Giuseppe Verdi
From Philosopedia
Verdi, Giuseppe (10 October 1813– 17 January 1901)
Verdi, the foremost composer of Italian opera, may have been interested in Nebuchadnezzar (in 1841 his third opera was Nabucodonosor), the First Crusade (I Lambardi alla prima Crociata), Manzoni (Requiem, written in 1874); and Shakespeare (Macbeth in 1847, Otello in 1867, Falstaff in 1893). But in one of the best examples of grand opera, Don Carlos, Verdi exuded an obvious dislike for the institutional Roman Catholic Church. In Aida are the words, "Will they ever have enough blooc, those ministers of heaven? "
As detailed in Verdi (1993), a biography by Mary Jane Phillips-Matz, Verdi had an affair in the 1870s with a soprano, one that was callously conducted in front of his heart-broken second wife, whom belatedly he had married. Also, when twenty-one he fought for the position in Busseto of maestro di cappella and organist. The Church, however, objected to hiring a theatrical composer. Whereupon fistfights resulted between partisans, and Verdi thereafter expressed a strong anticlericalism. He mockingly called one of his pet dogs Pretin (Little Priest). And he boasted that as a youth he had cursed a priest with death by lightning, an event that somehow took place some time later.
In 1861 Verdi served as a representative to the first Italian parliament. According to Joseph McCabe, F. T. Garibaldi showed in his biography that Verdi expressly ordered in his will that he should be buried “without any part of the customary formulae.”
He was a man of generous character. In 1898 he gave 2,000,000 lire to the city of Milan to build a home for aged and inform musicians. Upon his death in Milan, an estimated 300,000 mourners turned out, but the Church continued to claim him although Verdi was one of the many apostates from the Roman faith who were employed to compose music for its services. In its coverage of Verdi’s Macbeth, New York City Opera (September 1997) wrote
- Of all the level-headed, down-to-earth, and unshakably practical men who ever earned a living composing music, Giuseppe Verdi stands at the very top of the class. He loved clarity and hated obfuscation; he made fun of anything that suggested the supernatural, superstition, spiritualism, and seances. Everything in his world had to be examined in the light of day, or in bright sunshine, for he was a model rationalist. In a letter to a friend, Verdi’s wife Giuseppina Strepponi wrote that he was an atheist. She then crossed that word out, and over it she wrote, “not much of a believer.”
According to F.T. Garibaldi in Giuseppe Verdi (1903), the following was a stipulation in Verdi's will:
- [My funeral is to be without] any part of the customary formulae.
{CE; FFRF; JM; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD}
