next work, a comic opera known alternatively as ‘Un
Giorno di Regno’ and ‘Il Finto Stanislao’
(1840) was a failure. ‘Nabucodonosor’
(1842) and ‘I Lombardi’ (1843) established
his reputation in his own country and won favour abroad;
but the opera which gave him European fame was ‘Ernani’
(1844). The story is an adaptation of Victor
Hugo’s famous play. Elvira, the chosen bride
of Don Silva, a Spanish grandee, loves Ernani, an
exiled nobleman, who has had to take refuge in brigandage.
Silva discovers their attachment, but being connected
with Ernani in a plot against Charles V., he defers
his vengeance for the moment. He yields his claim
upon Elvira’s affection, but exacts a promise
from his rival, that when he demands it, Ernani shall
be prepared to take his own life. Charles’s
magnanimity frustrates the conspiracy, and Silva,
defeated alike in love and ambition, claims the fulfilment
of Ernani’s oath, despite the prayers of Elvira,
who is condemned to see her lover stab himself in
her presence. Hugo’s melodrama suited Verdi’s
blood-and-thunder style exactly. ‘Ernani’
is crude and sensational, but its rough vigour never
descends to weakness, though it often comes dangerously
near to vulgarity. ‘Ernani’ is the
opera most typical of Verdi’s earliest period.
With all its blemishes, it is easy to see how its
masculine vigour and energy must have captivated the
audiences of the day. But there were political
as well as musical reasons for the instantaneous success
of Verdi’s early operas. Italy in the forties
was a seething mass of sedition. Verdi’s
strenuous melodies, often allied to words in which
the passionate patriotism of his countrymen contrived
to read a political sentiment, struck like a trumpet-call
upon the ears of men already ripe for revolt against
the hated Austrian rule. Such strains as the
famous ’O mia patria, si bella e perduta’
in ‘Nabucodonosor’ proclaimed Verdi the
Tyrtaeus of awakened Italy.
‘Ernani’ was followed by a series of works
which, for the sake of Verdi’s reputation, it
is better to pass over as briefly as possible.
His success provided him with more engagements than
he could conscientiously fulfil, and the quality of
his work suffered in consequence. There are some
fine scenes in ‘I Due Foscari’ (1844),
but it has little of the vigour of ‘Ernani.’
‘Giovanna d’Arco’ (1845), ‘Alzira’
(1845), and ‘Attila’ (1846), were almost
total failures. In ‘Macbeth’ (1847),
however, Verdi seems to have been inspired by his
subject, and wrote better music than he had yet given
to the world. The libretto is a miserable perversion
of Shakespeare, and for that reason the opera has
never succeeded in England, but in countries which
can calmly contemplate a ballet of witches, or listen
unmoved to Lady Macbeth trolling a drinking-song,
it has had its day of success. ‘Macbeth’
is interesting to students of Verdi’s development
as the first work in which he shows signs of emerging
from his Sturm und Drang period. There