16 - Since Verdi: Italian serious music 1860-1995

Summary

1860–1900

In the years immediately following the unification of Italy, serious musical activity throughout the peninsula was still overwhelmingly dominated by opera, as it had been during the Risorgimento period. In all the major cities, and many smaller ones too, the operatic public was large and various, and was still at least as interested in new operas as in established 'classics'. At this time, one senior living Italian opera composer towered above all others, dwarfing them so drastically that most of them are nowadays hardly remembered even in their own country: Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) is now regarded everywhere as the only really lastingly important Italian composer who was active across the third quarter of the nineteenth century, and indeed as one of the greatest opera composers who ever lived. Although Verdi became markedly less prolific in his later years, many (perhaps most) of his finest works date from after 1860, and Aida (1871), Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893) have long been rated among the highest achievements of Italian genius in any field. However, by the time the two last-mentioned operas were written, the semi-retired Verdi had come to occupy a less unquestionably central place in Italian musical life, and new creative developments were emerging which in various ways showed signs of transforming the character of the new music being written at the time.