Verdi, Puccini, and Italian Opera as a Popular Phenomenon

Opera as Popular Passion

There is a common error in the way the history of nineteenth-century music is told: presenting it as though the debate between Wagner and Brahms were the only relevant axis, as though important music happened exclusively in the German-speaking world. While that debate shook Vienna and Leipzig, something entirely different was taking place on the other side of the Alps: Italian opera was reaching its greatest height and becoming the most important mass cultural phenomenon of the age.

In Italy, opera was not a matter for educated elites or philosophical debate. It was the equivalent of football today: a popular, democratic, noisy passion. Opera houses stood in every mid-sized city in the country. Audiences knew the most famous arias by heart and thought nothing of interrupting a performance to demand that a beloved passage be repeated — or of booing without mercy if the tenor went flat. Singers were celebrities of the first order. And above all others, two composers defined what Italian opera could be: Giuseppe Verdi in the second half of the century, and Giacomo Puccini at the turn of the twentieth.

Giuseppe Verdi: Drama as Human Truth

Giuseppe Verdi was born in 1813 — the same year as Wagner, a fact history cannot help but note — in a village in Emilia-Romagna, in northern Italy, and died in Milan in 1901, having lived long enough to see not only the birth of the twentieth century but the unification of Italy, a cause to which his music was intimately linked. His name became a political acronym: Italians who wanted unification under the House of Savoy wrote "Viva V.E.R.D.I." on city walls — the initials of Vittorio Emanuele Re D'Italia.

But to reduce Verdi to a political symbol would be as unjust as reducing Wagner to an antisemite. What Verdi did with opera was to steer it toward a human truth the genre had frequently avoided in favor of spectacle. His operas are not vehicles for vocal virtuosity — though they demand extraordinary voices — but dramas about human beings in situations of maximum tension: power and betrayal in Macbeth, impossible love and social marginalization in La traviata, vengeance and its consequences in Rigoletto, tyranny and resistance in Don Carlo.

La traviata (1853) deserves special mention because its premiere was a spectacular failure — the audience laughed at the dying heroine because the soprano playing her was visibly overweight — and it became, within a few years, one of the most beloved operas in history. Its subject — a Parisian courtesan who falls genuinely in love and pays for that love with her death — was scandalous for the time. Verdi insisted on setting it in the present rather than the historical past, so that no one could look away: this is not a legend, this is happening now, among people like us.

In his final works, Verdi reached a summit few would have predicted for a man already past seventy. Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893) — both based on Shakespeare texts adapted by the librettist Arrigo Boito — are the works of a composer who has absorbed decades of experience and distilled them into something of a formal complexity and freedom without precedent in his earlier output. Falstaff in particular, a comedy Verdi composed at the age of seventy-nine, is one of the great surprises in the history of opera: light, ironic, built with a musical agility that seems to mock the very grandeur of the genre.

Giacomo Puccini: Emotion as System

If Verdi was the dramatist, Puccini was the master of direct emotion. Giacomo Puccini was born in Lucca in 1858 and died in Brussels in 1924, leaving his final opera, Turandot, unfinished — it would be completed by another composer from his sketches. In the span between those two dates he built a repertoire that remains the core of the world operatic canon: La bohème, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, Manon Lescaut, La fanciulla del West.

Puccini understood something few composers of his time grasped with equal clarity: that musical theatre works when the spectator feels before thinking. His operas are constructed with an almost cinematic precision in the handling of emotional time: he knows exactly when to bring a melody to its peak intensity, when to cut with a silence, when to let the orchestra say what the voice cannot. His most famous arias — "Che gelida manina" from La bohème, "Vissi d'arte" from Tosca, "Un bel dì vedremo" from Madama Butterfly — are not ornaments: they are moments when the drama pauses so that a character can bare their soul completely.

He has been criticized as manipulative, for making audiences cry too easily, for preferring effect over depth. The criticism has some validity but misses something fundamental: making a thousand people cry simultaneously, with precision and consistency, is an artistic skill of the first order, and Puccini possessed it like no one else. His more sophisticated contemporaries might look down on him; audiences around the world continued — and continue — to fill theatres whenever one of his operas is announced.

Verismo: Real Life on Stage

Between Verdi and Puccini, and concurrent with both, a movement flourished in Italy that took the tendency toward concrete human drama to its most radical extreme: verismo. The veristi — among whom Pietro Mascagni with Cavalleria rusticana and Ruggero Leoncavallo with Pagliacci stand out — brought to opera the rawest environments of everyday life: Sicilian peasants, circus performers, primal passions without aristocratic refinement. Their operas are brief, intense, with no space for contemplation: violence and death arrive quickly and without philosophical preparation.

Verismo was a minor movement in terms of its long-term legacy, but it captured something real about Italian operatic life: its conviction that raw emotion, without cultural mediation, was the heart of the genre. That conviction is the same one that today draws millions of people to the operas of Verdi and Puccini even when they do not understand Italian.

What Italian Opera Taught the World

Nineteenth-century Italian opera left a legacy that extends far beyond its repertoire. It demonstrated that music could be both profoundly popular and artistically ambitious — that there was no contradiction between filling a theatre and saying something true about the human condition. It also demonstrated that the human voice, when in service of a well-constructed drama, is the most powerful instrument in existence: capable of expressing in seconds what literature would take pages to convey.

And it left something harder to quantify but perhaps more enduring: the idea that opera is a place where one can cry without shame, where the most intense emotion is also the most legitimate. That idea survived the nineteenth century, survived the avant-gardes of the twentieth, and remains the engine filling opera houses around the world in the twenty-first.

What comes next has nothing to do with full houses or the tears of an audience. Debussy was about to propose something radically different: a music that does not seek to move but to suggest, that builds not climaxes but atmospheres, that dissolves outlines rather than defining them. Musical Impressionism is the French answer to all the grandeur of the nineteenth century — German, Italian, and of any other origin.

"Success is easy to obtain. The hard part is deserving it." — Giuseppe Verdi, letter to a friend, date unknown

Listening Suggestions

• Rigoletto — Verdi: the most concentrated drama of his middle period. The aria "La donna è mobile" is unavoidable; the Act III quartet is one of the summits of the genre.
• La traviata — Verdi: listen to the first act in full to understand how Verdi builds a character in real time.
• Otello — Verdi: late Verdi at his maximum dramatic power. Iago's "Credo" is one of the great moments in musical theatre.
• La bohème — Puccini: the most accessible entry point into Puccini's world. The fourth act is devastating.
• Madama Butterfly — Puccini: "Un bel dì vedremo" as a masterclass in building an emotion from nothing in three minutes.