Verdi: 10 things every Italian must know

Verdi: no one has embodied the Italian genius more than him. He managed to capture the spirit of Italy with the net of his notes and brought his art into the pulsating flesh of Italian identity. And he has an exciting life. Those Parma countryside embraced by the winter fog and lashed by the summer sun made it sprout; Milan and pre-unification Italy made him Verdi and the world welcomed him as a great artist and genius. Every Italian must therefore know some essential things about the greatest Italian composer. Here are ten.

Ten things to know about Giuseppe Verdi

1. Verdi has set about 30 operas to music. The best known are the popular trilogy (Rigoletto, Trovatore and Traviata), the Aida and the works inspired by Shakespeare, such as Othello and Falstaff.
2. At six he played piano and organ, at eight he was already paid to play the organ, at thirteen he began composing.
3. At eighteen he failed the admission exam to the conservatory.
4. Verdi, after the first failures at La Scala, had decided to stop composing. He had been asked to set the Nabucco libretto to music. By chance he fell and the booklet opened on the pages of Va Pensiero. He read it, was moved, set it to music and decided to resume writing music.
5. Nabucco was staged on March 9, 1842 at the Teatro alla Scala. The work was so popular that it was repeated fifty-seven times only between August and November, something that never happened at La Scala. The work was then brought in the following years to Vienna, Lisbon, Barcelona, ​​Berlin, Paris and Hamburg, New York, Buenos Aires. Since then it has been represented in every corner of the globe.

6. After the success of Nabucco Verdi wrote practically one opera a year. He worked so hard that he called that period "the years in prison". The works he wrote at that time were: The Lombards at the first crusade, The battle of Legnano, The two Foscari, Joan of Arc, Alzira, Attila, Il corsaro, I masnadieri, Ernani and Macbeth.
7. Verdi had to fight for a long time against censorship. For example, La traviata, taken from Alexandre Dumas's The Lady of the Camellias, should have been titled Love and Death, but the Venetian censorship office asked that the title be changed. However, she was immediately "accused of immorality and turpitude"; Rigoletto Performed in Paris in 1832, it was banned after just one performance.
8. Verdi was also a politician. On the basis of his popularity he was elected Councilor of the Municipality of Villanova d'Arda, as well as in 1859 Councilor of the Province of Piacenza. In 1861 he was elected as Deputy in the College of Borgo San Donnino, the current Fidenza. In 1874 he was appointed member of the Italian Senate, but he never participated in its activities, just as he did little in those of the Chamber of Deputies.
9. Giuseppe Verdi thanks to his music became terribly rich. Very shrewd in negotiations and in the management of the capital, he bought vast estates and for many years he was a landowner and was an expert in poplar cultivation, horse breeding, irrigation of the fields, and enology.
10. His international popularity was so wide already in his life that he obtained honors and acknowledgments all over the world. He obtained honors for example from the Emperor of Austria Franz Joseph, from Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, emperor of the French, from the Emperor of all Russia Alexander II, from Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany and even from the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire Abdul Aziz and from the Republic of San Marino.