I was 15 when I went to my first Verdi opera, “Il Trovatore,” at the Met, the old Met, in 1964. I could barely figure out what was going on but didn’t care. Leontyne Price sang Leonora, and I was in awe of her plush, beautiful voice. The singing, the chorus, the orchestra, the emotional drama, the music with its mixture of soaring melody, intensity and structure (though I couldn’t have expressed this back then) all hooked me. Two months later I was back at the Met for Verdi’s “Otello” starring, no less, Renata Tebaldi as Desdemona. I still remember the poignant warmth and uncanny bloom of her voice as she sang the sighing refrain of “salce, salce” in the “Willow Song.”
I would go on to hear, and eventually review, most of the Verdi operas in productions around the world. I studied the scores in music classes and on my own at the piano. I read biographies that emphasized his deep ties to the rural region of northern Italy he came from and never really left.
To me, that devotion seemed of a piece both with Verdi’s character — he was a crusty, principled man with a built-in hypocrisy detector who was suspicious of urban elites — and his respect for the heritage of Italian opera. If Wagner brought a radical agenda to remaking German opera, Verdi was a reformer who worked from within the traditions and conventions of Italian opera while subtly, steadily introducing ingenious innovations that would, over time, transform it. So I wanted to see for myself where he came from, and how his roots shaped his life and art.
This fall, at long last, I made my Verdi pilgrimage, retracing his steps from his birthplace in Roncole to the crypt where he is buried in Milan.
Some of the most poignant and moving music Verdi wrote comes when characters longingly recall their homelands. In “La Traviata,” the fretful father Germont tries to convince his son Alfredo to flee the corrupting life of Paris and remember how happy he was at home amid the sea, soil and sun of Provence. In “Aida,” the title character — an Ethiopian princess who is enslaved in Egypt — achingly longs for the soft breezes, green hills and perfumed shores of her country in “O patria mia.” And in “Trovatore,” Azucena, facing execution with her son and almost hallucinating, imagines returning to the peaceful mountains they love.
So I went off in search of the homeland Verdi loved. In Roncole, a village near Parma, the humble house where Verdi was born in 1813 is now a modest museum. His father, Carlo Verdi, ran a tavern on the ground floor, and the family lived upstairs. Verdi first studied music with local priests. Just down the road from the house is the lovely little church of San Michele, where he began substituting as an organist at age 7 and won the job at 11.
Carlo wanted his gifted son to have a good education. So, at 11, Giuseppe became a boarding student in the nearby commune of Busseto; he would walk back to Roncole (more than five miles) every weekend to play the organ for church services.
At that time, Busseto was a “little fortress of culture and commerce,” Mary Jane Phillips-Matz wrote in “Verdi: A Biography.” In school the boy received instruction in Latin, Italian and humanities, and studied music with Ferdinando Provesi, who was maestro di cappella at the town church and directed Busseto’s thriving amateur orchestra. The ensemble’s other leader was Antonio Barezzi, a prosperous distiller and grocer, and avid musical amateur, who became the young Verdi’s indispensable patron and, later, his father-in-law.
The elegant townhouse where Barezzi lived on Busseto’s main street — with buildings dating to the 13th century — is now an invaluable museum, Casa Barezzi. Verdi moved there at 18 and gave piano and voice lessons to Barezzi’s spirited, red-haired daughter, Margherita. Verdi clearly adored her, and after a few years studying music privately in Milan, he returned to Busseto to take over the orchestra and marry her. They had two children. But during two terrible years Verdi lost them all: a girl, a boy and then Margherita, who succumbed to encephalitis at 26.
In a salon room of Casa Barezzi is a piano that Verdi used to play as a young man. Decades later, in 1867, when he returned to visit Barezzi, who was close to death, the old man, unable to speak, gestured to the piano. Sensing what he wanted, Verdi sat at the piano and played “Va, pensiero,” the chorus of exiled Jews from “Nabucco,” another timeless expression of people longing for their homeland that had touched a nerve with audiences swept up in the long campaign for Italian unification. I was invited to play the piano. Just placing my hands on those keys was humbling, even if the piano was in woeful need of tuning.
The highlight of the trip was my visit to the rolling farm in the hamlet of Sant’Agata, about 25 miles northwest of Parma, where Verdi lived for his last 50 years. There, at what is now known as Villa Verdi, he oversaw every aspect of the farm — the crops and livestock, a slaughterhouse for pigs, an irrigation system he devised, the work of his tenants — even as he kept writing operas that played the world’s grandest stages and demanded his presence for extended periods.
Verdi moved there in 1851 with his companion, Giuseppina Strepponi, a renowned soprano. Their personal relationship did not begin until several years after Strepponi had triumphed in the daunting role of Abigaille at the 1842 premiere of “Nabucco,” a breakthrough for Verdi. They had first lived as a couple in Paris and then in Busseto, where the fact that they were not married was seen as scandalous by the townspeople. Even Barezzi expressed his dismay.
After settling in Sant’Agata, Verdi addressed his father-in-law’s objections in a respectful but unapologetic letter. “In my house there lives a lady, free and independent, who, like myself, prefers a solitary life, and who has a fortune capable of satisfying all her needs,” he wrote. Neither of them, he added, was “obliged to account to anyone for our actions.” (Seven years later the couple secretly married in a village near Geneva.)
Until shortly before my trip I wasn’t sure I’d be allowed into Villa Verdi: The house has been closed to the public for more than a year, ever since Verdi’s heirs, who lived on its upper floors even as tourists roamed the ground floor, moved to sell it . The Italian government is working to buy it, but it has been a long, complicated process. My visit was facilitated by Paolo Maier, the head of communications of the Teatro Regio in nearby Parma, where I attended an inventively modern production of (fittingly) “Il Trovatore,” as part of its annual Festival Verdi.
The next day, he took me and my husband on a drive from Parma to the cluster of towns that constitute Verdi-land.
The main house at Villa Verdi is at once simple and imposing, with stone walls painted an earthy yellow, and large windows with green shutters currently closed tight. When we arrived, Roberto Montecchi, the manager of the institute overseeing the proposed auction, dramatically handed me the key to open the door for the first time in 12 months.
Just standing in that space reinforced impressions I’d long held about Verdi. After the triumphant 1842 La Scala premiere of “Nabucco,” it had played in houses throughout Europe. Verdi could have bought a fine home in Milan, Venice, Paris, anywhere. Instead, he bought a farm in the middle of nowhere. On government documents he listed his occupation as “agricoltore,” or farmer. Verdi was literally grounded by his man-of-the-earth upbringing and values. Often in his letters, complaining of inept impresarios, of censors who raised absurd objections to his dramas, he threatened to give up, to go “dig my fields and forget all about music and theaters.” But he was driven to create.
Even with the windows shuttered and drapes closed, the red velvet sitting room gave off the vibes of the legendary gatherings and intimate performances that took place there on the rare evenings when Verdi, who coveted his privacy, entertained. His office still has the letter he received, at 18, from the conservatory in Milan rejecting his application, a document he pointedly kept in sight.
The most revealing space was Verdi’s efficiently set up bedroom, where he did a great deal of work. Family lore has it that he typically stayed up into the wee hours composing, then rose at dawn and, on a horse or in a carriage, went out to inspect the farm and issue orders to workers. He caught up on sleep during afternoons.
Near his compact, canopied bed is a splendid writing desk with a tilted stand perfectly sized for sheets of music paper. Nestled in a corner is a handsome Erard piano.
Standing there, I imagined Verdi trying out ideas on the piano and notating them at his desk. The year he and Strepponi moved in, 1851, he was working on “Il Trovatore.” I thought of a fascinating letter he wrote at the time to Salvadore Cammarano, the librettist of “Trovatore.” Verdi yearned for emancipation from the “tyranny” of conventions and the “formal constraints” of Italian opera, and he urged his collaborator to take more chances. If the whole work consisted of “a single number,” he wrote, “I should find that all the more right and proper.”
Verdi generally hewed to broad parameters of convention during those years. But he adapted those forms to his own ends. He must have known how fresh, bold and sophisticated the score to “Trovatore” was. Decades later, in his final work, “Falstaff,” Verdi came pretty close to his fantasy of an opera that consisted of “a single number.” That masterpiece sounds like a succession of wondrous musical bits and pieces miraculously sewn together.
I recalled a letter Verdi wrote to his publisher while working on “Falstaff.” He was worried that the “huge size of La Scala” might ruin its effect: “I have written it on my own behalf to please myself, and I believe that instead of La Scala, it ought to be put on at Sant’Agata.” I think he was only half kidding. Hopefully Villa Verdi will be renovated and reopened soon, so it can once again be accessible to music lovers.
Verdi and Strepponi are buried in Milan, in a marble crypt on the grounds of one of several charitable projects he worked on in his later years: the Casa di Riposo per Musicisti, a retirement home for musicians. He oversaw its design, financed its construction and set up a foundation to keep it going. Long known as Casa Verdi, it continues to flourish, with about 65 current residents. Verdi called it his greatest “opera,” playing on the definition of the Italian word, which means “work” or “oeuvre.”
Seeing the crypt was moving, but the most poignant object in the fine museum at Casa Verdi is the small refurbished spinet given to 7-year-old Giuseppe by his parents, who could not afford a piano.
“It was a sacrifice for my parents to get me this old wreck,” Verdi recalled in 1888. “Having it made me happier than a king.”