Verdi: Overtures / Preludes / Ballet Music

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Giuseppe Verdi (1813 - 1901) Prelude to Aida Ballet Music from Aida Triumphal March from Aida Prelude to Act I of La Traviata Prelude to Act III of La Traviata Overture to La forza del destino Overture to I Vespri Siciliani I Vespri Siciliani: The Four Seasons(Ballet Music) Prelude to RigolettoGiuseppe Verdi is a figure of thegreatest importance in the development of Italian opera, his own career coinciding with the riseof Italian nationalism and the consciousness of national unity. He was ofhumble family and owed his early musical training to the generosity of a richmusic-lover, Antonio Barezzi, who arranged to pay for his training at theConservatory in Milan, an institution that he failed to enter, embarkinginstead, with Barezzi's support, on private lessons in Milan with VincenzoLavigna, an opera composer and former maestro al cembalo at La Scala. In 1836 Verdi was appointed municipalmusic director of Busseto, the nearest town to his native village of LeRoncole. He married in the same year the daughter of Antonio Barezzi and setabout completing his first opera, Rocester. Three years later the couplesettled in Milan, where Verdi was able to devote himself to the composition ofopera, an early period of his career that brought success and failure, as wellas tragedy in the death of his two children, followed, in 1840, by the death ofhis wife. Verdi's first operas, Oberto in1839 and Un giorno di regno in 1840, were followed by the signal successof Nabucco at La Scala in 1842. Oberto, Conte di San Bonifacio,presumably based on the earlier Rocester, had been given fourteenperformances, reasonable encouragement for a youngcomposer, but Un giorno di regno was a disaster. The years immediatelyfollowing Nabucco brought the successful I Lombardi and Ernani,both of them with an overt patriotic relevance.With these operas Verdi had establishedhimself, and during the course of a long career he was to write more than scoremore stage works, culminating, In 1893, with Falstaff, a final return toShakespeare, whose Macbeth he had transformed in 1847, followed forty yearslater by Otello. Recurrent plans for King Learwere never to be realised,nor Verdi's declared ambition to turn into opera the other major works ofShakespeare.Verdi's contemporary popularity wasprimarily due to his great musical gifts. Nevertheless his association with theIdeals of nationalism made him something of a hero to the idealists of theRisorgimento, his very name taken as an acrostic for Vittorio Emanuele, Red'ltalia, a fortunate coincidence. From 1861 to 1865 he was a member of the newItalian parliament, at the request of Count Cavour, but spent his later life atBusseto, marrying in 1859 the singer Giuseppina Strepponi, who had befriendedhim at the time of his first opera, Oberto, and with whom he had alreadybeen living for twelve years.The opera Rigoletto was firststaged at La Fenice in Venice in March, 1851. The libretto, by Francesco MariaPiave, was based on Victor Hugo's Le roi s'amuse