donna è mobile’ from Rigoletto are as well known in popular culture as they are in the world of opera. Father and daughter relationships are a recurrent theme in his work, as are the subjects of injustice, oppression and religious hypocrisy. A profoundly serious man, his final opera was a brilliant comedy. Verdi liked to give the impression that he came from a peasant background. However, he benefited hugely from an ambitious, middle-class father, who arranged music lessons and many other opportunities for him. Verdi began his education before he was four. When he was seven, his father bought him a spinet. By the age of nine, young Giuseppe was the resident organist at the church of San Michele, Roncole. Aged ten, he moved to Busseto to further his education. From 1831, he lodged at the home of Antonio Barezzi, a successful merchant and keen amateur musician. There he gave singing and piano lessons to Barezzi’s daughter Margherita. Barezzi sponsored his further musical studies in Milan before Verdi returned to Busseto in 1836 as maestro di musica. In the same year, he married Margherita, and they soon had two children. Tragically, Verdi’s children died in infancy, and his wife died soon after, leaving him distraught. With his personal life shattered and his professional life disrupted by grief, he turned his focus to composing opera. Verdi’s first opera, Oberto, conte di San Bonifacio, had achieved a modest success in Milan in 1839. On the basis of this, he was commissioned to write three operas for La Scala. The first, Un giorno di regno (1840), was a flop, but his follow-up, Nabucco (1842), was such a sensation that Verdi had a stream of new commissions. By 1853 he had written sixteen new operas. These include many of his most popular works, such as Mac

Giuseppe Verdi, (born Oct. 9/10, 1813, Roncole, near Busseto, duchy of Parma—died Jan. 27, 1901, Milan, Italy), Italian composer. He was the son of an innkeeper, and he showed talent early. While earning a living as an organist, he began to write operas in Milan; in 1839 his Oberto was successfully performed at La Scala, and it initiated Verdi’s long association with the publisher Giulio Ricordi. His next opera, Un giorno di regno (1840), was a failure. Much worse, Verdi’s two young daughters and his wife died. He overcame his despair by composing Nabucco (1842); it was a sensational success and was followed by the equally successful I Lombardi (1843). For the rest of the decade he wrote a hit opera every year.

Rejecting the prevailing structure of Italian opera—a patchwork of open-ended scenes and inserted arias, duets, and trios—he began conceiving of an opera as a series of integrated scenes, then as unified acts. Specializing in stories in which people’s private and public lives come into conflict, he produced a series of masterworks, including Rigoletto (1851), Il trovatore (1853), La traviata (1853), Don Carlos (1867), and Aïda (1871).

A fervent nationalist, he was regarded as a great national figure. After composing his Requiem (1874), he retired, but when Ricordi brought him together with the poet and composer Arrigo Boito, initially to revise Simon Boccanegra, their mutual esteem led to the two great operas of Verdi’s old age, Otello (1886) and Falstaff (1890).

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Giuseppe Verdi summary". Encyclopedia Britannica, 29 Apr. 2021, https://www.britannica.com/summary/Giuseppe-Verdi. Accessed 13 July 2023.

We are grateful to Pierluigi Petrobelli, president of the Learned Committee of the National Institute of Verdi Studies and “Knight of Verdi” - nominated by the Club of 27 of Parma - for kindly allowing us to publish his biography of Giuseppe Verdi.

Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901)

Born at Le Roncole, near Busseto (Province of Parma), on 9 or 10 October 1813, to an innkeeper and a spinner, Verdi showed musical talent early on, as the inscription on his spinet bears witness: Cavalletti, a harpsichord-maker, repaired the instrument free of charge, “seeing the good willingness that the boy Giuseppe Verdi has for learning to play this instrument.” He owed his cultural and humanistic education mainly to his frequenting of the well-endowed library of Busseto's Jesuit School, which still exists.

Ferdinando Provesi, the local bandmaster, taught him the rudiments of musical composition and instrumental techniques, but it was in Milan that his personality was formed.

Although he was not accepted at the Milan Conservatory (because he was over the age limit), for three years he mastered counterpoint technique as a student of Vincenzo Lavigna, former maestro al cembalo at La Scala. At the same time, frequenting Milan's opera houses allowed him to become familiar, first hand, with the contemporary opera repertoire.

The Milanese atmosphere, influenced by the Austrian occupation, also permitted him to become familiar with the classical Viennese repertoire, especially the string quartet repertoire. His relationships with the aristocracy and contacts within the theater world were also decisive for the young composer's future: he would not dedicate himself to sacred music, as a church music master, or to instrumental music, but instead almost exclusively to music for the theater.

His first opera began life as Rocester (1837), had a long gestation period, and was then transformed into Oberto, Conte di San Bonifacio; it was first performed on 17 November 1839, a