«Ho detto male di... Verdi». Saggio di ricezione negativa

Abstract

This essay discusses aspects of Verdi’s reception and fathoms the reasons of the resentful debates, biased attitudes, and specious reservations that characterized his entire life and climaxed in the years right after his death. Nationalism is not the only reason: in some cases, on the contrary, some foreign critics blamed Verdi for not being Italian enough... In general, critics were not able to grasp the evolution of Verdi’s choices and, as a consequence, they prompted pointless debates about Verdi’s models, the lack of a Verdi’s ‘school’, his hypothetical subjugation to Wagner, and so on. At the core of these critiques that characterized the reception of nineteenth-century Italian opera as a whole, of which Verdi was simply the most prominent representative, there was the growing elitism of Italian intellectuals. This attitude reached its peak with the Futurist and, more generally, Modernist movements. Verdi’s fault was, allegedly, to represent the age of realism in music at its apex. The unanimous praise of Falstaff, then, sounded worse than an outright blame against a manifold genius.