For too many years, the operas Verdi composed through most of the 1840s were grouped together as products of the so-called ‘anni di galera’ (years in the galleys), a term that was generally used in a derogatory way, as if it were intended to demean the artistic quality of the operas Verdi composed before, say, the 1849 Luisa Miller.Footnote ¹ Similarly, it was widely believed that Verdi only began sketching his operas in a serious fashion with Luisa Miller, and that this somehow constituted a decisive moment in his compositional career. We now know this to be untrue.Footnote ² Equally false are all efforts to interpret the phrase ‘anni di galera’ as referring to Verdi's operas of the 1840s. In fact, the phrase derives from a famous letter by Verdi to his Milanese friend, Clarina Maffei, of 12 May 1858 and, if anything, reflects his frustration at the unsuccessful negotiations with the Teatro San Carlo of Naples for the premiere of Gustavo III, which he had already transformed – thanks to censorial intervention – into Una vendetta in domino:

Verdi is not decrying his earlier style, not in 1858 at least, although we know well that by the 1870s the post-Wagnerian operatic world (and the Italian composer himself) had decreed that these operas were no longer to be particularly valued: at that moment in history, a moment that Verdi lived through, they were considered to be distinctly ‘old-fashioned’.

Instead, Verdi in 1858 is pointedly referring to the social system of Italian theatres to which he had long been obligated: a very short period of preparation; complex negotiations with librettists, who were not always nearby; rehearsals with singers at the same time he was orchestrating the opera; relatively little time for revisions and second thoughts; a relationship of utter dependence on theatres and their political requirements, including censorship. This situation was as true for the original version of Un ballo in maschera as it was for Nabucco. Verdi's determination to escape such servitude helps to explain why between Un ballo in maschera, which was finally staged at the Teatro Apollo of Rome, with a heavily censored text, on 17 February 1859, and the revision of La forza del destino, which had its premiere at Milan's Teatro alla Scala on 27 February 1869, he had nothing whatsoever to do with Italian theatres. The first version of La forza del destino was written for St Petersburg (1862) and restaged by the composer for Madrid (1863); the revision of Macbeth for the Théâtre-Lyrique of Paris (1865); and Don Carlos for the Paris Opéra (1867). Not that these adventures turned out to be perfect: he was supposed to give La forza del destino during the winter of 1861–2, but the illness of the prima donna forced the performance to be postponed nine months (no, she was not pregnant); the impresario of the Théàtre-Lyrique, Léon Carvalho, allowed himself liberties with Verdi's score of Macbeth that no Italian impresario would have dared; and Verdi's unhappiness with the Paris Opéra after his experience with Don Carlos is legendary.

The result of this misunderstanding about the meaning of the ‘anni di galera’ has been the tendency to mix together in an undifferentiated porridge all the operas Verdi composed before Luisa Miller. It is a tendency that also creeps into many discussions of the Rossini serious operas, Donizetti's oeuvre – if we exclude the few ‘masterworks’ that survived fairly continuously from the nineteenth century to today, and pretty much all the works of their contemporaries (Pacini, Mercadante, Coccia, Vaccai, etc.). The image of composers working to formula, of a uniformity of style and a lack of artistic integrity, still surrounds much of this music.Footnote ⁴

And yet there are hopeful signs that this tendency is finally being corrected. New, critical editions of the works of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi have encouraged scholars to concentrate on works they once would have ignored, leading to a significant body of research (not always by the editor of the respective editions) that addresses cultural issues and musical questions surrounding works such as Rossini's La donna del lago Footnote ⁵ or Verdi's Un giorno di regno,Footnote ⁶I masnadieri Footnote ⁷ and Giovanna d'Arco,Footnote ⁸ that had once seemed to be faceless.Footnote ⁹ The performers of these works, too, are beginning to be more than names, and their interactions with composers and the public are being taken seriously.Footnote ¹⁰

The following symposium was born in an effort to understand more fully Verdi's Attila, whose critical edition, edited by Helen Greenwald, received its first performance on 23 February 2010 at the Metropolitan Opera of New York, under the baton of Riccardo Muti. The new edition has many interesting things, to be sure: it corrects countless errors in the original printed vocal scores (published earliest by the firm of Lucca in Milan, then reissued many times by Ricordi, which inherited Lucca's catalogue in 1888: no full score of Attila was ever published, although Ricordi prepared one for rental); it presents new information about the sources – especially the autograph manuscript, which is housed in the British Library – explaining finally the unusual cancelled ‘skeleton score’ in the Bibliothèque nationale de France; and it prints for the first time all three of the Romanze that Verdi wrote for Foresto at the beginning of the third act, the original piece and the versions he prepared for Nicola Ivanoff (Trieste, Teatro Grande, 28 September 1846)Footnote ¹¹ and Napoleone Moriani (Milan, Teatro alla Scala, 26 December 1846).Footnote ¹² But work on the edition has done much more. It has focused serious scholarly attention on countless issues that are raised by the particularities of this opera. The brief essays in this forum reflect some of those issues, and will, I hope, stimulate further enquiry.Footnote ¹³

The premiere of the Attila edition and Riccardo Muti's debut at the Metropolitan Opera constituted an auspicious occasion for many of us who love the works from Verdi's youth. If this symposium encourages others to listen to Attila as a fascinating musical and dramatic contribution to the world of musical theatre in the years leading up to the revolutionary movements of 1848 and not simply as an ‘oom-pah-pah’ work of Verdi's youth, it will have served its ends.