Temistocle Solera was arguably the most important collaborator of Verdi's early years, and a poet whose experience and authority he greatly respected. In a letter to Guglielmo Brenna of 15 November 1843, the composer stated his confidence in Solera, while expressing reservations about Francesco Maria Piave's lack of experience:
For my part I would never like to annoy a poet by asking him to change a verse; and I have written the music for three librettos by Solera, and if you compare the original, which I have kept, with the printed librettos, you would find only a very few verses changed, and these because of Solera's own conviction. But Solera has already written five or six librettos and knows the theatre, theatrical effect, and musical form. Sig. Piave has never written [for the theatre] and is naturally deficient in these things.Footnote 1
Nor was this Verdi's only attestation of esteem for Solera. Even long after their artistic partnership had ended, he stated that if Solera had put his head to it, he could have become ‘the first melodramatic poet of our time’.Footnote 2
It is significant that in his 1843 letter to Brenna, Verdi praised Solera not only for the librettos he had set to music himself, but also for his practical experience and knowledge of theatrical conventions. Solera also earned Verdi's respect for his work as house poet and composer at La Scala, where he presented two of his own works – Ildegonda (1840) and Il contadino d'Agliate (1841), both of which were warmly received by Milanese audiences.Footnote 3
For all his high opinion of Solera's artistry, however, Verdi found it difficult to work with a man who, in biographical accounts and correspondence, appears to have been as stubborn, quick-tempered and unreliable as he was brilliant. A glimpse into the conflicts that arose between the two men comes from Verdi himself, who late in his life remembered how, at the time of Nabucco, he had to resort to extreme remedies to convince the librettist to replace a weak love duet for Fenena and Ismaele that originally followed the chorus, ‘Va, pensiero’:
He asked me what I wanted instead of the duet, and then I suggested to him to write a prophecy for the prophet Zaccaria: he didn't find it a bad idea, and with ‘buts’ and ‘ifs’ he said he would have thought it over and then written it. That is not what I wanted, because I knew that many days would have passed before Solera decided to write a [single] line. I locked the door, put the key in my pocket, and half-jokingly I said to Solera: ‘You are not getting out of here if you haven't written the prophecy: here is the Bible, you already have the words ready-made’. Solera, who had an irascible character, did not take this tirade well: a flash of anger sparked in his eyes: I had an ugly minute, because the poet was a figure of a man who could have quickly prevailed over the obstinate maestro, but all of a sudden he sat at the table and fifteen minutes later the prophecy was written!Footnote 4
When Verdi and Solera worked together on Attila, the personality conflict escalated rapidly. The task of preparing the libretto was initially assigned to Piave, the house poet at La Fenice, but it was Solera who obtained the commission. On 12 September, Verdi commented on the libretto in a letter to Léon Escudier: ‘The poetry is by Solera, and I am pleased with it’.Footnote 5 And on 5 November he enthusiastically exclaimed to Jacopo Ferretti: ‘Oh, the beautiful libretto suitable for music!’ (‘Oh, il bel libretto musicabile!’).Footnote 6 In the meantime, however, he was becoming increasingly concerned with Solera's delays, as the poet had left for Barcelona and was clearly not responding to his queries. On 1 November, Verdi complained to baritone Antonio Superchi:
I hear with pleasure that Solera has written a Hymn. What do you say! Whether he sent me a copy? Imagine that! He doesn't even send me what he should for Attila, imagine if he cares to send me a Hymn of his! Actually, I would like to pray you (knowing that you see him often) to spur him on so that he finishes once and for all these little things in Attila. I will be very grateful if you use all your eloquence (because my own does not suffice) to make him do it with all promptness.Footnote 7
But neither Superchi nor anyone else obtained from Solera the changes that Verdi expected. And it was only through the collaboration of someone else (to which Solera had previously given his consent)Footnote 8 that the libretto was modified to the composer's satisfaction. On 25 December, Verdi himself informed the recalcitrant poet that Francesco Maria Piave had made the revisions in the final act, and sent them to him for approval.Footnote 9 Solera's reply was vehement and resentful:
In the finale that you are sending me I find nothing but a parody: Attila who follows Odabella; Odabella who flees a bridal chamber in which she had placed all her hopes of revenge, etc., seem to me things that ruin everything I had hoped to infuse into my characters. Thy will be done: the cup you give me to drink is too bitter; only you could have made me understand so well that the librettist is no longer a profession for me.Footnote 10
In fact, during the later part of his life Solera wrote librettos for Emilio Arrieta (La conquista de Grenada, 1850), Benedetto Secchi (La fanciulla delle Asturie, 1856), Angelo Villanis (Vasconcello, 1858 and Una notte di festa, 1859) and others. But he was never able to secure commissions to write for prominent composers, and indeed he never wrote another libretto for Verdi, even though on several occasions, directly or through intermediaries, he attempted a rapprochement with the maestro.Footnote 11
It is generally acknowledged that Solera had a significant influence on the development of Verdi's early manner. As Gilles de Van put it, ‘the passion of his earliest operas, the warlike ardour, the rather confused action, the heroic activism, the quest for a more austere, less hedonistic moral climate – all this can be linked with Solera's librettos’.Footnote 12 De Van also observed that ‘Solera's patriotic fervour shows in all his Verdian librettos’, a statement that equally applies to several of his other librettos. Il contadino d'Agliate (Milan, La Scala, 4 October 1841), which Solera set to music himself, contains the following passage:
[We swear by the sword of our ancestors, before such a limpid sky, to free the homeland from the fury of the enemy's spite.]
Such forceful lines, and many others that appear in this and other Solera librettos (regardless of who set them to music) reveal a debt to Alessandro Manzoni's Risorgimento hymn, Marzo 1821; just as clearly, they foreshadow numerous patriotic passages Solera wrote for Verdi during the 1840s, including the rousing cabaletta for Foresto (echoed by the chorus) that concludes the prologue of Attila (‘Cara patria, già madre e reina’).Footnote 14 In Solera's librettos, furthermore, the patriotic thread is often combined with the sense of a religious mission to be accomplished. Not surprisingly, the plots of Nabucco, I Lombardi and Giovanna d'Arco provided an abundance of opportunities for prayers, invocations, choruses of praise and other expressions of religious faith. But even in Attila, Solera vividly depicted the clash between the foreign intruders and the subjugated natives not only in terms of warlike confrontation, but also of irreconcilable religious beliefs. Thus, on the one hand in the opening chorus the Huns celebrate pillage, rape and bloodshed as an earthly representation of Walhalla. On the other, at several points in the opera the monotheistic (and implicitly Christian) faith of the Aquileians is emphasised, for example in the distant cries of the Hermits in the prologue (‘Lode al Signor! … Lode al Creator!’ – ‘Praise to the Lord! … Praise to the Creator!’),Footnote 15 and in Odabella's bold words in her duet with Foresto, where she compares herself to the biblical Judith (‘Rinnovar di Giuditta la storia / Odabella giurava al Signor!’ – ‘Odabella swore to the Lord to renew Judith's story!’).Footnote 16
At the beginning of the prologue, moreover, Solera adopted another, more subtle strategy to depict the Huns, using poetic form to emphasise their fundamental alterity. The opening stanzas for the chorus and the first lines of recitative sung by Attila read as follows:
[CHORUS: Cries, pillage, groans, blood, rape, ruins and manslaughter and fire is Attila's game. Oh plentiful banquet, given to us by such a rich land! Wotan does not err, here is Walhalla!… Yield to the heroes… blessed land, you are for us. Long live Attila; he discovered it! The king approaches, Wotan encircles him with his might. Here we prostrate, god of war!… (all prostrate themselves).
ATTILA (steps off his chariot): Heroes, rise! Leave in the dust he who defeated dies. Here!… surround me; let the hymn of the winner resound.]
It is the prosody of the passage that deserves close attention. The sixteen lines of the chorus divide into four quatrains, each consisting of three quinari semplici and a quinario doppio in second position. Equally remarkable, Attila's recitative alternates between quinari doppi with sdrucciolo hemistichs and quinari semplici tronchi.Footnote 17 Such a structure is practically without precedent in early Verdi librettos,Footnote 18 and I have been unable to identify analogous passages in other librettos of the time. While metrically there is no difference between setting a single quinario doppio as opposed to a pair of quinari semplici,Footnote 19 the asymmetric stanzaic pattern created by Solera bears profound musical implications, as it essentially discourages the composer not only from employing the so-called ‘lyric form’ (a sixteen-bar melody consisting of four phrases of equal length), but also from the adoption of any sort of regular phrase pattern.Footnote 20 Indeed, Verdi's response to Solera's poetry was a through-composed setting with different musical materials appearing in each stanza, and the only substantial repetition occurring in the conclusive passage in C major setting Solera's final stanza.
While commentators have sometimes remarked on the lack of repetition and irregular phrasing of Verdi's setting of the chorus,Footnote 21 none seems to have traced the connection between the musical setting and Solera's unusual poetic structure. It is impossible to determine whether the composer himself prompted the librettist to provide such an unusual chorus, but this is probably one of the passages in Attila that stirred his musical imagination, and that prompted his enthusiastic exclamation to Ferretti in November 1845.Footnote 22 Furthermore, ‘Urli, rapine’ established a precedent for other prosodically idiosyncratic passages of poetry set to music by Verdi soon after Attila. It is well known that during the composition of Macbeth he repeatedly pestered Piave, asking for specific line lengths and metric patterns. Already in his first letter to the poet concerning the new opera, Verdi singled out the Witches' choruses, which needed to be ‘trivial, yet bizarre and original’.Footnote 23 We can only wonder whether Verdi was referring to form and prosody in this passage, but in one instance, in the Witches' chorus that opens Act III (‘Tre volte miagola la gatta in fregola’), Verdi obtained two stanzas of poetry that, like ‘Urli, rapine’, combine quinari semplici and quinari doppi. This came not without difficulties, however. Utterly dissatisfied with Piave's poetry for this passage, Verdi enlisted the help of Andrea Maffei, who rewrote the chorus completely.Footnote 24 It is not unlikely that prosody was one of the aspects of Piave's original poetry that caused Verdi's dissatisfaction.
If the opening scene of the prologue is quintessentially Solerian, the conclusion of the opera is most definitely not. And it is ironic that the poet himself, who (as we have seen) was the first to criticise sharply Verdi's dramatic choices for the finale and Piave's realisation of those choices, ended up taking the blame for a scene that early commentators found unconvincing at best, and often utterly nonsensical. Tommaso Locatelli, for instance, reporting on the premiere in the Gazzetta privilegiata di Venezia, noted how Attila ‘doesn't even have the good sense to escape and save himself when he sees that his life is in danger, and he dies, like a goose, spitted’.Footnote 25 Although the Venetian critic acknowledged that the libretto had been completed by another writer, he concluded that ‘certainly Solera did not care for his opera, nor for his reputation’.Footnote 26
We will probably never know what Solera had originally written for the conclusion of Attila. It is clear, however, that there was to be a choral ending, in all likelihood a chorus of praise not unlike ‘Immenso Jehovah’ in Nabucco or ‘Te lodiamo, gran Dio di vittoria’ in I Lombardi alla prima Crociata, likely inspired by the invisible chorus singing ‘Halleluja, halleluja, halleluja dir!’ at the end of Werner's play.Footnote 27 What we do know is the exact place in the libretto where Verdi began to use Piave's poetry. The most meaningful source of information on this point is Verdi's letter to Solera of 25 December 1845. The document, reproduced only in part and erroneously described as a minuta in the published Copialettere,Footnote 28 is in fact the actual letter sent to Solera: three pages densely written on a single sheet of paper folded width-wise and with the recipient's name and address on the fourth page.Footnote 29 In it, Verdi transcribed every single line of the new finale written by Piave, starting with the versi lirici for Foresto in Act III, scene 2, and solicited Solera to send any revisions he saw fit promptly, as the premiere of Attila was to take place around 20 January.
What is most intriguing in the letter is that what Verdi transcribed for Solera is not the poetry that appeared in print in the libretto for the premiere, but an earlier version of it, which Solera, despite his heated reaction to the missive, thoroughly revised, crossing out substantial portions of Verdi's transcription and rewriting them on the sides of the same sheet of paper. This explains what Solera meant when in his response to Verdi he wrote: ‘In the meantime I pray that you change at least some of the lines that are not my own, so that the pill will seem less bitter. I am sending you your same copy, so that you will see the corrections better’.Footnote 30 Verdi surely did see the corrections, and took advantage of them as he led Attila to its premiere.
It is beyond the scope of this study to conduct a thorough examination of Piave's original lines and of Solera's revision of them. But an example will give an idea of the stylistic impact Solera had on the text. The exchange between Foresto, Ezio and Odabella at the beginning of scene 4 is particularly revealing. Piave's original lines read as follows:
Solera, without altering the metre or the number of lines, thus modified the poetry:
The changes improve the quality of the poetry substantially, enhancing its dramatic intensity in several ways: Foresto addresses Odabella directly, and Ezio, rather than commenting pointlessly on Odabella's ostensible betrayal, urges Foresto to signal the attack on the Huns. As for Odabella's words, Solera's version expresses her initial surprise (‘Tu qui?’), places greater emphasis in her third line (‘Te sol, te sol’) and explicitly expresses her faithfulness. It is no wonder that Solera's revised text, with only a few changes in the punctuation, made it into Verdi's score and into the printed libretto.
For all his efforts, however, there was little the poet could do to restore the scene's dramatic credibility. Verdi's choice to have Odabella flee the altar, censured by Solera, was a fundamental move away from the public sphere, which he had explored so effectively in the final scenes of his other Solera operas, and towards a deeper reading of individual emotions. On a small scale, such a move foreshadows the transition, fully realised in the operas that followed La battaglia di Legnano, from the early to the middle period of Verdi's career.Footnote 31 Those who are fond of the grandiose choral endings of the earlier Verdi–Solera operas cannot help being more than a bit saddened by the loss of Solera's original finale.Footnote 32 At the same time, whilst Solera could only regard the new ending as a ‘parody’, there are reasons to be intrigued by the poetry prepared by Piave and revised by Solera for the conclusion of the opera. For all the loss of consistency, of grandeur, of moral and political commitment, and of the typically Solerian idea of individual commitment to a common cause, there is an important experimental side (dramatically ineffective though it may be) to the finale Verdi envisioned and entrusted to Piave. In Act III of Attila Odabella turns out to be not the biblical-size character that Solera had forcefully depicted in her initial cavatina, in her duet with Foresto, and in several other moments in the opera, but a woman whose private feelings and moral integrity end up taking precedence over the public mission she has undertaken. Similarly, at the end of the opera Attila figuratively steps down from his throne to follow the woman he loves, a choice thoroughly inconsistent with the character depicted earlier in the opera, but nonetheless one that privileges the private versus the public, his own inclinations versus his responsibility towards his people, and that makes him more human, and therefore unexpectedly (and fatally) vulnerable.
