Opera: The Musical Theater That Italy Invented and the World Adopted (1600–present)

Italy had already been producing high-quality religious and secular music for centuries, with composition schools radiating from Venice, Rome, Naples, and Florence. But opera was something else: a total theatre where music did not accompany the narrative but was the narrative, where the most extreme emotions found in the human voice — trained to the limits of what was possible — their most direct and most powerful expression.

In the four centuries that followed, Italy refined that invention until it became the most influential musical art form of Western civilisation. The great opera composers of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century — Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, Puccini — are figures whose influence extends beyond classical music to reach cinema, musical theatre, and popular culture around the world.

Bel canto: the voice as supreme instrument

The first great period of Italian opera — spanning from the early nineteenth century to its midpoint — is defined by the concept of bel canto: the "beautiful singing", the vocal technique that places beauty of sound above all else, demanding from the singer agility, purity of timbre, perfect control of the fiato and the ability to ornament the melody with trills and flourishes that demonstrate absolute mastery of the voice.

The master of bel canto was Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868) — born in Pesaro, died in Paris, having lived everywhere. Rossini wrote thirty-nine operas in fewer than twenty years, at a speed his contemporaries found both astonishing and suspicious. Il Barbiere di Siviglia (1816) — "The Barber of Seville" — is his comic masterpiece: two hours of romantic intrigue, disguises, impossible arias and the unstoppable energy of someone who writes music because he can do nothing else. Its overture — one of the most recognizable in history — begins calmly and accelerates until it becomes a race the listener cannot resist.

Rossini retired at thirty-seven — when his fame was total and his genius was at its peak — and never fully explained why. He lived forty more years without writing operas, cooking, receiving visitors, being the most famous man in Europe. He is the only musician in history who chose silence at the summit.

Vincenzo Bellini (1801–1835) was the opposite of Rossini in temperament: he worked slowly, with a painful meticulousness, and died at thirty-three leaving ten operas that include some of the most sublimely beautiful moments in the entire operatic tradition. Norma (1831) — with the aria "Casta Diva" — is for many the pinnacle of bel canto: a melody that rises with such inevitability that it seems it always existed and the composer only had to discover it. Chopin wanted Norma to be played at his funeral.

Gaetano Donizetti (1797–1848) was the most prolific of the three: seventy operas, several of which are permanent pillars of the repertoire. Lucia di Lammermoor (1835) elevated the mad scene aria to an art form of its own: the soprano descending into madness after betrayal and murder, singing with a voice that fragments and folds back upon itself with the same architecture as a mind breaking apart. L'elisir d'amore (1832) was its polar opposite: light comedy, with "Una furtiva lagrima" — the aria of a love that dare not declare itself — standing as one of the most perfect melodies in the repertoire.

Verdi: opera as nation

Giuseppe Verdi was born on October 10, 1813, in Roncole, near Parma, into a humble family. His father was a tavern keeper. He studied music in Busseto and then tried to enter the Milan Conservatory: he was rejected. That rejection marked him for life — the most important composer in nineteenth-century Italy could not study at Italy's Conservatory.

He started well, with a few operas that enjoyed moderate success. Then came tragedy: his wife and two children died within the space of two years. Verdi, devastated, vowed never to write operas again. The director of La Scala, Bartolomeo Merelli, literally forced the libretto of Nabucco into his hands.

Nabucco (1842) was the moment Verdi's career truly began — and also the moment Italian opera became politics. The story of the Babylonian king and the Hebrew slaves in captivity resonated immediately with audiences in northern Italy, who were living under Austrian occupation. The "Va, pensiero, sull'ali dorate" — the chorus of slaves imploring to return to their homeland, with the pensiero flying "on golden wings" — became the anthem of the Italian unification movement, the Risorgimento.

The Austrians saw the inscription "VIVA VERDI" appearing on city walls and thought it was a tribute to the composer. It was also a political acronym: Vittorio Emanuele Re D'Italia — the candidate for the throne of a unified Italy. Verdi, who did not consider himself political, had unwittingly written the battle cry of a national liberation movement.

The trilogy of his years of greatest compositional power — Rigoletto (1851), Il Trovatore (1853), La Traviata (1853) — represented the definitive leap toward dramatic maturity. Rigoletto — the story of the jester who tries to protect his daughter and fails in devastating fashion — brought him trouble with the Austrian censors, who would not tolerate a king being portrayed as a murderous libertine. Verdi changed the setting: the king became a duke, the Duke of Mantua, whose "La donna è mobile" — the womanizer's song claiming that women are fickle — became one of the most recognizable melodies in all of opera.

La Traviata — based on La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils — scandalized the audience at its Venice premiere: a courtesan as romantic protagonist, a love story destroyed by social conventions. Today it is one of the most performed operas in the world.

Aida (1871) was the commission of his life: the Khedive of Egypt asked him for an opera for the inauguration of the Cairo Opera House — though in fact it premiered there later, after the theater opened with Rigoletto. The Grand March from Aida became the emblem of monumental operatic spectacle: elephants, slaves, instantly famous trumpets, the thrill of visual power in the service of music.

Verdi died on January 27, 1901, in Milan. He had requested that the funeral be held in silence. But when his cortege passed through the streets of Milan, the people lining the sidewalks began spontaneously singing "Va, pensiero." The police could not stop a hundred thousand people softly singing the chorus of the slaves.

Puccini: the people's composer

If Verdi was the composer of the Italian nation, Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) was the composer of the people of the entire world. Born in Lucca, Tuscany, into a family with five generations of musicians, Puccini inherited the tradition but carried it into entirely new territory: verismo, emotional realism, opera that speaks not of kings and slaves but of ordinary people living, loving and dying in the contemporary world.

In an extraordinary decade spanning 1893 to 1904, Puccini wrote four operas that alone would be enough to secure the reputation of any composer: Manon Lescaut, La Bohème, Tosca and Madama Butterfly.

La Bohème (1896) — premiered in Turin under the baton of Arturo Toscanini, who was twenty-nine years old — tells the story of a group of young, impoverished artists in Paris and the love between the poet Rodolfo and Mimì, who dies of tuberculosis. It is the most performed opera in the world for reasons that go beyond the music: it speaks of youth, of poverty without melodrama, of love that arrives when one has nothing, of death that arrives when one is beginning to have everything. George Bernard Shaw wrote of Puccini: "He seems more the heir of Verdi than any of his rivals."

Tosca (1900) is the most violent opera in the standard repertoire: murder, torture, blackmail, double betrayal, a leap into the void from the walls of Castel Sant'Angelo. The soprano Tosca is the most dramatic character in Italian opera: a woman who kills to protect the man she loves and who discovers too late that she has been betrayed by the very person she wanted to save.

Madama Butterfly (1904) — the story of Cio-Cio-San, the young Japanese woman who waits years for the American officer who abandoned her and who destroys her when he returns with his American wife — was a resounding failure at its premiere at La Scala. Puccini revised it and restaged it three months later in Brescia: it was an absolute triumph. The distance between the failure and the success of the same work was eighty-nine days.

His final work, Turandot, was left unfinished when Puccini died of throat cancer in Brussels on 29 November 1924, at the age of sixty-five. His disciple Alfredo Catalani completed it and it was premiered at La Scala in 1926 by Toscanini, who at the moment where Puccini's music ended and Catalani's began, stopped the orchestra, turned to the audience and said: "Here the Maestro laid down his pen." The aria "Nessun Dorma" from Turandot — "Nessun dorma, nessun dorma" — became, when Luciano Pavarotti sang it at the opening ceremony of the Italia 90 Football World Cup before millions of viewers around the world, the most famous operatic aria of the twentieth century.

La Scala: the temple

No history of Italian opera is complete without the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, founded in 1778, which for two centuries was the most important stage in the operatic world and which today remains the benchmark par excellence of a singer's or conductor's prestige.

Verdi premiered some of his operas there. Toscanini conducted it for years and turned it into a synonym for absolute excellence. Maria Callas — the Greek-American soprano whose career in the nineteen fifties redefined what an opera singer could do with a voice and a role — gave some of her most legendary performances there. The name "La Scala" in the world of opera carries the same resonance as "the Louvre" in the world of art or "MoMA" in the world of contemporary art.

The legacy: four centuries of influence

Italian opera invented the concept of the "star" — the artist whose name on the bill sells tickets regardless of the title — centuries before Hollywood perfected it. It invented the concept of the "aria" — the self-contained piece within a larger work that can live on its own outside of context — which pop and musical theatre adopted without knowing it. It invented the idea that human emotion can and must be exaggerated in music because exaggeration is the truth of art and not its falsification.

That inheritance is direct: without Verdi there is no Richard Wagner. Without Puccini there is no Andrew Lloyd Webber. Without bel canto there is no concept of "the voice" that defines twentieth-century pop from Frank Sinatra to Mariah Carey. Italian opera is the mother of almost everything the twentieth century considered serious popular music.

Editorial note: When Verdi died in 1901, he had asked for a silent funeral. At the first procession, people on the sidewalks began to hum "Va, pensiero" without any agreement, without anyone organizing it, because that song belonged to everyone. Thirty days later he was definitively moved to his tomb at the Rest Home for Musicians that he himself had founded in Milan for elderly musicians who had no means of support. At that second transfer, two hundred thousand people accompanied the procession through the streets of Milan singing "Va, pensiero." There was no one conducting. The city simply knew the song.