Verdi, King Lear and Maria Piccolomini

GEORGE MARTIN

VERDI, unlike Puccini, never had an opera premiered in
this country, never came to this country and hardly
ever even directed a letter to it. This "absence" from our
shores doubtless is one reason why the Verdi letters and documents
in this country's libraries—until the recent gift of the Mary Flagler
Gary Trust made an exception of the Aforgan Library—do not
offer more than isolated examples of his style and work.

There are other reasons, of course: Verdi left heirs, and they
still live in his house at Sant' Agata, near Parma, and preserve the
sketches and letters he left them. His publisher, G. Ricordi & Co.,
is still in business in Milan, and its fabulous archives, with letters
and scores of many composers beside Verdi, are still intact—and
likely to remain so, for at the first sign of their dispersal the Italian
government would proclaim them a national treasure.

In the circumstances, then, the Columbia Libraries are fortunate
to have as their one Verdi document—a gift in 195 3 of Miss Alberta
M. Welch—an unpublished, autograph letter which is not only
characterstic in its swift, straight-foward style but touches on an
interesting problem: the great, uncompleted project of Verdi's
career, his opera on Shakespeare's King Lear.

Verdi admired Shakespeare more than any other poet, and from
the plays he successfully fashioned three operas: as a relatively
young man, Macbeth (1847), and then, in his seventy-fourth and
eightieth years, Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893). His interest
in Lear, however, exceeded even this span, for it was the first
Shakespearian subject he proposed to an opera house, in 1843, and
was among the last he considered, however fleetingly, in the ex¬
citement following the premiere of Falstaff. In the fifty years be¬
tween he returned to it again and again, analysing the play, hiring
librettists to versify his outlines and even sketching music for it.