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Bridging Divides: Verdi's Requiem in Post-Unification Italy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Francesca Vella
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Abstract

This article addresses the early Italian reception of Verdi's Messa da Requiem (1874), premièred in Milan on the first anniversary of the death of the novelist Alessandro Manzoni. Previous literature has focused on issues of musical genre and the work's political implications (particularly its connections with Manzoni and with late nineteenth-century Italian revivals of ‘old’ sacred music). The article examines, instead, the curiously pluralistic concerns of contemporary critics, as well as certain aspects of Verdi's vocal writing, with the aim of destabilizing traditional dichotomies such as old/new, sacred/operatic, vocal/instrumental and progress/crisis. It argues for more broad-ranging political resonances of Verdi's work, suggesting that the negotiation of a variety of boundaries both in Verdi's music and in its contemporary discussion made the Requiem dovetail with wider cultural attempts to define Italian identity.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 140 , Issue 2 , 2015 , pp. 313 - 342
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 The Royal Musical Association

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References

1 ‘Music, like a woman, is so holy with anticipation and purification, that even when men sully it with prostitution, they cannot totally obliterate the aura of promise that crowns it.’ Giuseppe Mazzini, Filosofia della musica (1836), repr. in Filosofia della musica, e estetica musicale del primo Ottocento, ed. Marcello de Angelis (Florence, 1977), 33–77 (p. 48); trans. quoted from Source Readings in Music History, ed. Oliver Strunk, rev. Leo Treitler (New York and London, 1998), 1085–94 (p. 1085).

2 ‘There are men with a very virtuous nature who need to believe in God; others whose nature is equally perfect who are happy without believing in anything and just following rigorously every precept of severe morality: Manzoni, and Verdi! … These two men make me think; they constitute for me a real subject of meditation. But my imperfections and my ignorance do not allow me to resolve this obscure question.’ Giuseppina Strepponi, letter to Clara Maffei, 7 September 1872 (Quartetto milanese ottocentesco, ed. Arturo di Ascoli (Rome, 1974), 282). All translations are my own unless otherwise stated.

3 See David Rosen, Verdi: ‘Requiem’ (Cambridge, 1995), 11. Following the San Marco première, the Messa da Requiem per l'anniversario della morte di Alessandro Manzoni 22 maggio 1874 received three performances at La Scala (on 25, 27 and 29 May), the first conducted by Verdi, the others by Franco Faccio. The soloists were Teresa Stolz, Maria Waldmann, Giuseppe Capponi and Ormondo Maini; the chorus and orchestra were formed of approximately 120 and 100 participants respectively. Further performances with Verdi took place in Paris (1874, 1875 and 1876), London (1875), Vienna (1875), Cologne (1877) and Milan (1879), the last of these for the benefit of the victims of a flood that had hit northern Italy.

4 ‘Una novella vittoria dell'arte italiana’ (Amintore Galli, in Il secolo, 23 May 1874, 2); ‘nel regno dell'arte, il più grande avvenimento dell'anno’ (‘Z’, in Gazzetta ufficiale del Regno d'Italia, 29 May 1874, 1). Dottor Verità (alias Leone Fortis) was even more explicit in his patriotic zeal: ‘Udendo la messa di Verdi, noi abbiamo sentito l'orgoglio di appartenere ad una nazione che può in arte tenere sempre il primato del mondo […] e ad una città che onora la memoria di un grande Scrittore con l'opera di un grande Maestro’ (‘Listening to Verdi's Mass, we felt proud to belong to a nation that is still pre-eminent in art […] and to a city that pays homage to the memory of a great Writer with the work of a great Maestro’; in Il pungolo, 23 May 1874 (morning issue), 2).

5 ‘La Messa da Requiem del Verdi è destinata, pei suoi nuovi e singolari caratteri, a segnare una linea impensata di demarcazione nello sviluppo dell'arte religiosa, aprendole forse un più vasto orizzonte’ (‘Owing to its novel and characteristic qualities, Verdi's Mass is destined to mark an unexpected watershed in the development of religious art, possibly opening up for it a larger horizon’; Filippo Filippi, in La perseveranza, 23 May 1874, 1). Filippi's statement was echoed by a critic in Venice: ‘Il Requiem di Verdi […] segnerà indubbiamente un'era nuova per le composizioni di carattere sacro’ (‘No doubt Verdi's Requiem will mark a new era for sacred composition’; Gazzetta di Venezia, quoted from Il Requiem del maestro Giuseppe Verdi a Venezia al Teatro Malibran nel luglio 1875, ed. Pietro Faustini (Venice, 1875), 8). The Venice correspondent for the Gazzetta musicale di Milano (henceforth GMM) argued that ‘Il Requiem di Verdi porrà nella Storia della musica sacra le due famose colonne d'Ercole’ (‘Verdi's Requiem will constitute the Pillars of Hercules in the history of sacred music’; ‘P. F.’, in GMM, 18 July 1875, 236).

6 An unpublished letter to Verdi from Tito Ricordi (12 June 1873) points to the national significance of the Requiem project: ‘Permetti che io venga a porgerti le mie più entusiastiche congratulazioni pel tuo sublime pensiero di scrivere una Messa per l'anniversario della morte di Manzoni. Sì, lo ripeto, sublime pensiero possibile ad attuarsi solamente in questa nostra patria terra altre volte chiamata dei morti!! Infatti quale altra nazione potrebbe in quest'epoca vantare due uomini di genio, così grandi che l'uno fosse veramente ed in tutto degno di onorare la memoria dell'altro? Che il cielo mi conservi in salute per godere all'epoca prefissa delle sublimi, religiose melodie che avrai composte per questo Santo e grande Scopo’ (‘Let me express to you my most enthusiastic congratulations on your sublime idea of composing a Mass for the anniversary of Manzoni's death. I repeat, a sublime idea, which could have materialized only in our homeland, sometimes called the land of the dead!! Indeed what other nation could pride itself on two such men of genius, so great that the one is truly worthy of paying homage to the memory of the other? May God keep me in good health so that on the agreed date I shall enjoy the sublime, religious melodies you will have composed for this Holy and great Purpose’; from the digital archive of the Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani (original at Villa Verdi, Sant'Agata)).

7 David Rosen, critical commentary to Giuseppe Verdi, Messa da Requiem per l'anniversario della morte di Manzoni 22 maggio 1874, ed. Rosen (Chicago, IL, and Milan, 1990), 5. A facsimile edition of the autograph was published by Ricordi in 1941 with a preface by Ildebrando Pizzetti.

8 These tensions had come to the surface early on, when the Milan city council had first convened to discuss plans for the Manzoni commemoration. Arguments arose about whether it would be appropriate for the municipality to associate itself with a religious ceremony. The council eventually approved the project; but given the conflicts between the newly born Italian nation state and the church (conflicts made harsher by the conquest of Rome in 1870), the potential implications of mingling secular and religious interests were to remain a focus of debate during subsequent months. They were, however, reformulated in musical polemics about the genre of Verdi's work.

9 Hans von Bülow made his criticism in the two-part article ‘Musikalisches aus Italien’ published in the Allgemeine Zeitung (Munich) on 28 May and 1 June 1874 (pp. 2293–4 and 2351–2).

10 For some recent accounts of the work's early reception in Italy and abroad, see Rosen, Verdi: ‘Requiem’; Laura Basini, ‘Verdi and Sacred Revivalism in Post Unification Italy’, 19th-Century Music, 28 (2004–5), 133–59; and Gundula Kreuzer, ‘“Oper im Kirchengewande”? Verdi's Requiem and the Anxieties of the Young German Empire’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 58 (2005), 399–449 (a revised version is included in her Verdi and the Germans: From Unification to the Third Reich (Cambridge, 2010), 39–84). For a reading of the Requiem as a message of national unity, see Pierluigi Petrobelli, ‘Un messaggio di unità nazionale’, Messa da Requiem, programme note for the Verdi Festival 2001 at the Teatro Regio in Parma, 11–15. For an interpretation of the work as a farewell to an entire period of Italian history, see Rubens Tedeschi, ‘Requiem per il Risorgimento’, programme notes for a performance of the work at La Scala in September 1985, 15–18, and James Hepokoski, ‘Verdi's Requiem: A Memorial for an Epoch’, booklet note for Verdi: ‘Requiem’, Deutsche Grammophon 423674-2 (1989), 13–17.

11 References to German influences did, however, surface in articles from abroad. Benoît Jean Baptiste Jouvin argued that ‘nell'ultime tre grandi opere che ho citato [Don Carlos, Aida e Messa da Requiem], Verdi si è spinto verso le nubi alemanne, ma conservando nei suoi occhi, per illuminargli la via, gli splendori del cielo italiano’ (‘in the last three operas I have mentioned, Verdi pushed himself towards the German clouds, but without losing sight, to illuminate his path, of the brightness of the Italian sky’; quoted from GMM, 23 May 1875, 168). A critic for the Daily Telegraph spotted ‘una tendenza manifesta verso le idee germaniche’ (‘a clear attraction to German ideas’) in Verdi's work (quoted from ‘Supplemento al n. 21’ of GMM, 23 May 1875, 6).

12 On the Rossini Mass, see Messa per Rossini: La storia, il testo, la musica, ed. Michele Girardi and Pierluigi Petrobelli (Parma and Milan, 1988). For an account of the Requiem's compositional history, see Verdi, Messa da Requiem, ed. Rosen, xli–lvi.

13 ‘Semplicemente un'opera d'arte’ (Verdi, letters to Angelo Mariani, 19 August 1869; Camillo Casarini, 10 November 1869; and Giulio Ricordi, 18 November 1869; I copialettere di Giuseppe Verdi, ed. Gaetano Cesari and Alessandro Luzio (Milan, 1913), 211, 217 and 218).

14 See Verdi, letters to Giulio Ricordi, 14 February 1874 (Franco Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, 4 vols. (Milan, 1959), iii, 665) and Giulio Belinzaghi, 14 March 1874 (I copialettere, ed. Cesari and Luzio, 286, note 3 (with a mistaken date)).

15 ‘Quanto era più dignitoso e da vero Italiano il provvedere in modo che quella messa […] potesse a tutti gli anniversari della morte del gran Manzoni, venir eseguita in una chiesa di Milano! Certo che si guadagnava meno danaro, ma si perdeva anche meno decoro’ (‘How much more respectable and worthy of a true Italian it would have been if that Mass […] had been performed in a church of Milan on every anniversary of Manzoni's death! No doubt it would have been less lucrative, but it would have been more decorous’; Vincenzo Sassaroli, Considerazioni sullo stato attuale dell'arte musicale in Italia e sull'importanza artistica dell'opera Aida e della Messa di Verdi (Genoa, 1876), 33). Giulio Roberti referred in 1879 to Verdi's ‘speculazioni bottegali’ (‘business speculations’), and wrote that ‘il Manzoni fu preso come pretesto per comporre e far eseguire una messa, e soprattutto per far quattrini’ (‘Manzoni became a pretext to compose and perform a Mass, and above all to make money’; in La stampa, 5 August 1879, 2). Verdi had been anxious to stress the disinterested nature of his proposal: ‘Fatemi il piacere di telegrafare subito a Milano a chi credete perché venga smentita subito stasera la notizia che si eseguirà la Messa a pagamento’ (‘Please telegraph immediately whomever you think appropriate in Milan and make sure by tonight the news is disavowed that the Mass will be performed for money’; letter to Giulio Ricordi, 20–23 April 1874 (digital archive of the Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani (original at Archivio Ricordi, Milan)).

16 See ‘X. Y.’, in Il commercio di Genova, 19 August 1876, repr. in Giuseppe Verdi, genovese, ed. Roberto Iovino and Stefano Verdino (Lucca, 2000), 139.

17 See, for instance, Girolamo Alessandro Biaggi, ‘Rassegna musicale’, Nuova antologia di scienze, lettere ed arti, 26 (1874), 772–82 (p. 781).

18 See Kreuzer, ‘“Oper im Kirchengewande”?’, 412–13, repr. in Verdi and the Germans, 51–2.

19 For a collection of reviews of Rossini's Stabat mater, see Lo Stabat mater di Rossini giudicato dalla stampa periodica francese ed italiana, ossia raccolta dei migliori articoli artistici pubblicati dal giornalismo delle due nazioni sovra tale argomento (Milan, 1843).

20 See Gino Stefani, ‘La Messe solennelle di Rossini nella critica dell'epoca’, Bollettino del Centro Rossiniano di Studi, 8 (1968), 137–48, and Roberta Montemorra Marvin, ‘La Petite messe solennelle di Rossini: La sua prima esecuzione in Italia’, ibid., 41 (2001), 37–82.

21 ‘A. A.’, in GMM, 14 March 1869, 88.

22 Alberto Mazzucato, in Il mondo artistico, 2 May 1869, 1.

23 ‘Il corriere’, in Il mondo artistico, 2 May 1869, 2.

24 ‘M.’, in Il monitore di Bologna, 24 March 1869, quoted from Marvin, ‘La Petite messe solennelle di Rossini’, 53.

25 See, for instance, Filippi's article in La perseveranza, repr. in GMM, 4 April 1869, 115–17.

26 See Stefani, ‘La Messe solennelle di Rossini’, 142, and Marvin, ‘La Petite messe solennelle di Rossini’, 51.

27 Giuseppe Baini, Memorie storico-critiche della vita e delle opere di Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, 2 vols. (Rome, 1828); Marco Di Pasquale, ‘Inventing Palestrina: Ideological and Historiographical Approaches in Nineteenth-Century Italy’, Schweizer Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft/Annales suisses de musicologie/Annuario svizzero di musicologia, 30 (2010), 223–66 (p. 239).

28 For a chronological account of the late nineteenth-century sacred-music ‘renaissance’ in Italy, see Felice Rainoldi, Sentieri della musica sacra: Dall'Ottocento al Concilio Vaticano II: Documentazione su ideologie e prassi (Rome, 1996). See also Basini, ‘Verdi and Sacred Revivalism’, and Roberto Calabretto, ‘Tomadini, Amelli e la nascita di Musica sacra’, Candotti, Tomadini, De Santi e la riforma della musica sacra, ed. Franco Colussi and Lucia Boscolo Folegana (Udine, 2011), 471–8. For music and the Cecilian movement in Italy, see Aspetti del cecilianesimo nella cultura musicale italiana dell'Ottocento, ed. Mauro Casadei Turroni Monti and Cesarino Ruini (Vatican City, 2004).

29 See James Garratt, Palestrina and the German Romantic Imagination: Interpreting Historicism in Nineteenth-Century Music (Cambridge, 2002), 3. The nineteenth-century reception of Palestrina in Italy has received little attention from scholars; see, however, Leopold M. Kantner and Angela Pachovsky, La cappella musicale pontificia nell'Ottocento (Rome, 1998), esp. pp. 65–78; and Angela Pachovsky, ‘La prassi esecutiva dei mottetti del Palestrina nel periodo ottocentesco della cappella pontificia: Testimonianze dei diari sistini’, Palestrina e l'Europa: Atti del III Convegno Internazionale di Studi, 6–9 ottobre 1994, ed. Giancarlo Rostirolla, Stefania Soldati and Elena Zomparelli (Palestrina, 2006), 1089–112.

30 ‘I canoni, le imitazioni e le fughe costituiscono tecnicamente la musica palestriniana.’ Amintore Galli, La musica ed i musicisti dal secolo X sino ai nostri giorni, ovvero biografie cronologiche d'illustri maestri (Milan, 1871), 18. Galli was a composer, teacher and music critic based in Milan for a few years during the 1860s and then again from the 1870s; he cultivated both historicist trends and interests in French and German opera.

31 ‘La fuga, e le dissonanze’; ‘acconcio assai alle sacre parole, alla liturgia’. Vincenzo Bigliani, La messa in musica, ossia considerazioni sulla musica sacra e sua importanza (Florence, 1872), 22–3.

32 ‘Lo stile fugato e imitativo [è] il più conveniente allo scopo della musica sacra.’ Musica sacra, 15 May 1877, quoted from Calabretto, ‘Tomadini, Amelli e la nascita di Musica sacra’, 478, note 23. A similar claim was made by Mattia Cipollone in Musica sacra, March–April 1878, 11. Francesco Izzo has also called attention to the learned style as an element closely associated with nineteenth-century Italian church music; see his ‘A Tale for Survival: Choral Music in Italy’, Nineteenth-Century Choral Music, ed. Donna M. Di Grazia (Abingdon, 2012), 305–31 (pp. 309, 314–16; my thanks to Dr Izzo for providing me with a copy of this article). In France, by contrast, Palestrina's music was understood as mostly homophonic and harmonic rather than contrapuntal; see Katharine Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past: Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France (New York, 2005), 179–207, esp. pp. 182 and 190–1. For the Catholic Church's conception of sacred music, see Deliberazioni dei Congressi Cattolici Italiani di Venezia e di Firenze (Bologna, 1876), 32.

33 See Marco Di Pasquale, ‘Immagini del Rinascimento nella storiografia musicale italiana del secondo Ottocento: Due paradigmi’, Musica e storia, 13 (2005), 279–322 (pp. 299–300).

34 According to Richard L. Crocker, Palestrina's music ‘was understood by the [nineteenth-century] reformers to be purely vocal (a cappella)’. Crocker, An Introduction to Gregorian Chant (New Haven, CT, and London, 2000), 84. On the ‘constructed’ nature of the vocal and instrumental idioms, and their understanding in relation to an earlier, medieval repertory during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, The Modern Invention of Medieval Music: Scholarship, Ideology, Performance (Cambridge, 2002).

35 ‘In codeste mirabili sinfonie vocali è trasfuso un soave effluvio religioso’ (Galli, La musica ed i musicisti, 18); ‘la severità della strumentazione, e talvolta la mancanza totale di questa’ (Bigliani, La messa in musica, 24). The a cappella scoring seems to have been a defining characteristic of alla Palestrina compositions also for Verdi; see his letter to Ferdinand Hiller, 7 January 1880 (Carteggi verdiani, ed. Alessandro Luzio, 4 vols. (Rome, 1935–47), ii (1935), 333), in which he describes his Pater noster (1880) as ‘scritto a cinque parti senza accompagnamento nello stile Palestrina’ (‘written in five parts without accompaniment in the style of Palestrina’).

36 The Offertorio, an organ prelude, was also regarded by Filippi as sacred in style because of the instrument's church connotations.

37 ‘Canone a quattro parti nello stile osservato, alla Palestrina, sulle parole Christe eleison, scritto con magistero sublime e con tutta la severità e l'unzione voluta dallo stile religioso’; ‘veramente evangelico’; ‘il sentimento religioso, cristiano, come l'ha consacrato la tradizione’ (Filippi, in La perseveranza, quoted from GMM, 4 April 1869, 115–17).

38 Some of these topics are addressed in Bruno Tobia, Una patria per gli italiani: Spazi, itinerari, monumenti nell'Italia unita, 1870–1900 (Rome and Bari, 1991); I luoghi della memoria, ed. Mario Isnenghi, 3 vols. (Rome and Bari, 1996–7); and Ilaria Porciani, La festa della nazione: Rappresentazione dello Stato e spazi sociali nell'Italia unita (Bologna, 1997).

39 Verdi, letter to Francesco Florimo, 5 January 1871 (I copialettere, ed. Cesari and Luzio, 233). For a discussion of this motto and larger Italian perceptions of time, see my ‘Verdi's Don Carlo as Monument’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 25 (2013), 75–103 (pp. 99–102).

40 ‘Coro a quattro voci, lavorato ad imitazione uso Palestrina, che avrebbe potuto […] farmi aspirare […] ad un posto di contrappuntista in un Liceo qualunque’. Verdi, letter to Giulio Ricordi, 12 August 1871 (I copialettere, ed. Cesari and Luzio, 676; for the date, see Verdi's Aida: The History of an Opera in Letters and Documents, ed. Hans Busch (Minneapolis, MN, 1978), 202, note 1).

41 ‘L'arte nostra non è l'istromentale.’ Verdi, letter to Clara Maffei, 2 May 1879 (I copialettere, ed. Cesari and Luzio, 525).

42 See Verdi, letter to Opprandino Arrivabene, 30 March 1879 (Verdi intimo: Carteggio di Giuseppe Verdi con il conte Opprandino Arrivabene (1861–1886), ed. Annibale Alberti (Milan, 1931), 231–3). ‘Quell'arte che era nostra’: Verdi, letter to the Società Orchestrale della Scala, 4 April 1879 (I copialettere, ed. Cesari and Luzio, 306). See also his letter to Giulio Ricordi, April 1878 (ibid., 626).

43 On the String Quartet, see Manfred Hermann Schmid, ‘“Il orrendo sol bemolle”: Zum Streichquartett von Giuseppe Verdi’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 59 (2002), 222–43; Ennio Speranza, ‘Caratteri e forme di una “pianta fuori di clima”: Sul quartetto per archi di Verdi’, Studi verdiani, 17 (2003), 110–65; and Gundula Kreuzer, Giuseppe Verdi: Chamber Music, ed. Kreuzer (Chicago, IL, and Milan, 2010), xi–xxii. For a contextualized view of the Aida overture seen in relation to wider, symphonic developments in Italian music under the influence of foreign compositions, see Antonio Rostagno, ‘Ouverture e dramma negli anni settanta: Il caso della sinfonia di Aida’, Studi verdiani, 14 (1999), 11–50. Another instrumental piece that was deemed to resonate (through counterpoint) with ‘old’ music is the Act 2 Prelude of the 1884 Don Carlo; see Filippi, in La perseveranza, 14 January 1884, repr. in Carteggio Verdi–Ricordi: 1882–1885, ed. Franca Cella, Madina Ricordi and Marisa di Gregorio Casati (Parma, 1994), 405–9 (p. 408).

44 As is well known, Verdi replaced the fugue of the ‘Liber scriptus’ in 1875 with a mezzo-soprano solo composed for Waldmann; see David Rosen, ‘Verdi's “Liber scriptus” Rewritten’, Musical Quarterly, 55 (1969), 151–69.

45 ‘Corale a voci sole ad imitazione, scritto nel grande stile dell'arte classica: un pezzo veramente da Chiesa’; ‘una bella melopia [sic], una specie di recitativo cantabile all'unissono [sic], ma alla distanza di un'intera ottava’. Filippi, in La perseveranza, 23 May 1874, 1–2. The prominent Cecilian figure and founder of Musica sacra Guerrino Amelli, who criticized Verdi's Requiem severely, nonetheless praised the ‘soave e maestosa melodia dell’Agnus Dei, la quale quasi sdegnando affatto l'accompagnamento istrumentale, colla sua ingenua bellezza ci parve richiamare la sublime semplicità delle melodie gregoriane’ (the ‘delicate, dignified melody of the Agnus Dei, which, almost disregarding instrumental accompaniment, recalls through its innocent beauty the sublime simplicity of Gregorian melodies’; Amelli, speech repr. in Sulla restaurazione della musica sacra in Italia: Estratto degli atti del primo Congresso Cattolico Italiano tenutosi in Venezia dal 12 al 16 giugno 1874 (Bologna, 1874), 5–22 (p. 15)). Similarly, Galli commented: ‘una melodia lenta, tranquilla, facile […] pella sua popolare semplicità ricorda l'indole dei canti liturgici’ (‘a slow, calm, simple melody […] through its popular simplicity it recalls liturgical chant’; in Il secolo, 23 May 1874, 3).

46 On the fusion of the singers’ voices, see E. Spagnolo, in Gazzetta di Milano, 26 May 1874, 2; the anonymous review in Corriere della sera, 1–2 July 1879, 3; and Blanche Roosevelt, Verdi, Milan and Othello: Being a Short Life of Verdi, with Letters Written about Milan and the New Opera of Othello: Represented for the First Time on the Stage of La Scala Theatre, February 5, 1887 (London, 1887), 73.

47 ‘Il Sanctus, fuga a due cori, scritto al modo antico e che rammenta la maniera del Lotti, del Pergolese [sic] e degli altri grandi musicisti del passato’ (‘The Sanctus, a fugue for two choruses, written in the old style and recalling Lotti, Pergolesi and the other great musicians of the past’; Spagnolo, in Gazzetta di Milano, 26 May 1874, 2). ‘La Messa da Requiem di Verdi è l'ultima perfezione dello stile di Pergolese [sic] e Marcello; basta una sola delle tre fughe […] che vi si riscontrano per confermare nel modo più assoluto la nostra asserzione […] Il Sanctus […] racchiude tutto lo scibile della scienza dell'armonia e del contrappunto; anzi dell'arte musicale stessa. Oggi Verdi […] è pari ai più grandi classici d'ogni tempo e d'ogni scuola’ (‘Verdi's Messa da Requiem is the uttermost perfection of the style of Pergolesi and Marcello; one of its three fugues […] is enough to prove unquestionably this assertion […]. The Sanctus […] is a compendium of all knowledge in the field of harmony and counterpoint, nay of music as a whole. Today Verdi […] equals the greatest classics of any time and any school’; Galli, in Il secolo, 23 May 1874, 2–3).

48 Galli described the Requiem as ‘un'opera colossale, e da cima a fondo tutta melodia di sapore esclusivamente italiano’ (‘a colossal work, all melody of Italian flavour from beginning to end’; in Il secolo, 23 May 1874, 3).

49 Carolyn Abbate, ‘Mourning and Apocalypse in Verdi's Requiem’, booklet note for Verdi: ‘Requiem’, ‘Quattro pezzi sacri’, Deutsche Grammophon 435884-2 (1993), 11–16 (p. 15).

50 One foreign commentator, teacher and music critic, August Guckeisen, also made an interesting pronouncement in this regard: ‘To a considerably greater extent than we Germans, the Italians use the human voice instrumentally […]. Solo voices are thus used in the same way as orchestral instruments: singers and players are treated as one large orchestra.’ This is why, according to Guckeisen, Verdi the conductor adopted very fast tempos in the Requiem fugues, tempos that seemed less appropriate for singers than for an orchestra. Quoted from the translation of Guckeisen's article in Marcello Conati, Interviews and Encounters with Verdi, trans. Richard Stokes (London, 1984), 125–7 (p. 126).

51 See Rosen, Verdi: ‘Requiem’, 54–5.

52 Further echoes of this aria may be heard in the three accented notes with acciaccaturas (a recurrent element in Don Carlos, and Philippe's aria in particular) at bars 29–30, and in the bass entrance (recalling Philippe's voice) immediately afterwards.

53 The awkward relationship between words and music is also evident in Verdi's different distribution of the syllables of ‘fidelium defunctorium’ to the same music at bars 36 and 203.

54 As a result of the soprano's long-held note, one also struggles to grasp the word on which it is sung (‘sed’, i.e. ‘but’), which further undermines traditional notions of vocality.

55 The significance of these bars also stems from the Requiem's compositional history. The Libera me passage (virtually unchanged in its 1869 and 1874 versions, except for a few minor revisions and the transposition from A minor to B♭ minor) provided the opening material for the Requiem e Kyrie, albeit with different scoring: the Libera me statement is a cappella, whereas the antiphon of the first movement is scored for strings and choral declamation. See David Rosen, ‘La “Messa” a Rossini e il “Requiem” per Manzoni’, Messa per Rossini, ed. Girardi and Petrobelli, 119–49.

56 The texture of this passage is similar to that of the quartet for solo voices in Act 2 of Luisa Miller, though in the opera the supporting group is made up of three soloists (rather than the chorus) and the character of the music is markedly different.

57 ‘Quella raccolta di sacre melodie registrate nei libri corali con precetto di conservarle e con proibizione di alterarle’; ‘Da tutti vien chiamato fermo questo canto per la sua lentezza e gravità. A me sembra che il medesimo attributo indichi meglio la sua stabilità’ (‘Everybody calls this chant fermo owing to its slowness and gravity. I reckon this attribute better indicates its stability’); ‘è soggetto alla legge delle cerimonie sacre, le quali sono immutabili’. Carlo Viganò, ‘Memoria intorno al canto fermo’, Musica sacra, May–July 1879, 18–20, 21–4 and 30–1 (p. 18).

58 ‘Verdi è la personificazione del progresso musicale.’ Galli, in Il secolo, 23 May 1874, 2.

59 See Galli, La musica ed i musicisti, 45–6.

60 Filippi, in La perseveranza, 23 May 1874, 1.

61 ‘La forma più elementare della musica da chiesa è il canto fermo: in confronto del canto fermo Palestrina è un audace novatore: e lo è Pergolese [sic], col suo Stabat Mater drammatico, in confronto di Palestrina; e così via discendendo fino a Rossini, ed a Berlioz’ (‘The most elementary form of church music is plainchant: compared with it, Palestrina is a bold innovator; and so is Pergolesi, with his dramatic Stabat mater, compared with Palestrina; and so on and on until Rossini and Berlioz’; Filippi, in La perseveranza, 28 May 1874, 1).

62 ‘Parve […] che la musica da chiesa obbedire dovesse alle leggi immutabili del cattolicismo e restasse immobile al pari di quello […] lasciamo le troppo sterili forme de’ vecchi maestri’. Pietro Cominazzi, in La fama, 26 May 1874, 82. Another commentator, writing for the Gazzetta di Venezia, maintained that ‘Il gigantesco successo di questo lavoro [il Requiem di Verdi] […] non può a meno di far gettare uno sguardo retrospettivo sulla storia della musica sacra e lo si fa con grande compiacenza, perché il progresso fu imponente’ (‘The enormous success of this work […] cannot avoid making one look back at the history of sacred music and be happy at its impressive progress’; quoted from Il Requiem del maestro Giuseppe Verdi a Venezia, ed. Faustini, 23–4).

63 ‘La musica da chiesa rispetto allo stile, alle forme, alla condotta, all'armonia, al contrappunto e a tutto ciò, insomma, che costituisce la sua manifestazione esterna e il suo magistero tecnico, deve essere concepita e scritta secondo la pratica del giorno.’ Girolamo Alessandro Biaggi, ‘Della vita e delle opere di Gioacchino Rossini’, Nuova antologia di scienze, lettere ed arti, 10 (1869), 637–47 (p. 642; see also pp. 640–1). See also idem, ‘La musica religiosa e la Petite messe del Rossini’, Nuova antologia di scienze, lettere ed arti, 14 (1870), 612–20, esp. pp. 613–14.

64 ‘Ogni cosa ha il suo tempo’; ‘tralasciare quanto di convenzionale si incontra e di relativo ad un tempo che passò, né può più ritornare’. Giuseppe Arrigo, L'organo nel santuario e la musica religiosa (Alessandria, 1875), quoted from Rainoldi, Sentieri della musica sacra, 191.

65 On such teleological views of music history, as exemplified by Biaggi, see Di Pasquale, ‘Inventing Palestrina’, and idem, ‘Immagini del Rinascimento’, esp. pp. 295–306. Galli was another critic and theorist whose writings adopt a similar evolutionary approach to music history; see Andrea Estero, ‘Il dibattito critico e musicologico nella pubblicistica milanese’, Milano musicale: 1861–1897, ed. Bianca Maria Antolini (Lucca, 1999), 333–50 (pp. 349–50).

66 Axel Körner, Politics of Culture in Liberal Italy: From Unification to Fascism (New York and London, 2009), 2.

67 Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians, 1860–1920 (Chicago, IL, 2007), 2. For an insightful analysis of tropes of degeneration during the Risorgimento and their connection to later nineteenth-century nationalistic discourse, see Silvana Patriarca, ‘Indolence and Regeneration: Tropes and Tensions of Risorgimento Patriotism’, American Historical Review, 110 (2005), 380–408, and eadem, Italian Vices: Nation and Character from the Risorgimento to the Republic (Cambridge, 2010), 20–50. On the ideology of nostalgia in late nineteenth-century Italy, see Richard Drake, Byzantium for Rome: The Politics of Nostalgia in Umbertian Italy, 1878–1900 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1980).

68 See Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–c. 1918 (Cambridge, 1993).

69 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York, 2001), 10.

70 See Luigi Bianchi, Una gloria dell'arte italiana, ossia lo studio del canto ecclesiastico riportato a chiara intelligenza di tutti (Pisa, 1877), 5.

71 ‘Sacrifica spesso la melodia ad un male inteso artifizio armonico, o, come dicono alla tedesca’; ‘stile del tutto profano […] puramente strumentale’; ‘per nulla intese, o considerate le dette parole, servono invece come di zavorra’ (‘totally misunderstood or disregarded, words become mere ballast’); ‘un indefinito e indefinibile frastuono’ (‘an undefined and undefinable roar’); ‘un mare tempestoso di assordanti strumenti’; ‘Della musica enigmatica che dicono dell'avvenire, giudicheranno i posteri.’ Ibid., 22–4.

72 For a general overview of scholarly examinations of secularization, see Hugh McLeod's introduction to his Secularisation in Western Europe, 1848–1914 (New York, 2000), 1–30. For insightful revisions of traditional views, see Austen Ivereigh, ‘The Politics of Religion in an Age of Revival’, and Margaret Lavinia Anderson, ‘The Divisions of the Pope: The Catholic Revival and Europe's Transition to Democracy’, The Politics of Religion in an Age of Revival: Studies in Nineteenth-Century Europe and Latin America, ed. Ivereigh (London, 2000), 1–21 and 22–42; and Christopher Clark, ‘The New Catholicism and the European Culture Wars’, Culture Wars: Secular–Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser (Cambridge, 2005), 11–46.

73 Spagnolo, in Gazzetta di Milano, 26 May 1874, 1.

74 ‘In questa [musica] dei nostri giorni che noi condanniamo, s'agita non pertanto tale un fermento di vita che prenunzia nuovi destini, nuovo sviluppo, nuova e più solenne missione’ (‘In this [music] of our own day which we condemn, there is yet so much vitality as to foretell new destinies, new progress, and a new and more solemn mission’; Mazzini, Filosofia della musica, repr. in Filosofia della musica, e estetica musicale, ed. de Angelis, 48). On Mazzini's views about music's social regenerative power, see Lawrence Kramer's foreword and Franco Sciannameo's introduction to Giuseppe Mazzini's Philosophy of Music (1836): Envisioning a Social Opera, trans. Emilie Ashurt Venturi (1867), ed. and annotated by Franco Sciannameo (Lewiston, NY, and Lampeter, 2004), i–iv and 1–26 respectively.

75 The moralizing effects of music-making, and choral singing in particular, were the subject of a series of articles published in GMM during August 1874 (in the issues of 2, 9, 23 and 30 August). The articles were signed by the composer and choral professor Giulio Roberti, and drew on writings by the Florentine musicologist Leo Puliti. Similar claims about the civilizing effects of choral music were made a few years later by Giovanni Varisco, professor of singing and author of didactic textbooks in Milan; see his Metodo di canto corale per imitazione e corso di lezioni teorico-pratiche (Milan, 1882). For more on these topics, see Marina Vaccarini Gallarani, ‘Aspetti e problemi della didattica musicale a Milano nell'ultimo ventennio dell'Ottocento’, Milano musicale, ed. Antolini, 351–71, esp. pp. 360–5; and Irene Piazzoni, Spettacolo, istituzioni e società nell'Italia postunitaria (1860–1882) (Rome, 2001), esp. pp. 317–24.

76 Manzoni does, however, feature in an 1874 French article emphasizing the poet's and Verdi's similar devotion to Italy's cause of independence. ‘Verdi fut ainsi le collaborateur de Cavour et de Victor-Emmanuel. A cette même cause de l'indépendance nationale, l'auteur des Promessi Sposi avait, lui aussi, dévoué son génie et les tendances de la vie la plus pure et la plus laborieuse, et c'est à la mémoire de Manzoni, à la gloire du compatriote et de l'ami, que Verdi consacre aujourd'hui cette messe de Requiem, oeuvre sinon religieuse, du moins inspirée par une pensée toute religieuse’ (‘Verdi was thus the collaborator of Cavour and Victor Emanuel. To that same cause of national independence, the author of I promessi sposi had himself devoted his genius and orientated his purest and most laborious life, and it is to the memory of Manzoni, to the glory of his compatriot and friend, that today Verdi dedicates his Requiem Mass, which, if not a religious work, is at least inspired by an all-religious thought’; F. de Lagenevais [Ange-Henri Blaze de Bury], ‘Revue musicale’, Revue des deux mondes, 15 June 1874, 941–55 (p. 942); article repr. almost unchanged in H. Blaze de Bury, ‘Verdi’, Musiciens du passé, du présent et de l'avenir (Paris, 1880), 247–79 (p. 256).

77 See Rosen, critical commentary to Verdi, Messa da Requiem, 3–4.