I

After the first performance of Macbeth (at La Pergola, Florence) in March 1847, Verdi turned his full attention to Andrea Maffei’s libretto, I Masnadieri, an adaptation of Friedrich Schiller’s 1781 play, Die Raüber. Verdi’s journey to England in the summer of 1847 for the premiere of this new opera came at an important stage in his career. He had already achieved real Italian success five years earlier with the production of his third opera, Nabucco, at La Scala in 1842, and his international success was beginning to reach remarkable proportions. Even more significant in the long run than his burgeoning popularity was the internal evolution of Verdi’s image of himself as a serious artist.⁴ One manifestation of this evolution was Verdi’s crusade for guarantees that his operas would be performed exactly as he wrote them—no cuts, no changes in the orchestration, and no transpositions.⁵ Of course, he could not get these guarantees—but from this time on, Verdi, with increasing success, applied pressure in order to get impresarios and singers to serve the requirements of the composer, not the other way around.

Looking back on Verdi’s early operas today, we find it easy to see their dramatic energy and melodic inventiveness. Things are not necessarily the same, however, if we consider these early operas from the point of view of English audiences hearing them for the first time.

Verdi came to London in the summer of 1847, accompanied by his friend and student, Emanuele Muzio.⁶ In one sense, the trip was a brilliant success. Muzio’s letters to Barezzi tell at length of the tremendous ovations for the work, the performers, and the composer. But in another sense, the journey was a failure: I Masnadieri was given a few performances but was not revived. The contract Verdi expected to be offered for more operas never materialized (Copialettere, pp. 42-44).

The apparently contradictory aspects of this situation illuminate important aspects of the mid-century operatic world in England. In many ways, this was a very small world, centering almost entirely on Her Majesty’s Theatre in London. Covent Garden Theatre had fallen on hard times and was accurately termed by one journalist “this happless establishment.”⁷ Although Carl Maria von Weber’s Oberon had been given its first performance there in 1826, since that time opera had played a secondary role. (By the mid-1840s there were “Masked Balls, Corn Law Meetings, Unending Concerts, Fancy Fairs,” in other words, “anything but what ought to be.”)⁸ At the Lyceum and at Drury Lane, some operas were presented, but those theaters too were generally acknowledged to be of secondary importance.⁹

Her Majesty’s Theatre in the Haymarket reigned supreme.¹⁰ Benjamin Lumley was its manager, having taken over in 1842 on the death of the previous manager, Pierre Laporte, whose assistant Lumley had been since 1835. Lumley had decided views about what an opera house should represent: the “resort and ‘rendezvous’ of the élite of rank and fashion.”¹¹ Accordingly, we find that newspaper accounts of the operas presented during the 1840s often discuss not only the singers and the operas, but also the social position and fashionable appearance of the audience. Was the Queen there? Prince Albert? The Duke of Wellington? How brilliantly dressed did the audience appear when everyone stood to sing “God Save the Queen” at the end of the performance? In one section of the house, “Fop’s Alley,” Lumley tells us that “during various portions of the performance,” the “exquisite” young men gathered and chattered, making a general spectacle of themselves (Lumley, Reminiscences, p. 63). Both in the theatre and at his annual summer “fête” at his villa on the Thames, Lumley found that cultivating the aristocracy was “among the most pleasing of compensations for the anxieties and vexations to which a director is necessarily subjected.”¹²

The artistic standards of Lumley’s theatre should have been as high as the social standards for two reasons: the high quality of the orchestra under Michael Costa’s direction, and the high ensemble level maintained by the principal singers. Sutherland Edwards, in a discussion of London opera companies published in 1862, tells us that “the same singers for nearly half a century past have for the most part sung alternately at the Italian operas of Paris and London.”¹³ In the 1830s and 1840s, these were the most celebrated in Europe: among them, Giuditta Pasta, María Felicia Malibran, Fanny Persiani, Giulia Grisi, Giovanni Rubini, Giuseppe Mario, Antonio Tamburini, and Luigi Lablache. And yet, looking back on the period from a mid-twentieth century perspective, Harold Rosenthal asserts that “by reading between the lines [of Lumley’s Reminiscences], and taking into account the views expressed by Chorley in his criticism both in the Athenaeum and elsewhere, it is fairly easy to see just how artistically bankrupt Italian Opera in London was in the 1840s” (Two Centuries, p. 66).

To call Her Majesty’s “artistically bankrupt” is surely an overstatement, but it is an accurate summary of Chorley’s position. Coming to London from Lancashire in the early 1830s to work for the newly established weekly review of arts and letters, the Athenaeum, Chorley was by the mid-1840s a major power as a shaper of opinion. Though he reviewed many novels, his specialty was always reviews of musical performances. His odd appearance (“the missing link between the chimpanzee and the cockatoo”)¹⁴ and squeaky voice were laughed at, but his knowledge of music and singing was impressive, and his gift to be able to articulate his reactions vividly caused him to be taken seriously. His fortunes prospered with those of the Athenaeum, which established a high reputation for critical integrity (not a characteristic of many journals in the first half of the century).¹⁵ One of Chorley’s contemporaries, Charles Hallé of Manchester, recognized that Chorley was a “man of strong views, fearless in his criticism, perfectly honest,” and yet Hallé cited as Chorley’s weak point the fact that he was “often and unconsciously swayed by personal antipathies or sympathies.”¹⁶

Chorley’s taste was for Felix Mendelssohn in the concert hall and Rossini on the stage.¹⁷ Therefore, to later generations, he may seem strikingly conservative. We must remind ourselves, however, that all generations of music critics seem conservative to succeeding generations. By way of comparison, consider the Second Earl of Mount Edgcumbe, a distinguished and respected amateur, who lamented in 1828 that for the past twenty years he had seldom brought himself to attend the opera because of the changing style of composition and the decline in the singers’ standards, which deviated “more and more from what I had been accustomed to in the golden age of the Opera.”¹⁸ And ten years after Mount Edgcumbe’s complaint, George Hogarth asserted that the decline of singing had been caused by the operas of Rossini and his followers. In Semiramide, “the ear is absolutely stunned by the unremitting noise of the orchestra.” The new approaches to writing operas “consist in a mere accession of noise. ”¹⁹ Singers in general can no longer sing Mozart well because of Rossini’s heavy orchestration:

This species of accompaniment, the vices of which have been aggravated by Rossini’s successors, has greatly injured the Italian style of singing. It has lost much of the sweetness and smoothness for which it has so long been pre-eminent. Forced to contend incessantly with such a mass of sound, the females are compelled to scream, and the males to shout; and the incorrect and slovenly harmony which they are accustomed to hear from the orchestra renders them by no means fastidious as to the purity of their roulades and embellishments.²⁰

Bearing in mind such critical positions, we can better understand the historical context for Chorley’s reaction to Verdi.

The first notice Chorley took of Verdi is a substantial article published on 31 August 1844. The article is remarkable mainly because in it Chorley analyzes Verdi’s early operas before he had had a chance to hear any of them. He begins by noting that Verdi is newsworthy:

Recent occurrences and appearances having called the attention of our English public to the modern style, or rather no-style, of Italian singing, it may be as well for the critic to see what is doing in the world of Italian vocal composition; and, since the name of Giuseppe Verdi has begun to circulate widely as the maestro most likely to become popular, we avail ourselves of such opportunities as perusal of his compositions here published affords us, to offer a word or two concerning his operas.

(Athenaeum, 31 August 1844, p. 797).

Chorley’s essay proceeds from general to specific: first an analysis of what he considered the basis of all Italian opera, then an analysis of how that basic principle applies to Verdi’s operas.

The general analysis is the widespread perception that the melody is the basis for opera: the article then moves into a diatribe against all currently active composers for their inability to understand that principle: Hector Berlioz, Richard Wagner, and “[Vincenzo] Bellini’s successors” ([Gaetano] Donizetti and Verdi) are all guilty. Chorley sarcastically predicts that we may someday see without regret “the Opera reduced to the shapeless recitative from whence it arose” (Athenaeum, 31 August 1844, p. 797).

After some incorrect biographical information for transition (“It is not many years since Sig. Verdi was in this country . . .”), the analysis moves to specifics. Having examined several selections of Verdi’s music recently published in England, Chorley laments that there is no melody, and that the works’ “varieties of form” show even less “original fancy” than those of Giovanni Pacini, Saverio Mercadante, or “Donnizetti.” Chorley’s claim that Verdi’s first operas have no original melodies, here first stated, remains basic to his criticism of Verdi for many years to come. Nor does this fact indicate that Chorley was an extraordinarily poor listener. As Julian Budden suggests, “the idiom of the time was as narrowly defined as at any period in the eighteenth century, so that to a casual ear all composers seem to be quoting from each other.”²¹ Despite Chorley’s feelings about Verdi’s poor melodic gift, the “concerted” pieces struck him as “a shade worthier and more individual.” Reluctant to seem too approving, he quickly points out that the striking effects had all been anticipated in various parts of Rossini.²²

Despite his many reservations, Chorley is clearly trying to be open-minded. He even grants Verdi a share of grudging admiration: “There is a certain aspiration in his works which deserves recognition, and may lead him to produce compositions which will command respect” (Athenaeum, 31 August 1844, p. 797). At this point, Chorley’s antagonism is tentative: he leaves open the possibility that he may actually come to like Verdi’s operas when he has a chance to see them.

II

Six months after Chorley’s Athenaeum article, Her Majesty’s Theatre gratified public curiosity about the new composer by presenting Ernani in March 1845, a few weeks before the “brilliant” part of the season (which always ran from Easter into August).²³ The opera’s first performance in London thus took place almost exactly one year after its premiere at La Fenice in Venice (9 March 1844). Chorley began his review of Ernani by remarking enthusiastically that “we do not remember so interesting a commencement of an opera season as that of this day week, when a new work by a new composer was executed by new singers;—and music, maestro, and vocalists alike stood the difficult test.” He adds: “By its length, which extends to four acts, its subject, and the treatment, it would seem as if the Italians are looking to the Grand Opera of Paris for their model in serious musical drama”) Athenaeum,15 March 1845, p. 275). Chorley was considering the opera carefully in the light of his own criteria as established in the article of the previous August, before he had seen any of Verdi’s operas; the same three issues were central: Verdi’s lack of originality, his interesting “concerted music,” and his disturbing treatment of voices.

“That he has made free use” of other composers’ music is clear (that is, the musical ideas of Bellini and Donizetti, as well as a dozen other “commonplaces” of current Italian opera). “But there is something beside” which impresses Chorley favorably: “a disposition to study new effects in the concerted music. . . . Signor Verdi’s choruses are spirited: they move.” Nevertheless, in his writing for voices, Verdi’s “uncouthness of interval” is “ruinous.” “The soprano part is perpetually above the stave. ... To make matters worse, the orchestra is for the most part at full strength—very frequently fortissimo, leaving the poor prima donna no choice, save scream or pantomime.” Composers no longer have the “slightest right to complain of the short-lived date of the voices of the present generation” because it is “their own ruthless ignorance” of how to write for the voice which causes the problem. Under the circumstances, the level of singing attained by Angiolina Bosio (Elvira), Moriani (Ernani), Fornasari (Don Ruy Gomez) and Botelli (Don Carlos) ranged from adequate to good (Athenaeum, 15 March 1845, pp. 275 and 276).

When Chorley looked back on the 1845 Ernani from the vantage point of 1862 in his Thirty Years’ Musical Recollections, he stated that Ernani had been “received with curiosity rather than sympathy.” Recollecting his bitter antagonism toward Verdi in subsequent seasons, he added that the opera “gave hopes which have not been justified by its writer’s subsequent operas, more popular though they have been” (Chorley, Thirty Years’, 1862, I, 256-257). Chorley’s memory of the opera’s reception agrees substantially with Lumley’s own assessment in his Reminiscences: “That it excited the enthusiasm awarded to it so lavishly in Italy, cannot be asserted; that it was a failure, may be emphatically denied. . . . The general result of this first introduction of Verdi to the English public was a feeling of hesitation and doubt” (p. 103). Despite its only “moderate” popular success, Lumley had the opera repeated “for several nights during the ante-Easter season” (p. 105).

After the season ended in August, Lumley went to the Continent, as he often did, to make arrangements for the coming season. His decision to initiate negotiations with Verdi about the possibility of writing an opera for London was a creditable instance of managerial far-sightedness. Verdi’s Italian success was great and growing; nevertheless, London’s reaction to Ernani had shown that his success might not be exportable. Yet Lumley was apparently confident that the next opera by Verdi would be a greater curiosity for English audiences than the previous one (he must have known, too, that the great success Nabucco was then enjoying in Paris augured well for its London chances).²⁴

We know some details of Verdi’s business dealings with Lumley because they are preserved in Verdi’s Copialettere. Verdi’s irritation with his publisher Giovanni Ricordi had reached a crisis: Verdi signed a contract on 16 October 1845, binding himself to write two operas for Ricordi’s rival, Francesco Lucca.²⁵ Our picture of Verdi’s life at this period is especially vivid if we supplement the information in the Copialettere by that in another source: the collection of letters written by Emanuele Muzio to Antonio Barezzi (see above, note 6). Several years younger than Verdi, Muzio had come to Milan from Verdi’s hometown, Busseto, in April 1844, and had become Verdi’s pupil. In addition to being the only pupil Verdi ever had, he soon became a companion and functioned as Verdi’s secretary as well. (He remained a close friend for life.) Muzio idolized Verdi and his operas; his regular letters to Barezzi— the generous merchant at Busseto, friend to both Muzio and Verdi—show us Verdi from the perspective of an impressionable young man who was somewhat naive, but also sensitive, good-humored, and honest.

Writing to Barezzi on 27 October 1845, Muzio was amused by the foreigner who had arrived in Milan while Verdi was in the countryside:

As soon as Lumley heard about the outcome of Nabucco he came from London along with Escudier [the French publisher], to sign up the Signor Maestro for next spring. Not finding him in Milan, they went to Clusone, where he was [visiting Countess Maffei]; but as they were on their way there, he was coming back, so they keep running after him till they find him. They thought he was in Busseto, and wanted to go there directly. It is very likely they will sign him up for London, with a third more than the fee he would receive in Italy, plus lodging, because there two little rooms cost twenty francs a day.²⁶

When Lumley and Verdi finally got together, the negotiations must have gone smoothly. Although no document exists containing the exact agreement (as far as I know), we have Muzio’s excited report to Barezzi two days later (29 October 1845) that the engagement was agreed on (“II signor Maestro è proprio scritturato per Londra, ieri mattina”). Verdi was to write an opera a year for ten years (“volevano che si obbligasse per 10 anni! ! ! e dare uriopera per anno!”).²⁷

Meanwhile, something that should have been completely irrelevant to Verdi’s London contract was becoming an issue back in England. The Illustrated London News, a mass circulation weekly, reported on 11 October 1845 that Jenny Lind’s voice was magnificent and that she would be making her English debut, sooner or later, at Drury Lane under the management of Alfred Bunn, even though “most liberal offers have also been tendered to her by Mr. Lumley’s agents for her Majesty’s Theatre” (p. 233). Despite the contract with Bunn to appear in English-language performances of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Feldlager von Schlesien, Jenny Lind had changed her mind: on 18 October, Lind wrote Bunn asking to be released from her contract. Bunn’s reply was to threaten legal action against Lind.²⁸ But this had nothing to do with Verdi and Lumley.

Not yet.

III

The year 1846 began with two developments that affected the reception of Verdi’s early operas in London: Chorley’s attitude toward Verdi changed from tentative acceptance to complete hostility, and Lumley’s management of Her Majesty’s was threatened by a series of problems so acute as to be almost overwhelming.

Like many English periodicals, the Athenaeum at this time printed gossip about Jenny Lind in almost every issue (is she coming? what will she sing? where will she sing?). But on 17 January, Chorley turned his attention from this phenomenon to a consideration of Verdi’s newly published Sei Romanzi. Headed “The Verdi Mania,” the review elaborated Chorley’s new line that Verdi was all bad. “We are led to pay more attention to this newest of Italian maestri than his merits demand, from the circumstance that, bad or good, his Operas contain certain elements of popularity. . . . How long Signor Verdi’s reputation will last, seems to us very questionable.” Some say that his rythmic tricks in Nabucco have been “found out” and that “little or nothing remains: little science—no melody” (17 January 1846, p. 73).

On 23 January, Lumley announced publicly that Michael Costa, the widely admired conductor at Her Majesty’s, was being replaced by Michael Balfe. Whether Costa resigned or whether Lumley fired him is not entirely clear from the strongly worded letters both men released to the press (see the Athenaeum, 31 January 1846). Costa took a great deal of good feeling along with him, apparently including Chorley’s. The same issue of the Athenaeum that printed the Lumley-Costa correspondence also printed a significant little rumor: “Our contemporaries now tell us that Covent Garden is forthwith to be arranged as a second Italian Opera House. . . . [W]e cannot but consider such a project as hopeful, and an inevitable result from the course pursued at Her Majesty’s Theatre” (p. 129). Elsewhere in this same issue, Chorley enumerates a long series of grievances against Lumley’s administration. He sums them up as follows: “We will thankfully concede that the Opera orchestra and chorus are better now than ever before [Chorley’s concession flatters Costa, not Lumley]. In all other respects, however, the Opera has deteriorated year by year since it came under Mr. Lumley’s control” (p. 128).

Throughout the season of 1846, Chorley returns to the poor artistic standards of the house. Fifteen years later, when he published his Thirty Years’ Musical Recollections, he was somewhat calmer: “It would serve no good turn ... to recall the green room tales and their contradictions, which agitated those who are concerned in such maters.—It is enough to have lived for a while in the cauldron of Scandal, without stirring its waters afresh” (Thirty Years’, 1862, II, 4). Chorley then complained that the press at the time generally whitewashed the problems by ignoring them: “There was no record of failure. . . . The so-called power of journalism had never a greater rebuke than in the downfall of Her Majesty’s Theatre—day by day described as unparagoned in the splendour of its performances, and as enjoying a well-deserved prosperity!”) Thirty Years’, 1862, I, 273). Chorley felt that events vindicated his judgment about the rottenness of the house. How far this may be an overstatement prompted by Chorley’s sense of self-importance is impossible to say precisely, but it is true that in other journals one reads constantly about the brilliance of the house, “crowded to excess with rank and fashion”— as they liked to say—with very little sense that rank and fashion may not be the only judges of the health of an opera house. Chorley’s notices, week after week in 1846, appear sometimes simply cantankerous; there is, however, no doubt that their tone was caused by the frustration of a critic who took opera more seriously as art than critics were expected to.

Lumley, in his Reminiscences, traced his ultimate downfall not to Chorley’s criticism but to problems with singers that began under his predecessor, Laporte, and finally came to a head in 1846. Certain singers, whom Lumley termed the vielle garde, or the cabal, or the “clique,” were allegedly power mad (pp. 9, 14, 134 and following). The clique had temporarily triumphed in 1841 when Laporte fired Tamburini and replaced him with Filippo Coletti: members of the audience under the cabal’s sway responded with “Tamburini riots” and Tamburini was re-engaged. Lumley felt it was his duty to reassert strongly the authority of the management. Of the heart of the vielle garde (Persiani, Grisi, Rubini, Tamburini, and Lablache), only Grisi and Lablache were under contract in 1846, and of the two only Grisi (together with the new tenor Mario) could be considered rebellious. Lumley, picturing himself as sinned against by the power-mad singers, did not explain very convincingly what terrible things these singers were actually doing. Explanations from other commentators of the period suggest that Lumley in some sense caused his own problems. C. L. Gruneisen, for example, gave the following explanation in a pamphlet, The Opera and the Press, published five years after Lumley published his Reminiscences:

Mr. Lumley, to this day according to his book, dwells on a monomania that he was ruined by a cabal. His error was in supposing that ballet was in the ascendant over opera, and to uphold the former, he sacrificed the latter. The Tamburini and Persiani secessions were only the prelude to the projected dismissals of Grisi and Mario; the schism with Costa was another fatal miscalculation. . . . Mr. Lumley’s downfall was chiefly owing to his infatuated belief in the power of the press. He conceived journalism to be omnipotent. Hence his neglect of the stage and his attention to the newspaper people before the curtain. . . . Mr. Lumley relied on the press, and was ruined by the press. Had he acted solely on his own unquestionable abilities, and had he not listened to those advisers, now dead and gone, whose basis of action was in turn corruption and intimidation of journalists, he might at the moment have been still the ruler of the Haymarket Opera House.²⁹

Willert Beale noted that Lumley quarreled with Giuseppe Persiani, husband of the famous soprano and a composer, because he did not want to produce Persiani’s opera: “To that quarrel, and to a reserved, autocratic bearing towards his artists, may be traced all the rivalry against which Mr. Lumley had subsequently to contend.”³⁰

In this climate of stress, Lumley had several plans to make his season noteworthy: the possible return of Rubini, a possible ballet on Faust to be written by Heinrich Heine, and Verdi’s new opera, King Lear (Lumley, Reminiscences, pp. 142, 143). The Athenaeum announced on 7 February 1846 (along with another public letter from Lumley complaining about Costa) that “the opera to be written by Signor Verdi for her Majesty’s Theatre is said to be on the story of ‘King Lear.’” Chorley is already skeptical about it: “As it is an opera to be written, let us point out to all concerned, the risk of selecting a story in which the female interest is subservient” (p. 157). Lumley was to be disappointed in all his hopes: Heine’s ballet, Rubini’s return, Verdi’s opera— each was cancelled or postponed.

The reception of Lumley’s season in the popular press this year seems to bear out accusations by Chorley and Gruneisen that Lumley could do no wrong according to other journalists. Thus when Lumley brought out two more operas by Verdi, Nabucco and I Lombardi, the press received them favorably, for the most part. The Times praised the March 3rd opening night of Nabucco (presented as Nino “in conformity with the feelings of the English as to the unsuitability of Biblical subjects for theatrical representation”), noting that “the work was received with a stronger feeling of approbation than has been displayed on the production of any new Italian opera for a long time” (4 March 1846, p. 5). The Illustrated London News found it “characterized by merits of the highest order” (7 March 1846, p. 162). Nino was praised even more fervently in the next issue: a “splendid chorus” here, a “glorious burst of harmony” there, “charming melody” everywhere, and a “splendid crescendo” which was “grandly effective.” The unison in “Va Pensiero” gave the piece a “wild simplicity of character” that was especially appealing (14 March 1846, p. 175). The critic liked I Lombardi better each time he saw it, in particular the “concerted pieces” (23 May 1846, p. 341), and The Times critic affirmed that “the success is unquestionable” (13 May 1846, p. 5).³¹

But Chorley, unmoved by this kind of response—which he saw as the product of Lumley’s “army of trumpeters in the Press who play in any key the manager pleases”³² —attacked with severe and somewhat savage thoroughness. Of Nino he wrote: “But with every sympathy in favour of a new style, and a new master, our first hearing of the ‘Nino’ has done nothing to change our judgment of the limited nature of Signor Verdi’s resources” (Athenaeum, 7 March 1846, p. 250). Verdi’s occasional effective passages are ruined because there is not enough contrast: everything is noisy. Later in the season, I Lombardi was even worse: “more tawdry in instrumentation than either ‘Ernani’ or ‘Nabucco’ and less substantial in idea.” Grisi is uncomfortable in the role of Giselda because “happily for the world, she was not trained in the unmitigated screaming in which Young Italy delighteth” (16 May 1846, p. 507).

Chorley’s dislike of Verdi was matched by his contempt for Lumley’s proceedings “which, up to this point, entitle the season of 1846 to be called the most meagre in interest of any during the last twelve years” (Athenaeum, 25 April 1846, p. 434). A little later (after a performance of Barbiere) he notes: “The orchestra is now more frequently before or after the singers, than with them” (2 May 1846, p. 459). And after major last-minute cast substitutions: “Those who have watched the courageous downward progress of the management of our Italian Opera, assuredly should, by this time, be almost beyond the reach of further surprise” (27 May 1846, p. 530).

On 2 May 1846, Chorley announced that he had wind of bad news for Lumley: “It is generally rumoured that the opera ‘written expressly for London’ is not to be expected this year” (Athenaeum, p. 459). Lumley could not deny it: “As evil fortune would have it,” he remembered, “about this time Verdi’s health gave way; he was unequal to the arduous task, and the opera was not forthcoming” (Lumley, Reminiscences, pp. 142-143).

In January 1846, while Verdi was in Venice preparing for the first performances of Attila, he became very ill (Copialettere, p. 16). Although it was not unusual for Verdi to have various symptoms of illness while he was preparing a new opera—his illness the previous year had delayed the production of Alzira at San Carlo in Naples³³ —this time the recuperation period dragged on longer than ever before. One might wonder whether the long convalescence was partly a psychological necessity: he was not really ready to write the opera for London and needed a pretext. Frank Walker disputes this possibility as “impertinent.”³⁴ Whatever caused the illness and the prolonged recovery, an opera for London was out of the question. Verdi wrote to Lumley on 9 April 1846, with the bad news:

Milan, 9 April 1846

Signor Lumley,

I know that the news I am about to give you will not be unexpected, namely that because of the illness suffered in Venice, I am not able to come to London, and still less to write the opera there. The same day Signor Lucca will send you two medical certificates given him, which will authenticate things. You cannot imagine how distressed I am to have to renounce the honour of writing for London. My health is improving so slowly that it makes me incapable of even the slightest occupation, and I am forced to remain here idle, scrupulously following a medical cure until it is time to go to Recoaro to drink the waters, etc. . . .

I hope that this inconvenience will not cause any harm to our relationship, and praying you to respond with two lines about the matter, I style myself with all respect yours faithfully.³⁵

Lucca forwarded this letter on to Lumley in London, enclosing a medical certificate from Dr. Giacinto Namìas of Venice (22 March 1846) and another from Dr. Gaspare Belcredi of Milan (6 April 1846) (Copialettere, p. 19). From Lumley came two letters—sympathizing but also urging Verdi to reconsider. In the first (14 April), Lumley hoped that Verdi would still come for the change of scene and the brilliance of the London season.³⁶ A month later, he wrote again with news of the great popularity of I Lombardi, proposing a non-medical cure—the enthusiastic English applause awaiting him.³⁷ David Kimbell feels that Lumley’s first letter displays “effusive and insensitive breeziness,”³⁸ but it could just as easily be said to display the dignified but understandable desperation of a manager about to lose one of the main novelties of a season in bad trouble. For Lumley, Verdi’s illiness could not have come at a worse time. Verdi himself, though, insisted that the trip was off, writing on 22 May that “the natural curiosity to see an extraordinary city like London, my self-esteem, and my self-interest would be sufficient motives not to delay the execution of my contract with Signor Lucca. But my health prevents me, and I have a need for absolute repose.”³⁹

Muzio, too, was disappointed that the London trip was off. Lucca had offered to pay his expenses as a travelling companion and 2,000 francs. But if Verdi could not go, Muzio wrote, so be it: rather than have Verdi suffer—to the devil “with all the money in the world, because to me he is dearer than the whole universe!”⁴⁰

Muzio’s effusive letters to Barezzi at this time—full of news about Verdi’s stream of successes everywhere—make a striking foil to Chorley’s grim summing up of the 1846 season at Her Majesty’s: Verdi’s operas are not likely to hold the stage much longer in London. “Let us here, again, repeat, in present substantiation of our prophecies with regard to Signor Verdi’s career, that his four last operas,—’I due Foscari,’ ‘Giovanno [sic] d’Arco,’ ‘Alzira,’ and ‘Attila,’ have more or less failed in Italy;—the last most signally”) Athenaeum, 22 August 1846, p. 869).

During Lumley’s post-season visit to the Continent, he pursued Jenny Lind in earnest, knowing that she was determined not to honor her contract with Bunn at Drury Lane. Writing on 6 October 1846, to her friend Madame Birch-Pfeiffer, Lind announced that she was going to Vienna to sing in Meyerbeer’s Feldlager von Schlesien —“and all the more, because it has fallen through in London [with Bunn]” (Lind-Goldschmidt, II, 3-4). She ended her letter with an indication of the direction in which her thoughts were moving: “Lumley (the Director of the Italian Opera in London), what has he not offered! And what an amiable man he is! He came here; but I have sent him to Italy, to look for a singer there. But, he still hopes to get me; and, if you should hear that I have really gone mad, I may then go to London” (II, 4). Three weeks later, it was definite, as she wrote her close friend, Madame Wichmann:

Munich, October 27, 1846

. . . Now let me tell you that I am going to London; and that Mendelssohn alone was able to induce me to do so. For you know what confidence I place in his advice; and, besides that, things have really so shaped themselves, that I can clearly see that God Himself has so ordained it—and, against one’s destiny, one can do nothing.

(Lind-Goldschmidt, II, 6).

Mendelssohn (although in his long letter to Lind dated 31 October 1846 he mentioned that he had a number of reservations about certain points in her contract) strongly supported this step in her career and predicted that “you will be greeted, in England, musically and personally, with such love, and jubilation, and rapture, as has seldom fallen even to you” (Lind-Goldschmidt, II, 7).

In the same letter Mendelssohn mentioned the frustration he was feeling about the libretto Madame Birch-Pfeiffer was supposed to be writing for him:

I should indeed be glad if I could soon, in accordance with my most hearty wish, write something dramatic—and especially, for you. Of what I can do in that way I will neglect nothing; of that I assure you; for I should at all times have gladly written dramatic music, but now more gladly than ever. And then I have a secret foreboding, which tells me that, if I do not attain to the composition of a fairly good Opera, now, and /or you, I shall never accomplish it at all.

(Lind-Goldschmidt, II, 9-10).

News of Lumley’s contract with Lind was clearly important for Verdi. He wrote Lumley on 11 November 1846 that he was willing to compose an opera and he must have the right to choose the best artists in the company, among them Lind and Gaetano Fraschini (Copialettere, p. 30). He mentioned it again in a letter to Lucca on December 2nd and again on December 3rd, telling Lucca moreover that he had finished about one-third of Masnadieri (Copialettere, p. 32). The next day he wrote to Lumley again that, since his illness had annulled the previous contract, he was no longer bound to compose Il Corsaro (which had replaced Lear as the subject for London). He was, however, willing to complete Masnadieri, of which he had already composed “about one half” (Copialettere, pp. 33-34). If Lumley would agree to the opera and would give Verdi the pick of the company, specifically Lind and Fraschini, then the contract was to be on again for the coming season.

Since either Shakespeare’s Lear or Byron’s Corsair would have been more obviously suited to the interests of an English audience, Lumley’s acceptance of Verdi’s new proposal was not enthusiastic. “Verdi now offered his ‘Masnadieri,’“ Lumley recalled later, “and with this proposal I was obliged to close” (Reminiscences, p. 192).

IV

The developments of 1846 laid the foundations for the failure of I Masnadieri in 1847. This year Chorley intensified the battle against Lumley’s house begun so forcefully the year before. Chorley announced in the January 23rd issue of the Athenaeum that Lumley was promising for the coming season a new opera by Verdi, an appearance by Meyerbeer, a new opera by Mendelssohn (this news genuinely pleased him), and the English debut of Jenny Lind.⁴¹ But he turned this announcement against Lumley, implying (and later openly stating) that Lumley was using deceptive advertising in order to win subscribers to the season; on 13 February Chorley asked rhetorically “what became of the promise of Meyerbeer, with his ‘Camp de Silésie—what of Verdi with his ‘Robbers’—what, even, of the one substantial hope of the theatre, Mdlle Jenny Lind?” (Athenaeum, 13 February 1847, p. 179). It seems that Chorley was eager to criticize Lumley for not keeping his promises for the season, before the season had even begun. When Chorley did print something positive about Her Majesty’s, it was often done in such a way as to praise Covent Garden at the same time, as in his concession that “on the whole, the amount of variety produced before Easter, and the general quality of the performances, have been creditable to the energy of the management—and, we think, without precedent. Great is the virtue of opposition!—let the monopolists be ever so shocked thereat” (27 March 1847, p. 344).

By 1847 a widespread perception of Verdi had evolved among most journalists. It can be summarized as follows: Verdi was crude and unable to write original melodies, but he was able to write highly dramatic and effective concerted pieces. Representative statements of what is in a way a consensus of opinion may be found in the Examiner:

The invention of striking melodies is not Verdi’s strong point, and herein he has a disadvantage when compared with the generality of modern Italian composers. But the richness of his instrumentation, the power evinced in the construction of his concerted pieces, and the dramatic colouring he gives them, will command admiration among all unprejudiced hearers. There is writing in his work, which shows that he is daring to soar above the petty trivialities that have so long held possession of the stage of his country.

(Examiner, 7 March 1846, p. 149).

And again, a few weeks later:

Of original melody, there is scarcely a bar to be found in his entire works. Nay, he perpetually repeats himself. . . His erudition, such as it is does not take him far, and he goes back to his darling unison. His merit—and every first opera confirms this opinon—is his feeling for the drama which his music is to illustrate . . . His attention is directed not merely to his principal vocalists, but to the choruses, which form, as it were, the substances to his drama; and he elaborates these, not so much by “writing,” as by balancing masses of sound of different quality, one against the other.

(Examiner, 16 May 1846, p. 308).

Chorley’s position is closely related to this one, except that he takes everything in an entirely hostile way, emphasizing the severity of the melodic failings and de-emphasizing the excellences of the dramatic interest—adding a special note of fury over Verdi’s writing for (or against) the singers’ voices.⁴² He began the year with a fresh attack, occasioned by a letter he printed from an anonymous reader stating that I Due Foscari was successful in Paris: “I think it much to be regretted that you should, for some incomprehensible reason or other, systematically decry a composer who, with many defects, has great merits . . . On the whole he is far superior to all the living composers”) Athenaeum, 2 January 1847, p. 24). Chorley printed the letter in order to have the pleasure of replying. Verdi “represents the extremes of that extravagant school of writing which, under pretext of dramatic effect, has all but ruined the singers of Italy.” Verdi “tears his voices” and uses “trombones in unison with the voices,—no matter what the subject.” His melody is “simple and clear plagiarism of the most wornout commonplaces of modern composers”) Athenaeum, 2 January 1847, p. 24). Chorley’s opinions that season were reinforced by what amounted to an early Verdi festival at Her Majesty’s: Nino, Ernani, I Due Foscari, I Lombardi (“matter-less . . . flimsy . . . full of pretense”),⁴³ and, of course, I Masnadieri.

On 6 April 1847, the new company at Covent Garden opened its first season with Rossini’s Semiramide and interest switched to the new house. The performance was a great success, with Grisi at her best and Marietta Alboni making a tremendously successful debut as Arsace. Chorley’s praise for the orchestra is significant (he relished mocking Michael Balfe at Her Majesty’s for beating his foot loudly to keep the musicians playing together⁴⁴): “The Orchestra is unquestionably the best ever assembled in England . . . and the general ensemble . . . something never heretofore attained by any Italian performances in this country” (Athenaeum, 10 April 1847, p. 394). This “ensemble” aspect of the new house elicited extensive comment. That from the Illustrated London News is particularly valuable for what it adds to our understanding of mid-century performance practice because of its details about the composition of the orchestra:

To eulogize the band too strongly would be impossible. Costa has achieved a most important improvement in the balance of instruments; by adding to the strength of the stringed ones, the braying of brass has been balanced. We never heard such first violins for brilliancy, and the luscious tones of the tenors and Violoncelli, and the power and crispness of the double-basses, were quite as delightful . . . and we rank the Covent Garden band as now the first in the world. There are fifteen first violins, with Sainton at the head; fourteen second, with Ella; ten violas, with Hill; ten Violoncelli, with Lindley; nine double-basses, with Anfossi; with the usual complement of wind instruments [for a total of eighty players].⁴⁵

Covent Garden presented two operas by Verdi during its first season: Ernani, in which Alboni sang Charles the Fifth,⁴⁶ and I Due Foscari, in which, according to the Morning Chronicle, the singers—Grisi, Mario, and Giorgio Ronconi—”created an immense sensation” (23 June 1847, p. 5). But Chorley, while granting that Ronconi’s acting was “sublime” and his singing was not bad, felt that the performance generally “strengthens our judgment of the utter worthlessness of the music” (Athenaeum, 26 June 1847, p. 683).

Verdi and Muzio arrived in London in early June (Muzio first, in order to reassure Verdi that Jenny Lind was indeed going to be singing in the new opera). Muzio’s view of the activities at Covent Garden is interesting. Although he was pleased by the excellent performance of I Due Foscari,⁴⁷ he insisted that the old guard at Covent Garden “are all enemies of Verdi’s music” and that they refused to perform Foscari more than twice because of their jealousy. Costa, moreover, was a Neapolitan and “since they are jealous, proud, and neither able to do good things nor sing well, they do not want others to do well either.”⁴⁸

The day after the first performance of Masnadieri, Muzio wrote to Barezzi that “the opera created a furor”—the orchestra, singers, and press reception: everything was “bietifol” (Garibaldi, pp. 344, 345, 349). Verdi himself clearly had expected success and was preparing to negotiate a very high price for his future services at Her Majesty’s. To Clarina Maffei he wrote on July 17th (five days before the premiere): “It is true that they have offered me 40 thousand francs for an opera and that I have not accepted. But do not be amazed, because it is not an excessive sum and if I were to return I should want much more” (Copialettere, p. 459, my translation).

I Masnadieri was received with great applause on the first night; it was, however, not really a success and was never revived in Victorian England. Ivan Turgenev, then on his first of several visits to London, saw the opera and wrote to Pauline Viardot-Garcia that it “had a very nice little fiasco.”⁴⁹ Queen Victoria confided to her journal that the music was “very inferior and commonplace.”⁵⁰ Chorley told his readers that “we take it to be the worst opera which has been given in our time at Her Majesty’s Theatre” (Athenaeum, 24 July 1847, p. 795), and later, in Thirty Years’ Musical Recollections he insisted that it was “perhaps his [Verdi’s] most paltry work” (“Thirty Years’,1862, I, 296). Even Lumley, who had gone to so much trouble for so long, did not choose to defend it. He noted that, although it was given “with every appearance of a triumphant success,” it was a failure, not just in England but also in Italy.⁵¹ Lumley’s comments on Verdi’s use of the great but very fat bass Lablache is often quoted: “Lablache, as the imprisoned father, had to do about the only thing he could not do to perfection—having to represent a man nearly starved to death” (Reminiscences, p. 193). But according to the Morning Chronicle, Lablache’s portrayal of Maximilian Moor was a redeeming feature of the evening: his character “was the only one commanding the sympathies of the audience” (23 July 1847, p. 5). The Times greeted the opera with a long, respectful notice, citing points of similarity with Schiller’s play,⁵² and pointing out that the world of “rank and fashion” was in attendance. The critic’s only negative remarks were somewhat tentative: “Whatever opinion may be entertained of the merits of this opera, this fact is certain,—that the manager in its production has acted in a manner worthy of the director of such an establishment” (23 July 1847, p. 5). The Illustrated London News reported that “the opera was highly successful” (24 July 1847, p. 58). But the Examiner’s critic did not think that the opera had much chance of “living beyond the occasion” (24 July 1847, p. 469).

The reaction of the press was, therefore, not uniformly negative, though it was certainly not as enthusiastic as Muzio wanted Barezzi to believe. And yet certainly the fact that Chorley damned the opera so severely could not in itself have made it unpopular with London audiences, since his previous hostility towards Verdi, manifested over several years, cannot be shown to have had a decisive effect on Verdi’s appeal to English audiences. It seems most likely that the reason for I Masnadieri’s being dropped the next few seasons were basically twofold: the lack of concerted numbers in the opera and the relative unimportance of the prima donna’s role.

As we have seen, Verdi had made his reputation in London largely though not exclusively on the strength of the excitement created by the concerted pieces in his operas. In I Masnadieri, the energetic bandit choruses made a relatively weak impression compared with that produced by Verdi’s earlier full-scale ensemble finales in operas such as Ernani and Nino. The audience’s expectations were not met; the critics did not have time to hear what was there, being too busy noticing what was missing.

Furthermore, casting Jenny Lind as Amalia looked like a good idea on paper, but was in fact a big mistake. Although Lind apparently told Muzio that she was pleased with the way the role of Amalia suited her voice,⁵³ the critic for the Illustrated London News felt that the music seemed “written, we suspect, rather with a view to its performance by prime donne of a less extended compass of voice, and therefore not embracing Jenny Lind’s higher notes” (31 July 1847, p. 78). There is, in fact, only one passage in I Masnadieri requiring extraordinary virtuosity: Amalia’s cabaletta “Carlo vive!” near the beginning of Act II (“evidently based,” the Morning Chronicle smugly remarked, on Bellini’s “Ah, non giunge!”).⁵⁴ Certainly, Amalia’s role is by no means disproportionately small for an ensemble opera (and The Times felt it had to remind readers that “it must always be remembered that Verdi writes more for an ensemble than for bringing forward any single personage, and hence there are not those opportunities for individual display which are to be found in the works of earlier composers”).⁵⁵ Nevertheless, Jenny Lind’s unprecedented power over an audience made people eager to see her in roles like Marie in Donizetti’s Figlia di Regimento or Amina in La Sonnambula, roles in which she was the center of attention. As Masnadieri progresses, the emphasis is placed increasingly on the tenor, not the soprano. The appetite whetted for Lind in the first two acts was largely disappointed by the last two. During any other season with any other singer, even Grisi, this issue might not have been crucial to the opera’s successful reception. This season it was. By the time it might have been logical to think about reviving Masnadieri—after Lind’s retirement—there was no reason to. For Lumley, the opera represented a major disappointment; for Covent Garden, an affront. And for audiences, it soon became irrelevant, as Verdi’s thrilling operas of the 1850s—Rigoletto, Traviata, and II Trovatore—came along, erasing most recollections of Verdi in the forties.

Verdi conducted two performances of Masnadieri, then left for Paris to begin preparing Jérusalem. From Paris on 2 August, he wrote Lumley, expressing his willingness to write an opera a year for the next three years (2 August 1847, Copialettere, p. 43). Lumley’s reply was polite but evasive. No contract was offered.

Probably, Verdi did not understand what a disappointment this opera had been to Lumley. Nor, probably, did he care.⁵⁶ Only a few seasons later, he composed Rigoletto. And from that time on, the world realized that Verdi really was as important as he thought he was. Problems caused by an idolized singer, a desperate manager, and a hostile critic were easy to forget.⁵⁷

______________________

¹ The best general account of Chorley’s career is still Henry Fothergill Chorley: Autobiography, Memoir, and Letters, compiled by Henry C. Hewlett, 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1873). See also E. D. Mackerness, “Henry Fothergill Chorley (1808-1872),” Monthly Musical Record (1957), Part I, pp. 134-140 and Part II, pp. 181-188; and Robert Bledsoe, “Arbiter,” Opera News, 13 February 1982, pp. 16-18.

² François Fétis in Biographie universelle des musiciens remarks that “Un jugement juste en ce qui concerne l’art, et des observations originales exprimées avec esprit, distinguent cet ouvrage de beaucoup de publications de même genre” (2d ed., 8 vols. [Paris: Fermin-Didot, 1875-83), II, 286).

³ A comprehensive study of the importance of this journal, emphasizing its function as a literary review, is Leslie Marchand’s The Athenaeum: A Mirror of Victorian Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941). Later in the century, specialized musical journals developed a readership overlapping that of the general reviews, but during the period discussed in this essay, there were few and their influence was slight. For a general survey of the musical press, see Stephen Banfield, “Aesthetics and Criticism” in The Romantic Age: 1800-1914, ed. Nicholas Temperley (London: Athlone, 1981), pp. 455-473, and Leanne Langley, “The English Musical journal in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Ph. D. dissertation, University of North Carolina, 1983.

⁴ This new self·esteem can be sensed in the dedication to Macbeth (1847) to Antonio Barezzi: “Florence, 25 March 1847 . . . Here is Macbeth, which I love more than my other works and which therefore I consider more worthy to be presented to you” (my translation) (I Copialettere di Giuseppe Verdi, eds. Gaetano Cesari and Alessandro Luzio [1913; rpt. ed., Bologna: Forni, 19681. p. 451). Subsequently cited as Copialettere.

⁵ Letter to Giovanni Ricordi, 20 May 1847, Copialettere, pp. 37-39.

⁶ Luigi Agostino Garibaldi, ed., Giuseppe Verdi nelle lettere di Emanuele Muzio ad Antonio Barezzi (Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1931), pp. 321-322. Subsequently cited as Garibaldi. The significance of the correspondence is discussed later in this article.

⁷ Illustrated. London News, 18 April 1846, p. 258. Covent Garden’s history is narrated by Henry Saxe Wyndham in The Annals of Covent Garden Theatre from 1732 to 1897, 2 vols. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1906) and—from a better informed point of view musically—by Harold Rosenthal in Two Centuries of Opera at Covent Garden (London: Putnam, 1958).

⁸ Illustrated London News, 18 April 1846, p. 258.

⁹ Michael Balfe’s Bohemian Girl was first performed at Drury Lane (1845) but the house was never primarily an opera house. A case has been made for the importance of English opera at the Lyceum: Nicholas Temperley, “The English Romantic Opera,” Victorian Studies, 9 (March 1966), 293-301.

¹⁰ There are no histories of Her Majesty’s Theatre as thorough as those of Covent Garden by Saxe Wyndham and Rosenthal. A useful short history is Daniel Nalbach, The King’s Theatre 1704-1867 (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1972).

¹¹ Benjamin Lumley, Reminiscences of the Opera (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1864), p. vii.

¹² Lumley, Reminiscences, p. 30 and following. Lumley’s social attentions were not confined to the aristocracy: Dickens and Thackeray were considered useful enough to be cultivated. See The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, ed. Gordon N. Ray, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard Un iversity Press, 1945-46), II, 165, 269, 666; and The Letters of Charks Dickens, volume IV, ed. Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 672, and volume V, ed. Graham Storey and K. j. Fielding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 78-79.

¹³ Sutherland Edwards, History of the Opera from Monteverde [sic] to Donizetti, 2d ed., 2 vols. (London: Wm. H. Allen & Co., 1862), II, 224.

¹⁴ Memories of Half a Century: A Record of Friendships, compiled and edited by R. C. Lehmann (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1908), p. 228.

¹⁵ Marchand, The Athenaeum, pp. 97-165. Also see Charles Wentworth Dilke, The Papers of a Critic: Sekcted from the Writings of the Late Charks Wentworth Dilke, 2 vols. (London: john Murray, 1875), “Memoir,” (by his son), 1, 1-91 and following.

¹⁶ The Autobiography of Charles Halle: With Correspondence and Diaries, ed. Michael Kennedy (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979), p. 118.

¹⁷ During Chorley’s first decade of opera-going, Rossini was the mainstay of the repertory at the King’s The· atre (renamed Her Majesty’s in 1837). See Henry Fothergill Chorley, Thirty Years’ Musical Recollections, 2 vols. (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1862). This edition has been reissued by Da Capo (1984). A widely circulated version of the work is Ernest Newman’s one-volume edition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926). Newman’s introduction is important, but his decision to make several cuts and to regularize Chorley’s punctuation makes the edition less useful than it might have been. Subsequent references will be to Chorley, Thirty Years', 1862. For Chorley’s reactions to operas and concerts on the Continent, see his reports in Music and Manners in France and Germany: A Series of TraveUing Sketches of Art and Society, 3 vols. (1844; rpt. ed., New York: Da Capo, 1983). For Chorley’s friendship with Mendelssohn, see lgnaz Moscheles, Recent Music and Musicians as Described in the Diaries and Correspondence of Ignatz Moscheles, tr. A. D. Coleridge (1873; rpt. ed., New York: Da Capo, 1970), p. 177 and following.

¹⁸ Richard Edgcumbe, Musical Reminiscences Chiefly Respecting the Italian Opera in England from the Year 1773 to the Present Times, 3d ed. (London: George Clarke, 1828), p. xii.

¹⁹ George Hogarth, Musical History, 2d ed., 2 vols. (London: John W. Parker, 1838), ll, 21 4, 186.

²⁰ Hogarth, Musical History, ll, 207. As an example of the “incorrect and slovenly harmony,” Hogarth specifies the Otello trio, “Ah, vieni,” which “contains within the compass of four bars, and in the vocal parts, a series of five perfect fifths in succession, besides three discords of the seventh resolved upwards; and the passage is twice repeated” (ll, 208, italics in original). At the bottom of the page of the autograph score, next to the passage where these fifths occur, Rossini wrote “Queste cinque quinte sono per li Signori Coglioni” [“These five fifths are for the ‘Signori Blockheads;’” “coglioni” are blockheads or, literally, testicles] (Otello [facsimile], ed. Philip Gossett [New York: Garland, 1979], ll, 67. See also Gossett’s comment on the passage “Introduction,” I, v). At this time Hogarth nourished a hope that things had gone as far as they could go: “The human tympanum can hear nothing beyond the beating of drums, and braying of trumpets and trombones, introduced by the followers of the Rossini school; and the temporary vogue of a fashion of composing which is a mere cloak for ignorance and incapacity, appears to be passing away” (Hogarth, Musical History, II, 186).

²¹ Budden also notes that “the London critic Henry Chorley accused Verdi of lacking originality and proceeded to ascribe to Donizetti what he thought to be Donizetti’s, and likewise to Federico Ricci, Bellini, and Mercadante” (“Verdi and the Contemporary Italian Operatic Scene” in The Verdi Companion, eds. William Weaver and Martin Chusid [New York: Norton, 1979], p. 86). For a discussion of this issue in its Italian context, see Julian Budden, The Operas of Verdi, 3 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), I, 3-41. For a twentieth-century perspective on some of the issues Chorley raises, see Winton Dean, “Some Echoes of Donizetti in Verdi’s Operas,” Atti del III° Congresso lnternationale di Studi Verdiani (Milan, Piccola Scala, 12-17 June, 1972) (Parma: lnstituto di Studi Verdiani, 1974), 122-147, and Friedrich Lippman, “Verdi and Donizetti,” Opernstudien: Anna Amalie Abert zum 65. Geburtstag (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1975)

²² Athenaeum, 31 August 1844, p. 797. Chorley’s next comment reveals his sensibility: “We must note, too, that the progression of keys, in one movement, with a view to entireness in construction (a point till lately thought worthy of attention), is most curiously managed; unless some of the remarkable sequences are ascribable to transpositions on the part of the English publisher. Sig. Verdi shall have the full benefit of the doubt.”

²³ The Times, 17 February 1845, p. 5: “Moriani and Fornasari are to appear before Easter, and as Easter falls early this year, the brilliant portion of the season will be of longer duration than usual.”

²⁴ Garibaldi prints Italian translations of several favorable French press reports, pp. 227-231.

²⁵ “I undertake to compose for you an opera to be performed in a leading Italian theatre by a first-rate company during the Carnival season 1848, provided that I do not have to write an opera for a theatre outside Italy for the same Carnival season: in that case I should compose your opera for a different season, to be agreed upon with you, within the year 1849. For this you will pay me 1,200 (one thousand two hundred) golden napoleons of 20 francs in four equal instalments: the first on 1 November 1848, the second on 1 December 1847, the third on 1 January 1848, the fourth on l February 1848. If these conditions are acceptable to you, I will hold myself engaged for five months, provided that Attila has been produced by that time” (Translation from David R. B. Kimbell, Verdi in the Age of Italian Romanticism [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981]. p. 191).

Lucca published Verdi’s next opera, Attila (first performance: La Fenice, Venice, 17 March 1846) and Il Corsaro (first performance: Teatro Grande, Trieste, 25 October 1848). Lucca also published I Masnadieri, although as far as I know there are no documents extant that explain why (the original contract calls for only two operas). Verdi’s relationship with Lucca was worse than it had been with Ricordi, as the following letter to the librettist Piave shows: “Paris, 14 January 1848 . . . You are interested in Signor Lucca? Do you know how l have been treated by that man after I dealt with him so generously, working hard to finish Attila in a deplorable physical condition and after I honored the London contract even though I was not bound to? . . . With me he has been insensitive, boorish, and demanding . . . . but enough of Signor Lucca, and I hope that you will never again speak to me of him” Carteggi Verdiani, ed. Alessandro Luzio, 4 vols. (Rome: Reale Accademia d'ltalia, 1935), II, 350 (my translation).

²⁶ Translation from William Weaver, Verdi: A Documentary Study (London: Thames and Hudson, [1977?]), pp. 164-165. Original in Garibaldi, p. 227.

²⁷ Garibaldi, p. 232. For useful accounts of Verdi’s dealings with Lumley and the journey to London, see Frank Walker, The Man Verdi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 158-163; Budden, The Operas of Verdi, I, 318-322; and Kimbell, Verdi in the Age of Italian Romanticism, pp. 190-207. These accounts are based primarily on the material in Garibaldi and the Copialettere (Kimbell’s account is the most detailed).

²⁸ Henry Scott Holland and W. S. Rockstro, Memoir of Madame Jenny Lind-Goldschmidt, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1891), I, chaps. 6 (pp. ZZ8-Z36) and IZ (pp. Z90-Z98). Subsequently cited as LindGoldschmidt. Holland and Rockstro say that Lind was at this time not contemplating singing at Her Majesty’s even though Bunn and many others thought she was. Documents relating to Lumley and Verdi show no references to Lind at this time, a fact which tends to support the assertion in Lind-Goldschmidt.

²⁹ C. L. Gruneisen, The Opera and the Press (London: Robert Hardwicke, 1869), p. 5.

³⁰ Willert Beale, The Light of Other Days: Seen Through the Wrong End of an Opera Glass, 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1890), I, 43.

³¹ Another report notes that the success of I Lombardi was increased by the fact that “the principal parts in it are sustained by Grisi and Mario, while those of Nino and Ernani were filled by the mere before-Easter tolerables”) Examiner, 16 May 1846, p. 308, italics in original).

³² Athenaeum, 27 June 1846, p. 665.

³³ See the exchange of letters with the impresario Vincenzio Flauto, Copialeuere, pp. 9-12.

³⁴ “In the face of all this evidence, suggestions that Verdi was not honestly justified in his action seem impertinent” (Walker, The Man Verdi, p. 147). Walker’s point of view seems to be that if the illness were real, its origin could not have been psychosomatic.

³⁵ Translation of first paragraph from Weaver, Verdi, pp. 165-166. Original in Copialettere, p. 19.

³⁶ “C’est avec un vif regret que j’ai appris votre maladie au moment ou je comptais avoir le plaisir de vous revoir ici presque immédiatement. Je suis bien aise d’apprendre que vous y portez le soins que requiert une organisation aussi sensible que celle d’un genie créatif comme le vôtre. Veuillez agreer l’expression de toute ma sympathie . . .

Je suis sûr que le changement de scène et une visite à Londres pendant une saison aussi belle et aussi prospère (je n’en ai jamais connu de plus brillante à notre Theatre) vous fera plus de bien que tous les remedes imaginables” (Copialettere, pp. 20-21).

³⁷ “J’espère que cette nouvelle [success of I Lombardi] vous fera plaisir et qu’elle agira si efficacement comme antidote à votre indisposition, que vous viendrez ici en prendre une bien plus forte dose en forme d’applaudissement; ce qui ne peut vous manquer” (13 May 1846, Compialettere, p. 22).

³⁸ Kimbell, Verdi in the Age of Italian Romanticism, p. 193.

³⁹ Original in Copialettere, p. 22. That Verdi was doing nothing at this time is corroborated by Muzio’s letter to Barezzi (16 April 1846) in which he reports that Verdi “does not do anything—he does not write, he does not apply himself, but just amuses himself by going for walks and drives” (Garibaldi, p. 238, my translation).

⁴⁰ Muzio to Barezzi, 14 May 1846, original in Garibaldi, p. 245.

⁴¹ On 12 April 1847. the critic for the Morning Chronicle (probably Gruneisen)-by this time Chorley’s ally in the theater war-reprinted Lumley’s prospectus for the 1847 season as evidence that Lumley had not kept his promises (Jenny Lind arrived in London on April 16th): “That great composer, the Chevalier MEYERBEER, has arranged to visit this country to bring out the Camp de Silesie, and another of his admired chef d’oeuvres. The principal parts in the Camp de Silesie by Mademoiselle JENNY LIND and Signor FRASCHINI. The cclebrateu Dr. FELIX MENDELSSOHN BARTHOLDY will likewise visit England, and produce an opera expressly composed for her Majesty’s Theatre, the libretto founded on the Tempest of SHAKESPEARE, written by M. SCRIBE: Miranda. Mademoiselle JENNY LIND; Ferdinand, Signor GAROONI; Caliban, Herr STAUDIGL; and Prospero, Signor LABLACHE. It is likewise announced with great satisfaction that Signor VERDI, having recovered from his severe illness, has expressly composed for this theatre a new opera, of which the plot is founded on “The Robbers,” of SCHILLER. ROSSINI’s opera of Robert Bruce Ia pasticciol, lately produced at the Academic Royale, has also been secured. Mademoiselle JENNY LIND, whose engagement commences in March and extends until the end of the season, will appear immediately after Easter. In addition to the above, several operas, new to this country, will be produced, and the repertoire will be selected from the chef d’oeuvres of MOZART, CIMAROSA, ROSSINI, DONIZETTI, MERCADANTE, BELLINI, &.” (Morning Chronicle, 12 April 1847, p. 6).

As early as 13 February 1847, Chorley called Lumley’s announcement about The Tempest into question, wondering “whether even, any libretto has been accepted” by Mendelssohn (Athenaeum, p. 179). About a month later he announced: “It is now, too, known beyond mistake-Dr. Mendelssohn’s letters, which we have seen, being our warrant-that there will be no ‘Tempest’ this year: there having been (as we men· tioned some weeks since) no engagement on the composer’s part to produce such a work” (Athenaeum, 20 March 1847, p. 315). Lumley seems to have had a clear conscience, recalling bitterly that “both these reports ]that is, of Lind’s engagement and Mendelssohn’s opera] were denied with singular acrimony by the Covent-Gardenite sharpshooters of the penand yet both were substantially true” (Lumley, Reminiscences, p. 159). Lumley said that Mendelssohn did not write him until 21 February to say that the opera would not be ready (Lumley, Reminiscences, p. 167). But Chorley, too, had a clear conscience about his accusations, writing severn1 years later: “I passed the last three days of August, 184 7, beside Mendelssohn at Interlachen in Switzerland and heard first-hand of Mendelssohn’s irritation at the ‘ unauthorized use of his name’ in announcing The Tempest”(“The Last Days of Mendelssohn,” in Modern German Music, 2 vols. [1854; rpt. ed., New York: Da Capo, 1973], 11, 388).

⁴² This charge persisted. More than fifty years later, George Bernard Shaw wrote in the Anglo-Saxon Review (March 1901) that “until Boito became his artistic conscience he wrote inhumanly for the voice and fero ciously for the orchestra . ... He practically treated that upper fifth as the whole voice, and pitched his melodies in the middle of it instead of the middle of the whole compass, the result being a frightful strain on the singer” (Reprinted in George Bernard Shaw, London Music in 1888-89 As Heard by Corno de Bassetto [New York: Dodd, Mead, 1937]. pp. 414-415).

⁴³ Athenaeum, 10 July 1847 (italics in original).

⁴⁴ “Mr. Balfe in the last impassioned scene [of Norma] outstamping the drums, by way of keeping matters together” (Athenaeum, 19 June 1847, p. 653, italics in original).

⁴⁵ Illustrated London News, 10 April 1847, p. 234. The string-brass balance was different from that of many pit orchestras in Italy, where there were frequently more basses than cellos. Kimbell, Verdi in the Age of Italian Romanticism, p. 48; see also Gregory W. Harwood, “The Nineteenth Century Italian Opera Orchestra” [abstract], Verdi Newsletter, 11 (March 1983), 26-27. A few days later, the Morning Chronicle announced: “This undertaking has commenced triumphantly. It has the support of royalty, rank and fashion—it has the entire sympathies of the musical circles, whether composed of artists or amateurs. . . . From The Morning Chronicle it will continue to receive every encouragement and support, so long as we conscientiously believe that the interests of the public, the promotion of art, and the protection of artists are the leading principles of action. We are neither the organ, the tool, nor the parasites of the new temple of art. We were firm believers in the imperious necessity for its formation, to put an end to a grasping monopoly, and to a most corrupt and degraded system of puffery, the success of which would not only have swamped lyrical art, to establish in its place the sensual ballet, but would also have destroyed every vestige of independent criticism. We have stood alone in our course of action, and now we find ourselves with many allies” (Morning Chronicle, 12 April 1847, p. 6). The shrill tone of these remarks is a good reflection of the touchiness that many journalists were feeling at this period.

⁴⁶ Muzio recorded matter-of-factly that in London there is no difference between contralto and bass (“A Londra contralto e basso è lo stesso”), Garibaldi, p. 337. Chorley, however, cautioned that “such experiments ought not to be made by a management professing itself careful of musical integrity” (Athenaeum,10 July 1847, pp. 737-738). The reprimand is mild; substitution of a contralto for a bass at her Majesty’s might have been seen as one more example of artistic bankruptcy.

⁴⁷ Muzio to Barezzi, 29 june 1847, Garibaldi, p. 336.

⁴⁸ Writing to Barezzi on 18 June 1847, Muzio claimed that Costa had accompanied Lind at a private performance in the presence of the Queen, and “avendo appositamente accompagnata male Ia Lynd, e caduto in disgrazia della Regina .... Da un Napoletano la Lynd non si poteva sicuramente aspettare delle belle cose, giacche essi sono invidiosi, superbi, e non potendo ne fare belle cose, ne cantar bene, non vogliono neanche che gli altri facciano bene” (Garibaldi, p. 343). Queen Victoria took an interest in the theater war, as is demonstrated in one paragraph of a letter to her uncle (the King of Belgium): “To-night we are going to the Opera in state, and will hear and see Jenny Lind (who is perfection) in Normo, which is ·considered one of her best parts. Poor Grisi is quite going off, and after the pure angelic voice and extremely quiet, perfect acting of]. Lind, she seems quite passée. Poor thing! she is quite furious about it, and was excessively impertinent to J. Lind” (12 June 1847, The Letters of Queen Victoria [first series], eds. Arthur Christopher Benson and Viscount Esher [London: John Murray, 1907], II, 144, italics in original, my translation).

⁴⁹ Quoted in Patrick Waddington, Turgenev and England (New York: New York University Press, 1981), p. 10.

⁵⁰ Quoted in Vincent Godefroy, The Dramatic Genius of Verdi: Studies of Selected Operas, 2 vols. (London: Victor Gollancz, 1975-77), I, 164.

⁵¹ Lumley, Reminiscences, p. 193. That the opera was, in fact, reasonably successful in Italy is suggested by the list of printed librettos published in “The Verdi Archive at New York University: Part II” by Martin Chusid, Luke jensen, and David Day, Verdi Newsletter, 9110 (November 1981-82). 31. Escudier wrote Verdi about a successful revival of Masnadieri (as Les brigands) as late as 1870. Stephen Casale, “A NewlyDiscovered Letter from Verdi to Leon Escudier,” Verdi Newsletter, II (March 1983), 10, note 7.

⁵² Since the 1780s, Schiller’s Die Raüber had exercised a real fascination on many English writers and critics. It was, for example, one of the major influences on Wordsworth’s long poem, The Borderers (1795-96). An English translation of Die Raüber was even still occasionally performed (in 1851 at Drury Lane, for example). (See Frederic Ewen, The Prestige of Schiller in England 1789-1859 [New York: Columbia University Press, 1932]. xii, 78, 142, and following.) The reviews of Masnadieri generally gave some attention to Maffei’s adaptation: The Times notes that “the opening portion of the second act of the opera is taken from Schiller’s third, with considerable alteration ... Several incidents in the third act of the original play are here packed closely together” (The Times, 23 july 1847, p. 5). Nevertheless, many in the audience of “rank and fashion” at Her Majesty’s would have seen the plot as quaint and the source as of no concern. Indeed, one reviewer claimed that the opera’s final trio was “more provocative of hilarity than of tragic emotion” (Morning Chronicle, 23 july 1847, p. 5). Muzio, by contrast, called it the high point of the opera ("In tutte le sue opere il Maestro ha qualche terzetto che e un capo d'opera, rna questo e i1 capo d'opera di tutti gli altri capi d'opera” [Muzio to Barezzi, 23 july 1847, Garibaldi, pp. 348-349]).

⁵³ Muzio to Barezzi, 19 Uuly] 1847, Garibaldi, p. 343.

⁵⁴ Morning Chronicle, 23 july 184 7, p. 5.

⁵⁵ The Times, 23 july 1847, p. 5.

⁵⁶ Verdi to Escudier, 11 December 1869: “As for the Masnadieri I hope it succeeds. I can tell you nothing about it as I do not have it before me and don’t remember it. I know that the last two acts are better than the first two, and perhaps it will be necessary to make some cuts in these earlier acts, if only in the repetition of the so-called Cabalette—Keep me posted.” Verdi clearly was not thinking of Amalia as the opera’s central role. Translation from Stephen Casale, “A Newly-Discovered Letter from Verdi to Léon Escudier,” Verdi Newsletter, 11 (March 1983), 9.

⁵⁷ The author wishes to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities and Diana Natalicio, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, University of Texas at El Paso, for their financial support and the American Institute for Verdi Studies at New York University for providing research facilities, as well as Martin Chusid, Luke Jensen, and Julian Budden for their kindness in answering questions and suggesting improvements during the preparation of this article.