The German-Italian Nexus, Part–III

Building the Bridge

It is evident from our discussion in the first two posts of this series that German and Italian approaches to music vary greatly. Italians viewed music theory through a cultural lens, examining how their identity can be expressed through music via different building blocks, or forms. Germans, on the other hand, fell back on metaphysics– viewing music as a tool to get in touch with an abstract world filled with the ideal forms of music, with good composers forging the ideal into reality. While it is difficult to trace the precise root of this division, with centuries of cultural divisions enforced by the Alpine barrier, the turn of the 19^th century went a long way in reemphasizing them. Later in the 19^th century, Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901) captured the essence of Romanticism yearned for by earlier Italian Romanticists, unconsciously forming a nexus between German and Italian notions of form.

The Napoleonic and Austrian occupations of Italy reignited a nationalistic spark, which in large part was centered around a yearning for lost, or rather, “left behind” culture. Nationalism was not new to the Italian states. Centuries prior, the poet Petrarch (1304–1374) had dreamt of a united Italy. After him, the statesman Machiavelli (1469–1527) yearned for a Prince to unite the Italian states and free them from foreign oppression. Now, with the Italian states under occupation once again, Italian literature geared towards a unique nationalist identity. Music soon followed, through the Classicist–Romanticist debate.

The evolution of Italian opera through the 19^th century shows that the Romanticists won. While composers like Bellini did not fully embrace the Romantic turn in music, formerly ambivalent composers like Rossini did. As we saw in the first post, the growing Romantic fervor in Italy had Giuseppe Mazzini call for a “local authentic color” in music and for human differences in different characters to be exploited to the fullest through music. He saw composers like Gaetano Donizetti inching towards this Romantic ideal in his central years but fall away later on. How these composers collectively influenced Verdi was apparent even to a contemporary like Abramo Basevi, who after the early success of Ernani called him “the composer destined to inherit the legacy of Donizetti and Bellini”.¹ This may seem to confuse Verdi’s location in the ideological currents sweeping Italy, but evidence suggests that he belonged in the Romantic camp. Later in his career, Verdi’s name became firmly linked with the nationalist movement, the Risorgimento, with dissidents using the acronym “Viva V.E.R.D.I.” (“Viva Vittorio Emmanuel, Re D’Italia”– Long live Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy) to identify with the nationalist cause. His chorus of oppressed slaves yearning for their homeland, Va, Pensiero, became a national anthem for the movement.

The German camp, meanwhile, was not as nationalistic in its approach to music. Drawing on recent philosophers such as Kant and Hegel, they closely identified music theory with an idealistic approach—to them, there was an ‘ideal’ realm transcending our senses, and music theory helped composers pull from this realm and forge music into reality. As a result, a composition to them was a complete organism, impossible to subdivide and reassemble. This ontological approach—examining the very being of music—set the Germans apart from the Italians in their notions of form. Mazzini and Basevi of Italy were more concerned with identifying “local color” based on historical and geographical distinctions. Basevi in particular identified a unique tinta (overarching musical hue, depending on motifs, themes, and harmonies) specific to a Verdi opera. Form, to him, mainly concerned smaller formulaic structures within the conventional frameworks of opera—the breakdown of a movement into its subparts and the interweaving of these subparts to form a fundamentally musical, empirically observable unit. The German A. B. Marx, as we saw in the second post, was more abstract in his thought. He employed a “process-of-becoming” approach where conformation to convention illustrated how innovation is guided by overarching ideals.

Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901). Image source

Are these approaches united in Verdi? Do they explain how he inherited Donizetti’s mantle and became the composer Mazzini and other Romanticists desperately craved? The answer is yes, albeit with much nuance. First, which camp did Verdi belong in? Which of his three main predecessors, Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti, did he most align with? The answer, Basevi tells us, varies along Verdi’s compositional timeline:

Glancing now across this opera as a whole, we can easily see that Verdi was keeping very close to Rossini: indeed, in its majesty this music seems to be a reaction against the style of Donizetti. But the forms of the numbers, the shape of the melodies, and—most of all—the dramatic inflection show signs of Donizetti’s influence, an influence that, as we shall see, grows stronger and stronger in the operas to come and leads Verdi to his “second manner.” While Verdi strove to approach Bellinian pathos, his melodies, by their very nature, made this impossible. Like those of Rossini, Verdi’s melodies are ba­sically consonant, whereas Bellini’s are rather dissonant, dominated by pass­ing notes, suspensions, appoggiaturas, sevenths, tritones, and so forth, not so much as ornaments but as essential parts of the melody.²

That Verdi was a radical in the mold of Donizetti was evident to his contemporaries. Moreover, Verdi’s “second manner,” stated above, fulfils Mazzini’s aim of unique characterization. Basevi explains that in it, “the majestic diminishes or disappears altogether, and each character represents no other than himself.”³ This new style involved direct appeal to Verdi’s audience, asking them to question convention and embrace innovation—albeit not in a manner that breaks apart the foundations of operatic form. Harold Powers, in his article “La solita forma,” alludes to this, saying,

Verdi’s constant play on the gestures and junctures pertaining to the normative pattern for duets shows that at every moment he was firmly depending on his prospective audience’s awareness of the pattern in order to make his effects; the simple “solita forma de’ duetti” clearly underlies the complex surface both psychologically and formally.⁴^[4]

Verdi’s output underwent great transformation in the 1850s and 1860s. Basevi himself credits to Verdi a “third manner” in La Traviata (1853), with more restraint in the orchestra, more parlante (a style where the orchestra carries a continuous, repeating melodic discourse while vocal parts interject syllabically and irregularly),⁵ and different structural forms for arias which do not fit convention.⁶ These are consolidated further in Simon Boccanegra (1857), a brooding opera with a dark tinta set in the stormy, seaside background of medieval Genoa. Basevi says that the vocal style isn’t the exaggerated, impetuous force typically seen in Verdi. The harmonies are richer and more sophisticated, and the orchestra is elevated to a dominant role, often fleshing out the emotions portrayed on stage while vocal lines remain suspended one note above.⁷ Possibly taken aback at these changes, Basevi launched into a discussion on how music paints pictures in listeners’ minds; these emotions are clarified and directed by the text itself:

[Musical pictures] are vague depictions, but they are not without an effect on our feelings. The poetry with which they are associated provides, in a sense, their interpretation, by which their general meaning becomes particular and determinate. Thus, poetry is here to music what arithmetic is to algebra: music supplies a formula that poetry then applies to the particular case.⁸^[8]

Verdi the innovator was incorporating German ideas into his compositional process. Basevi confirms this, and isn’t too pleased with the product, partly because of the poorly written libretto. More importantly, Basevi, finally revealing himself as a Classicist, does not approve of the growing importance of harmony at the detriment of melody, and the poorly chosen themes.

It is probably a good thing, then, that Basevi published his Studio in 1859, eight years before the premiere of Don Carlos, my favorite Verdi opera. Verdi capitalizes on these changes to produce an ultimate Romantic dramma per musica: “local authentic color” to match the Spanish setting; characters and emotional themes identified through unique motifs; very few showy arias and much more emotional gravitas packed into sung speech; and dominant roles for the chorus and the orchestra. It breaks apart all the conventional forms of his earlier works and paves the way to his end-period masterpieces like Otello and Falstaff.

In recognizing conventional traces of form in opera and then innovating, pushing, and bending those structures, Verdi inadvertently became a Hegelian endpoint in operatic history, just like Beethoven was for Marx. This is especially true during and after his 1851–1853 successes of Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, and La Traviata. Verdi’s innovations, all within the fundamentally Italian cauldron of Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti, took Italian opera from its previous stale, lofty status to something which kept audiences at the edge of their seats; his manipulation of form from mere building blocks into a transcendental, ideal process of becoming, finally building a German-Italian nexus.

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References

• Basevi, Abramo, Edward Schneider, and Stefano Castelvecchi. 2013 (1859). The Operas of Giuseppe Verdi. Edited by Stefano Castelvecchi. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

• Parker, Roger. 2014. ""Insolite Forme", or Basevi's Garden Path." In Leonora’s Last Act : Essays in Verdian Discourse, by Roger Parker, 42-60. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

• Powers, Harold S. 1987. ""La solita forma" and "The Uses of Convention"." Acta Musicologica (International Musicological Society) 59 (1): 65-90.

1. (Basevi, Schneider and Castelvecchi 2013 (1859), 57)

2. (Basevi, Schneider and Castelvecchi 2013 (1859), 25)

3. (Basevi, Schneider and Castelvecchi 2013 (1859), 139)

4. (Powers 1987, 81)

5. (Basevi, Schneider and Castelvecchi 2013 (1859), xxxi)

6. (Basevi, Schneider and Castelvecchi 2013 (1859), 196)

7. (Basevi, Schneider and Castelvecchi 2013 (1859), 224)

8. (Basevi, Schneider and Castelvecchi 2013 (1859), 228-9)