Giuseppe Verdi

Giuseppe Verdi was the leading Italian opera composer of the 19th century. Born in a village near Parma when it was ruled by Napoleonic France, he rose from provincial organist to international fame with operas such as Nabucco, Rigoletto, La traviata and Aida, and ended his career with two Shakespeare masterpieces, Otello and Falstaff. His works became bound up with the movement for Italian unification, and he served briefly in the first parliament of united Italy.

Verdi was born in the hamlet of Le Roncole near Busseto on 9 or 10 October 1813, the son of an innkeeper; the area then lay within the First French Empire. He played the organ in the village church and became its paid organist at about eight. He was schooled in Busseto, where he wrote marches and church pieces for the local Philharmonic Society. Its co-director, the merchant Antonio Barezzi, became his patron.

The Milan Conservatory turned him down, and Barezzi paid for private lessons with a former La Scala musician instead. Verdi returned to Busseto as municipal music master and in 1836 married Barezzi's daughter Margherita. Their two children died in infancy, and Margherita died soon afterwards.

Verdi's first opera, Oberto, was staged at La Scala in 1839, but his comedy Un giorno di regno failed after a single night. The La Scala impresario Bartolomeo Merelli persuaded him to set the biblical drama Nabucco, which opened on 9 March 1842 and made him famous; within a few years it had been heard across Europe and the Americas. Its chorus of Hebrew exiles, Va, pensiero, was later taken up as a patriotic anthem, though historians note that the political meaning of his early operas was often added in retrospect.

Verdi later called the next sixteen years his time in the galleys. He wrote some twenty operas, including Ernani, Macbeth and works for London and Paris. In 1848, after Milan's Five Days rising briefly drove out the Austrians, he hurried to the city. His La battaglia di Legnano opened in Rome in 1849 on the eve of its short-lived republic.

Rigoletto (1851), Il trovatore and La traviata (both 1853) brought Verdi lasting fame and financial independence, despite fights with censors and a failed first night for Traviata. He settled at his estate of Sant'Agata near Busseto with the former soprano Giuseppina Strepponi, whom he married in 1859, and devoted much of his time to farming. Later works included Simon Boccanegra, Un ballo in maschera, La forza del destino for Saint Petersburg and Don Carlos for Paris.

By 1859 the cry "Viva Verdi" was used as a coded salute to Victor Emmanuel, King of Sardinia, as the future king of Italy. That year Verdi joined a delegation to the king in Turin and met Camillo Cavour, who persuaded him to stand for parliament. Elected in 1861, the year of the unification of Italy, he seldom attended after Cavour's death. He was made a senator in 1874.

Aida, commissioned by Egypt's khedive in connection with the opening of the Suez Canal, premiered in Cairo in 1871. His Requiem, honouring the novelist Alessandro Manzoni, followed in 1874. Verdi then seemed to retire, but the poet and composer Arrigo Boito drew him back with libretti based on Shakespeare. Otello triumphed at La Scala in 1887, and the comedy Falstaff, premiered there on 9 February 1893, when Verdi was 79, ended his operatic career.

Verdi founded a rest home for retired musicians in Milan, the Casa di Riposo. He suffered a stroke in a Milan hotel and died on 27 January 1901, aged 87. When his body was moved to the rest home a month later, Arturo Toscanini conducted Va, pensiero before a crowd estimated at 300,000. His operas remain among the most often performed in the world,.

Our 1815 map shows northern Italy divided after Napoleon's fall, with Milan and Venice under Austrian rule, and the 1878 and 1880 maps show the united Italy that Verdi had helped to symbolise.