Giuseppe Verdi

Between March 1851 and March 1853 Verdi premiered three operas that have stayed in the international repertory ever since: Rigoletto (Venice), Il trovatore (Rome) and La traviata (Venice). His Aida opened at the Cairo opera house on 24 December 1871, followed by its European premiere at La Scala in February 1872.

Late in life Verdi wrote two Shakespeare operas to librettos by Arrigo Boito. Otello opened at La Scala on 5 February 1887 after about seven years of work, and the comedy Falstaff followed there on 9 February 1893, when Verdi was seventy-nine.

In the 1890s Verdi paid for and closely supervised the building of the Casa di Riposo per Musicisti in Milan, a residence for elderly musicians without means, and created its foundation in December 1899. At his request it opened only after his death, receiving its first residents in October 1902, and he left it the royalties from his operas.

For the first Macbeth (Florence, 1847), the soprano Marianna Barbieri-Nini later recalled more than a hundred piano and orchestra rehearsals, three months of work on the sleepwalking scene, and a duet rehearsed over 150 times. In her account, printed by the critic Gino Monaldi in 1899, Verdi called the two singers away to rehearse it once more just before the dress rehearsal, with the audience already in the theatre.

The episode is consistent with this profile's high perfectionism score, though the figures come from one performer's recollection decades later. The same account records the cost: the cast resented what she called his exaggerated demands. Perfectionism

In early 1858 the Naples censors withdrew permission for Verdi's new opera about the murder of a king. According to press reports of the time, quoted by his biographer Arthur Pougin, Verdi refused to fit his music to a substitute libretto despite a formal protest and a claim for damages, and the opera was withdrawn. It reached the stage in Rome in February 1859 as Un ballo in maschera, with the action moved to colonial Boston.

His refusal in Naples offers one example of the conflict tolerance scored in this profile. The Rome version sits alongside it as a reminder that he also accepted compromises when a production was otherwise impossible. Conflict Tolerance

According to the scholar Fabrizio Della Seta, from Ernani (1844) onward Verdi's contracts reserved him the right to approve the singers. After Nabucco he never set a libretto that someone else had already written: he chose the subjects and planned the scenes himself, and the libretto stage often took longer than the music.

This shift in working terms fits the high need for autonomy recorded in this profile. Della Seta also places it within a wider change in the standing of Italian composers, so it reflects the theatre business of the time as well as Verdi himself. Need for Autonomy