Giuseppe Verdi

I was born at Le Roncole near Busseto, the son of an innkeeper and a spinner. In that small world I learned diligence and measure. Antonio Barezzi opened his home and purse to me, and in Milan I worked under Vincenzo Lavigna after the conservatory turned me away. I read our poets and the French, and I kept Shakespeare close; the stage taught me where music must bend.

My beginning was not gentle. Oberto showed a path, but soon I buried two children and my wife, Margherita, and Un giorno di regno fell flat. Out of that blackness came Nabucco. In it, the word ruled the phrase, character ruled ornament. The chorus “Va, pensiero” was taken up by many Italians as their own murmur; I had written for drama, yet the public heard a nation.

The 1850s were a wrestle with censors and with form. With Piave I turned Victor Hugo’s forbidden tale into Rigoletto by changing a king into a duke and shifting the scene; the knife still cut. Il trovatore and La traviata followed quickly—melody at the service of the theater, not the other way round. I listened to singers, but I asked them to speak truth on stage.

They called me to public duty in 1861 and I went, briefly, to Italy’s first parliament, but I remained a practical landowner at Sant’Agata. I wrote Don Carlo and Aida for grand occasions, and, for Manzoni, the Messa da Requiem. In old age, with Arrigo Boito, I returned to Shakespeare for Otello and Falstaff. I built a home for my fellow musicians in Milan—the Casa di Riposo—because an artist’s final act should be charity, not applause.