A tavern keeper's son who became the voice of an entire nation: this is how Giuseppe Verdi, from the organ of a village in Emilia-Romagna to the stages of Cairo and Paris, built the most performed lyrical repertoire in the world - and which arias to start with to truly appreciate it.
Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) was not born in a Milanese salon but in a village, Roncole, near Busseto, in Emilia-Romagna, a province in Northern Italy known for its rich soil and winter fogs. His parents ran an inn. In other words, nothing in his environment prepared a child to become the master of European opera.
However, music arrived very early, and through an object. His father gave him a spinet, and little Giuseppe could play it by the age of six. By ten, he was already playing the organ in the village church, which implies something very concrete: knowing how to accompany services, support voices, improvise a bit, and keep a rhythm in front of an audience.
Nota Bene: the spinet is a plucked string instrument, a kind of small harpsichord, more modest and easier to fit into a home than a large salon instrument. It is the ideal school for keyboard skills, where one learns to read two staves at once and to hear harmony under the fingers.
This dual experience - the domestic keyboard and the church organ - explains much of Verdi's future solidity. He did not start with theory; he began by making music for real listeners.
Verdi continued his education at the Busseto high school and his musical training at the municipal philharmonic society of the city. This society of enlightened amateurs served as his laboratory: he played the piano there, conducted the orchestra, and composed for the musicians he had at hand. Today, we underestimate what this learning experience represented. Conducting a local orchestra means learning firsthand what a horn can do, how high a clarinet can go, and how to cover or highlight a voice.
He then wrote a symphony inspired by the overture of The Barber of Seville by Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868), the undisputed master of the Italian stage at the time. Again, the process is revealing: young Verdi learned by imitating a model, dismantling a mechanism that works to understand why it works.
Thanks to a scholarship, he went to study in Milan, the lyrical capital of Northern Italy. He failed the entrance exam for the conservatory. A rejection that could have stopped everything, but did not: he took private lessons, frequented La Scala, trained through exposure to performances and professionals, and composed several pieces.
This lesson remains valid for anyone learning an art: the institution opens doors; it never closes them all. Verdi created his own alternative school.
In 1835, having completed his musical studies, Verdi sought to make a living—because a composer at that time did not earn from his music until a theater commissioned him. He therefore secured a stable job as a music teacher and director of the Philharmonic in Busseto, the town where he was trained.
It is there that he married Margherita Barezzi (1814-1840), the daughter of the family that had supported his studies. Happiness was short-lived, and the aftermath was terrible: their two children died in infancy, and Margherita also passed away at the age of twenty-six. In just a few years, Verdi lost his entire household.
These years of mourning coincided with his first steps on the Milanese stage. His works were performed at La Scala, and the success of Nabucco—with its grand chorus of exiles, Va, pensiero—suddenly made him famous in Italy. The public immediately recognized a new voice: broad, straightforward, singable melodies, and choruses that seemed to speak for an entire people.
Keep this point in mind, as it explains his entire career: Verdi does not write for connoisseurs; he writes for an audience. He is as much a man of the theater as he is a musician.
In the early 1850s, Verdi tackled an explosive subject: a play by Victor Hugo, Le Roi s'amuse, in which a debauched sovereign seduces his jester's daughter and where revenge leads to disaster. However, Northern Italy was then under Austrian domination, and every opera libretto had to pass through censors before its premiere.
The verdict was predictable: it was impossible to show a lecherous and cynical king, impossible to depict him as the target of a conspiracy. The solution found with his librettist consisted of three precise gestures. The action was moved to a small Italian court of the Renaissance, the king was downgraded to the Duke of Mantua—a fictional prince who had been dead for centuries, thus harmless—and the characters were renamed, with the jester becoming Rigoletto.
The rest remained intact: the jester's hunchback, his hidden daughter, the sack in which he believes he holds the corpse of his enemy. The work premiered in Venice and immediately made its mark. Its most famous aria, La donna è mobile, sung by the duke, is a case in point: a catchy, almost trivial melody that becomes chilling because we hear it return just as the drama unfolds.
To listen to it meaningfully, do not stop at this aria. Listen to the quartet in the final act: four characters sing simultaneously four different emotions—seduction, mockery, despair, hatred—and each remains perfectly identifiable. This is where Verdi's mastery is evident.
The year 1853 is one of the most spectacular in the entire history of opera. Verdi created two works that the whole world still performs: Il Trovatore, followed by La Traviata. Two opposing universes, one after the other.
Il Trovatore, based on a Spanish drama, is an opera of blood and night: a gypsy, a stolen child, two brothers who are unaware of each other and confront each other, a pyre. The music goes straight to the point, with pounding rhythms - the famous chorus of the blacksmiths striking the anvil - and arias designed as challenges thrown to the voices. It is romantic opera in its most flamboyant version.
La Traviata, on the other hand, is the exact opposite, and that is its modernity. Adapted from La Dame aux camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils, it tells the story of a Parisian courtesan, who is ill, renouncing love for social convenience before dying. No kings, no pyres: a salon, a father who comes to demand a breakup, a bedroom, and an agony. The premiere actually disappoints the audience, who are unprepared to see characters on stage dressed like them.
Listen to it by identifying three moments and everything becomes clear: the brindisi of the first act, this joyful toast that sets the celebration, the great duet of the second act between Violetta and Germont's father where everything breaks, and finally the last act, where the orchestra thins out to a thread of voice. Verdi invents an intimacy here that opera had never known.
An Italian composer who succeeds in Milan, Venice, and Rome has not yet won everything: he still has Paris to conquer, then the capital of spectacle in Europe. Verdi composes Les Vêpres siciliennes for the Opera there, based on a French libretto, accepting the rules of a very codified genre, the grand opera à la française.
These rules are demanding and concrete: five acts instead of three or four, a historical plot based on a popular uprising, monumental sets, vast choral ensembles, and - an absolute requirement - a ballet inserted at the heart of the work. Verdi, accustomed to Italian efficiency, must therefore broaden his palette, stretch his scenes, and pay even more attention to the orchestra.
This Parisian detour permanently changes his writing style. The recitatives become more flexible, the scenes flow together without abrupt cuts, and the orchestra stops being a mere support to become a commentary on the drama. Verdi will also revise several of his works for the French stages, adapting them to this taste.
As a result, from these years onward, his titles circulate everywhere, from London to Vienna, from Saint Petersburg to South America. Verdi is no longer a national composer; he is a sure value in the international repertoire.
In his private life, one name dominates everything: Giuseppina Strepponi, the singer who had performed his early works. They first live together, which causes a scandal in a small Catholic town, and then they marry. She will be his companion, his advisor, and his reader for decades.
The couple settles in the countryside, near Busseto, in a property that Verdi transforms into a true agricultural estate. One must imagine this man overseeing his crops, discussing harvests and work, then returning to write scores that will make Europe weep. This secluded life is not a retirement: it is his method of working, away from the noise of theaters.
This is followed by a decade of impressive productivity, with works that further expand his dramatic territory: an opera of conspiracy and masquerade, a grand fresco of fate and war, a vast political and romantic drama set at the Spanish court. Themes emerge that will never leave him: the conflict between power and conscience, betrayed friendship, the solitude of the powerful.
If you want to hear the evolution, compare an aria from Trovatore with a duet from this later period. In the former, the melody commands. In the latter, the phrase bends to the meaning of the words, it hesitates, it interrupts itself: Verdi gradually shifts from the aria to the scene.
Aïda is the result of a commission from Egypt, in the context of the grand festivities surrounding the opening of the Suez Canal and the country's ambition to have a theater worthy of European capitals. The work was created in Cairo, which remains a uniqueness: one of the greatest successes of the Italian repertoire was not named in Italy.
The subject starts from a framework provided by an Egyptologist, which explains the care given to the background: temples, rites, priests, military processions. The story itself is of formidable simplicity. Aïda is an Ethiopian princess enslaved, Radamès is an Egyptian war chief who loves her, and Amneris is the pharaoh's daughter who also loves her. Three people, two warring nations, no way out.
Verdi achieves a remarkable balance. On one side, the spectacle: the triumphal scene, with its trumpets, its immense choir, its march that everyone recognizes without knowing where it comes from. On the other, a whispered finale, two voices alive and trapped in a tomb, accompanied by an almost motionless orchestra.
This is the best entry point for a listener discovering opera: start with the triumphal march for its power, then go directly to the final duet. In twenty minutes, you will understand what Verdi does better than anyone else, transitioning from the monumental to the intimate without interruption.
Verdi revered Alessandro Manzoni, the writer of The Betrothed, a novel that gave Italy a common literary language and a sense of self. Upon the writer's death, he decided to pay tribute with a Requiem Mass, performed in Milan on the first anniversary of his passing.
The work puzzled some listeners, and one can understand why: it is religious music written by a man of the theater, using theatrical means. Four soloists, a large choir, a powerful orchestra, and a treatment of the liturgical text that aims for dramatic effect rather than serene meditation.
The Dies irae sets the tone: the choir screams the divine wrath over thundering bass drum beats, then everything collapses into silence. Elsewhere, the writing becomes scholarly, featuring grand fugues, as if to prove that an opera composer also masters the craft of chapel masters.
It should be listened to, therefore, like an opera without staging: each section is a scene, each soloist a character confronted with the idea of their own death. It is probably the most violent work Verdi ever wrote.
After Aida, Verdi remains silent for a long time. He is believed to have settled down, occupied with his lands. Then a decisive meeting reignites everything: that of the poet and composer Arrigo Boito, who writes two librettos based on Shakespeare and rekindles his desire to work.
Otello, premiered at La Scala, is the pinnacle of his theater. No more isolated arias applauded before the action resumes: the music flows from beginning to end of each act, the voice follows the word, and Iago advances openly in a role of astonishing modernity as a manipulator. Listen to the opening scene, the storm, without orchestral introduction: Verdi throws the listener into the action from the very first measure.
Falstaff, his last work, is the final surprise. At an age when one writes wills, Verdi composes a comedy, drawn from the misadventures of a vain old fat man deceived by the women of Windsor. The score is lively, light, full of tiny orchestral touches, and ends with a collective fugue on a simple idea: everything in this world is a joke.
So, two works to listen to in order if you want to grasp the journey taken. The man who built his glory on great vengeful melodies ultimately writes a learned laugh, and he does so without an ounce of nostalgia.
Verdi had a historic opportunity: his career perfectly aligns with the movement that made Italy. His choirs of exiles, oppressed peoples, and armed patriots were heard by audiences as messages about their own situation at a time when the peninsula was fragmented and partly occupied. His name itself became a password: shouting Viva Verdi in a hall allowed one to cheer for Victor Emmanuel as king of Italy without being arrested, the composer's initials serving as an abbreviation for the forbidden formula.
Having become a national figure, he served in parliament and then in the senate, without much taste for politics, and dedicated a portion of his fortune to a very concrete cause: a retirement home for elderly and destitute musicians in Milan. A choice that speaks volumes about him - the son of an innkeeper never forgot how precarious the life of a musician is.
At his death in 1901, the Milanese crowd accompanied his funeral procession and sang the choir of exiles from Nabucco. A composer buried by a people singing their own music: the scene encapsulates a century.
What to do, very concretely, with all this? A listening journey in four steps is enough to traverse his work: La Traviata for intimacy and social drama, Rigoletto for dramatic construction and the final quartet, Aïda for grand spectacle and its whispered reverse, Otello or Falstaff for the culmination. Add the Requiem if voices interest you more than the sets. Take a bilingual libretto, follow the text the first time, let yourself be carried away the second: this is how this repertoire, written for halls full of ordinary people, begins to speak again.
Author Loïc on 07 May 2026
Art and Culture : Sculpture
Author Audrey on 28 July 2021
Art and Culture : Museums