If Giuseppe Verdi had done nothing more than compose operas, he'd still have been one of the most admired figures in Western music. But Verdi was more than just a great composer — he was also a great man.
Verdi lent his wealth and reputation to any number of causes — some of them quite risky. Politically, his work and personal integrity helped to inspire a generation of Italians in their struggle for independence, and he often faced the wrath of government censors as a result. He was even urged to run for public office, and he was popular enough to have won handily.
All of this was serious business, to match Verdi's personality. He wasn't exactly a barrel of laughs. Of his more than two dozen operas only two were comedies, and one of those was his very first opera — seldom heard today.
Still, even Verdi himself once referred to the opera featured here as, "too sad and desolate." It's the somber, historical drama Simon Boccanegra, named for a real life Doge of Genoa who lived in the 1300's. The story is unrelentingly gloomy, with few moments even approaching levity, and the whole drama has an air of death about it right from the start.
But that fact should not scare anyone away. Simon Boccanegra also has a key element that nearly always brought out Verdi's best — a poignant relationship between father and daughter.
The composer's own life as a father was tragic, almost from the beginning. Verdi's first wife died, as did their two children, while he was still in his 20s. At the time, he was just getting his start as an opera composer. As he grew more and more successful, he often relied on tragic stories featuring the deep love between fathers and their children.
Verdi featured poignant, father-daughter relationships in Stiffelio and Rigoletto, and one between a concerned father and his sort-of-daughter-in-law in La Traviata. And just a few years after Traviata, Verdi created a father-daughter bond that may top all the others. It's the centerpiece of the dark and intensely emotional Simon Boccanegra.
Just as Verdi seemed to spend a lot of time pondering fathers and their daughters, he also took quite a while to come to grips with Simon Boccanegra. The opera began life in the 1850s, but the final version didn't take shape until 1881. Even then, it took a long time for the opera to earn its way among so many Verdi masterpieces. But by now, it's widely recognized as one of the most complex and moving of all his great tragedies.
On World of Opera, host Lisa Simeone brings us a production of Simon Boccanegra from Houston Grand Opera, featuring the outstanding baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky in the title role, and soprano Olga Guryakova as his daughter, Amelia.
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