Giuseppe Verdi, the Mezzogiorno loved by the great Maestro

In Naples, over a century later the debut (1949), at a premiere of Nabucco the Corriere correspondent commented: it happened yesterday at the San Carlo, an unusual and unexpected fact, a fact that occurred frequently in the last century, when Verdi was both a musical and patriotic symbol. To the Go thinking a shower of tricolor leaflets fell from the top of the boxes. A long round of applause to the rhythm of Long live Italy, long live Verdi, almost a desperate appeal of those seeking a lost supreme good…. Verdi and Naples, a special bond. The calm! the best thing in the world. (…) What the hell has it ever gotten into my head to still smear myself in theater things!. This is how the composer from Roncole di Busseto vented himself in 1872 with his friend Clarina Maffei, referring to the rehearsals of Don Carlo which opened the 1872-3 season, to which was added the local debut of Aida. Performance anxiety? D. Carlos is fine and the public very happy about it, he will communicate Verdi live to the librettist Camille Du Locle, praising the orchestra and claiming that it has what Paris always lacked: panache and verve.

Many connections: Cesarino shopkeeper, then stock broker, music addict, the caricaturist Melchiorre Delfico, the painters Domenico Morelli and Filippo Palizzi, the poet Nicola Sole, and the librarian Francesco Florimo, among others. I’d go right away to dig my fields even at night to completely forget about music and theaters, she had announced to her friend Clarina. She did not and, during the rehearsals of Aidagave the precious to Naples Quartet in E minor, performed from the first parts of Massimo at the Albergo delle Crocelle, the same one where the Verdi spouses had been overwhelmed by a huge crowd, complete with torches and band in tow. The success of that‘Aida he gives Verdi the legend: having unplugged the horses from the carriage, the crowd drags the couple on their shoulders to the hotel. Still believed to be true today. What does Verdi think of the Neapolitans?: he is not poisoned with the ifs with the buts (…) Because here there are no critics who act as apostles; not the crowd of masters who know about music only along the lines of Mendelson, Schumann, Vagner etc.; not the aristocratic dilettantism which fashionably transports itself to what it does not understand. And the Neapolitan publishing houses reciprocate by printing adaptations of all kinds taken from Verdi’s repertoire. Raisetragedy by Voltaire which in the hands of Salvador Cammarano it will become an excellent melodrama, the first opera commissioned from him by San Carlo, which he anticipates Luisa Miller inspired by the French translation (Alexandre Dumas pre) of Love and Scam by Schiller. In 1858 Verdi was censured for his Gustaf III, by Scribe. He withdraws the work and ends up in court. Wins. In the first ‘unitary’ season present with six titles at the maximum. The accession of Naples to the new Kingdom of Savoy worries him. He wrote to De Sanctis: If due to miserable ideas of a bell tower Italy were to be divided in two (God forbid) it would always be at the mercy and under the protection of other great powers, therefore poor, weak, without freedom, and semi-barbarous. Woe to you if you do not join us with confidence, frankly. How true, still today.