The 'Vulgarity' of Giuseppe Verdi

...A plebeian two centuries out of date, he has given us a provincial Casanova...

...Anyone who knows the Po valley round Parma will recognize Verdi's atmosphere in the monuments, in the people and in the landscape...

...And yet there is something natural in this decay, in the mysterious but undeniable relationship between the common people of today and the illustrious people of the past...

...And both are artists of impeccable, strict, and artistocratic taste...

...As soon as we begin comparing Verdi with other great men of our 19th century we realize that he was not only an exception but an anachronism...

...To keep the metaphor we used earlier on, with Verdi we have the illustrious and ancient palace fallen on evil days and inhabited by artisans and workers...

...The men of the Risorgimento were provincial middle class and their mixture of nationalism and liberalism produced something very weak in alcoholic content...

...So our return to Verdi today is based on a fundamental misunderstanding: the effort to seek out and re-evaluate his modernity...

...already an anachronism in the 19th century, he is yet more so today...

...Between the middle classes and the aristocrats who once inhabited the palaces, the gulf is complete and irreparable...

...The comparison between Shakespeare and Verdi has often been made and is substantially exact...

...Verdi's art is exuberant, explosive and passionate, and it is not repressed by prudence or led astray by revolt...

...we have also seen that 19th century society in Italy is better expressed by Leopardi's despair and Manzoni's prudence than by the extremely rich and full-blooded vulgarity of Verdi...

...To me it seems that this vulgarity is the most mysterious and problematic aspect of Verdi's personality...

...yet the difference is enormous...

...But in both, despite their stature as artists, the acceptance or rejection bore the distinctive mark of what was accepted or rejected-with Manzoni this was prudence, with Leopardi despair...

...And so his characters still interest us today, because they are first and foremost men, and only secondarily medieval men or Renaissance men...

...The Duke of Mantua is Verdi's equivalent of Duke Valentino...

...But to speak of Verdi's revival has an odd sound-exactly like talking of Shakespeare's revival...

...Verdi is a close relative of the peasants who used to know Ariostos rhymes by heart, of the gondoliers who recited Tasso's verses...

...In what, then, does Verdi's vulgarity consist...

...At its best it is upheld by the animal astuteness peculiar to the artisan...

...Verdi's characters, therefore, are Renaissance rather than romantic...

...Verdi had no belief in history either as something to be reconstructed or as something to be escaped into-and this, apart from everything else, separates him off from the romantics...

...In both we find the same idea of man, the same prodigious knowledge of the human heart, the same love of life, the same wonderful capacity for splitting themselves up and disappearing behind countless characters, dismembering their autobiographies into a thousand existences and hence making them unrecognizable...

...Verdi's conception of history was immobile, static, humanistic, Plutarchian...

...With Verdi there was no such situation...

...This explains the difference between Verdi and 19th century Italians such as Manzoni, Leopardi, Cavour and Mazzini, and his resemblance to Garibaldi who was also a man of another age, and the analogies between Verdi and Shakespeare...

...Though Verdi's characters are "dressed up," they are outside history...

...it is an aristocratic and cultivated beauty...

...It is a middle-class century-only, unlike the French and English, the Italian middle class had no proper identity papers...

...Yet the degraded world of Riga/etta is pervaded by a breath of the Renaissance as seen with the admiration, envy, and amazement of an urbanized peasant who is out of touch with modern European civilization and whose standard for cultural comparison is still the Renaissance...

...For beneath Renaissance affectation there is always respect for the whole man with his vices and his virtues, and this we would look for in vain beneath the emphasis of romanticism, for romanticism anticipates the amputated and shrunken scale of decadentism...

...Consider Manzoni and Leopardi, for instance...

...Verdi was of peasant stock...

...He is a Renaissance man as seen by a Renaissance intellectual...

...We feel that Italy has exchanged her grandiose vices and far from conventional virtues for a decorum in which everything, from religion to art, from ethics to literature, is reduced to the level of timid, provincial society...

...Often, and above all in provincial cities not yet in .he grip of the Industrial Revolution and its prosperity, we can come across immense and illustrious palaces that have fallen on evil days and are inhabited by artisan and working-class families...

...After Verdi, Italy became definitely and finally petit bourgeois...

...Verdi is not in any way modern...

...We can recognize Renaissance humanism in the complete image of man that Verdi presents...

...Noris Verdi's vulgarity that vulgarity of the romantics, of Hugo, for example...

...Their romantic intoxication was a prelude to the drunken orgy of rhetoric under Fascism, and the lower middle class camomile-infusion under the Christian Democrats...

...True, urged on by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, it made a supreme effort and managed to bring about the Risorgimento, but even the Risorgimento lacked men, made little impression On the masses, was full of humiliating contradictions, and was far behind the rest of Europe...

...Yet both Manzoni and Leopardi are "modern" artists, that is, they fitted perfectly into the culture of their epoch...

...It would be useless to look for anything like this in the 19th century romantics...

...Duke Valentino is a full-length portrait executed with incomparable vigor...

...And there is the question of proportion...

...Now if this is true it confirms our comparison with Shakespeare, with the important modification about vulgarity thrown in...

...They aimed for such things, but never managed to create them...

...They say that Stravinsky once said he would give much of his work to have invented the notes of La donna e mobile...

...We see Verdi, and will always see him, as a Renaissance man, for his knowledge of human nature goes back to the age when man still saw himself as the end, and only himself, and nothing less than himself...

...With Verdi the greatness of Italy, and the best and most typically hers that she had to give to the world, died out: that is to say, humanism...

...for, heaven help us, some artists are not vulgar, and others, no less gifted, are...

...With the Duke of Mantua Verdi has given us his Duke Valentino...

...Giuseppe Verdi's situation in the Italian 19th century is rather like the situation of those illustrious but impoverished palaces in the heart of the now bourgeois cities in our provinces...

...And there is another difference between Verdi and Hugo: Hugo believed in history, he believed that men's conduct changed with history, in other words that it was determined historically...

...Even today these people retain a full-blooded and exuberant vitality which is a reflection of old preCounter- Reformation Italy: We can still imagine that we are in Verdi's age...

...It had never beheaded kings, or made a Reformation, or adored the goddess Reason...

...Though in any other country the Risorgimento would have been an important upheaval, in Italy, given her grandiose past, it was a mean little enterprise...

...A petty affair, taken all in all...

...we have another comparison to make, that between the Duke Valentino as described by Machiavelli in The Prince, and the Duke of Mantua as portrayed by Verdi in Rigaetta...

...In these 19th century, middle- and lowermiddle- class houses we breathe an enclosed, guarded and withdrawn atmosphere...

...Stendhal, for instance, is never vulgar...

...After the comparison between Verdi and Shakespeare...

...He is not, like Verdi, a plebeian in whom the culture of a dead epoch survives as folklore...

...Verdi must be considered with the respect and understanding due to phenomena of culture, which are every bit as mysterious and powerful as those of nature...

...As by origin he was neither aristocratic nor middle class, but peasant, he had no obligation to accept or-in last analysis-reject anything...

...Hugo was a real European romantic -from him the path to the decadents, to Baudelaire and Rimbaud, is an easy one...

...But in Rigoletto the great political enterprises of the Borgias have become the low intrigues of a tiny Italian court, captain adventurers have turned into idle courtiers, the hero is a provincial good-timer...

...Side by side with medieval palaces in stone and iron, the gigantic buildings of the Renaissance, and the vast houses of the 17th and 18th centuries, we find little neo-classical style houses of the middle class 19th century-petty, cold, narrow, as though planned by art-masters from elementary schools...

...These unfortunate people show up the unavoidable decay of the oncesplendid buildings in which they live...

...Yet the comparison needs correcting on one important point: Shakespeare is never vulgar...

...What Verdi offers is a Plutarchian or, if it be preferred, Shakespearean idea of man-and it is not his fault if he inherited this idea not from the decorous, timid and petty middle class culture of his time but from the folklore of the common people of the Po valley...

...His actuality is the actuality of poetry...

...Balzac, also a great novelist, is...

...When we look closely we see that the two characters are made of the same Renaissance stuff and are probably the finest, strongest, most complete characters ever created in Italy...

...At first sight the thing seems obvious, and anyway not very interesting...

...but if we listen carefully and analyze the stupefying vitality and subtlety of the Duke's character, we shall see that the vitality and dimensions of this Casanova are in no way inferior to Machiavelli's Valentino So Verdi is our plebeian, folkloristic peasant, our "vulgar" Shakespeare...

...His genius is not a genius that accepts or rejects, but a genius that identifies itself and expresses itself in its own creations...

...For in their lightning collocation and evocative force these notes stand up to Macbeth's famous soliloquy after he has been told of Lady Macbeth's death...

...Verdi's full-blooded, passionate, robust and explosive personality, within the poor and petty Italian 19th century, seems almost incredible...

...Folklore and vulgarity do not impair this inspiring conception born out of its time...

...Whereas we feel a yawning gulf in cases where these palaces have been spruced up and restored and divided into large numbers of luxury flatlets for middleclass artistic people on the lookout for historic surroundings...

...Finally, unlike Manzoni and Leopardi, Verdi is "vulgar...

...In other words we have the humanist view of our Renaissance which' was abandoned and betrayed by the Italian ruling class after the Counter-Reformation, but preserved by the common people in a decayed form of folklore...

...I would like to pause for a moment on the analogies with Shakespeare because they give us another key to the understanding of the nature of Verdi's vulgarity...

...he is a man of his time and of the society of his time, like Manzoni and Leopardi...

...In Manzoni and Leopardi the artistic temperament, negatively speaking, drew its distinctive colouring from the prudent, provincial and timid society to which they belonged and from which they originated...

...There is nothing of all this about Verdi...

...Now both Manzoni and Leopardi are artists of a stature certainly not inferior to Verdi...

...Both stemmed directly from the Italian ruling class, both belonged to the provincial aristocracy and were in positions typical of Italian society of the period...

...But here too, as with Shakespeare and Verdi...

...The kind of beauty he creates has nothing popular, rustic or ingenuous about it...

...The resemblance is only superficial...

...As we have seen, Italy underwent no social upheaval comparable to the one in France...

...whereas Verdi's apparent romanticism leads to no similar stage of decadence...

...As an outcome of this belief the characters in Hugo's plays have to be Middle Ages men, or Renaissance men, before they are men at all, with the result that Hugo's plays are unreadable and unplayable nowadays...

...In him there is no vulgarity, everything about him breathes the paradoxical, aristocratic impiety that Stendhal was to admire so much two centuries later...

...In a way Manzoni accepted and expressed the pettiness of that society, whereas Leopardi rejected it...

...there is a substantial difference which, yet again, can be traced back to Verdi's plebeian vulgarity...

...The truth of what has been said can be appreciated if we glance at the types of architecture in Italian provincial cities...

...it was, and stili is, a timid, cautious, narrow-minded middle class that cringed before the aristocracy and licked the boots of the clergy...

...ALBERTO MORAVIA'S forthcoming collection of essays, of which this is one, will be published in January by Farrar, Straus & Giroux under the title Man As an End...

...If Verdi had been born in the 16th century he would have given us the real Duke Valentino with his ravening nobility and tigerish energy...

...But for Stendhal and Balzac we have an explanation to hand, for a deep social upheaval separated them in time, with consequent change in style...