In January 1951, as part of the commemorative events for the fiftieth anniversary of Giuseppe Verdi’s death, a small group of devotees descended into the composer’s crypt in Milan. As they paused before the tomb, a member of the group, playing an out-of-tune piano, launched into the chorus ‘Va pensiero’, the number from Verdi’s Nabucco (1842) by then so firmly entwined with the history of Italy’s so-called Risorgimento. The marble lid of Verdi’s tomb was prised open to reveal the coffin, with its oval glass window positioned over the composer’s face. The group were, according to the press, presented with a ‘miracle’: Verdi’s exhumed body was unmarked by death, his features ‘intact like that of a saint’; some claimed that the Maestro ‘appeared incorruptible’.Footnote ¹ ‘A moment of awe and emotion’ stirred among those present.Footnote ² ‘Incorruptibility’ is the term applied in Catholicism to sacred bodies that show little sign of decay; it had long been a requirement for canonisation. The composer’s physical remnants, then, were confirmed as saintly relics.

The composer’s body, however, was not the only thing dug up from the past in 1951. On 12 September of that year his 1846 opera Attila was also ‘exhumed’, in concert at Venice’s Teatro La Fenice.Footnote ³ The opera was understood not just as a previously forgotten classic revived now for the ‘operatic museum’, but as a still-powerful medium for the broader cultural reappraisal of the nation’s past.Footnote ⁴

Such commemorative activities formed part of a broader engagement with Italy’s past in the aftermath of Fascism and the Second World War. Within Verdi scholarship, the composer’s role in national unification was being reconstructed and myths re-inscribed; within Risorgimento scholarship, this was a period of rewriting the history of unification in light of more recent events. Verdi’s role in such historiographical narratives – in the ensuing fate of Liberal Italy, in Gramscian and Crocean readings of the nation’s past, or in recent Fascist appropriations – meant that the historical remembering stirred by Verdi and his music was undergoing renewed politicisation.Footnote ⁵ Post-war crisis thus prompted cultural archaeology: the excavating of people, music and political ideas from a previous age, with the Verdian celebrations crystallising the debates such exhumations stirred.

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In Attila’s prologue, Odabella’s aria ‘Allor che i forti corrono’ was just the kind of moment seized on by critics. The aria proper is preceded by Odabella’s unexpected entrance on the line ‘Santo di patria indefinito amor’, sung at fortissimo and opening on a high G; sheer vocal power here reigns supreme. What follows is a relatively formulaic double aria. Odabella’s opening lines form an immediate contrast with her dramatic entrance cry: now piano and an octave lower. There is an obvious degree of mapping of the music to the text; the first four lines tell of the muted behaviour of Hun women – correspondingly, the text is set within a more subdued sound world. The remaining four lines depict the notably different comportment of Italian women (‘Ma noi, noi donne italiche,/cinte di ferro il seno’). At the start of the second half the orchestra bursts forth again fortissimo, and Odabella’s line returns to the high G and to a reliance on vocal strength.Footnote ⁶

The midway point of the aria is thus a moment of musico-dramatic rupture, a surface fissure that was identified by critics in 1951 as a sonic and verbal gesture with historical topicality. Listening to this moment prompted a direct comparison with the original performance context of 1846, and this juxtaposition honed in precisely on the relationship between words and music. The midpoint of Odabella’s aria therefore became the moment – critics claimed in 1951 – when the 1846 audience rose up, stirred by the patriotic resonances of the libretto. As one commentator noted:

If at the opera’s premiere the music had been subservient to the patriotic significance of the text, this critic argued, by 1951 the libretto’s political efficacy was inevitably somewhat diminished. Another wrote that despite ‘a burning topicality’ for original listeners and the ‘Risorgimental outbursts’ that numbers such as Odabella’s aria had once inspired, heated political sentiments were diffused into a libretto that now seemed mediocre.Footnote ⁸

The aria thus posed a conundrum: how should one explain the fact that the opera continued to provoke such a powerful emotional response, despite the reduced efficacy of the libretto in the 1951 context? The answer for some lay specifically in the music and its ability to signify beyond any textual allusion. These critics repeatedly emphasised the music as a vehicle of emotion distinct from the text, and proposed this as contrary to the understanding of the opera’s original critics. Others, however, claimed that it was the fusion of powerful music and evocative words that created an emotionally patriotic response. Either way, some were wary of the implications: critic Giuseppe Cacciola, for instance, warned of the ‘easy patriotic oratory’ that could be created from Verdi’s ‘Dionysian’ effects.Footnote ⁹

For the most part, though, the 1951 critics failed to pay heed to Cacciola’s warning. The lingering resonance of moments of musical drama such as Odabella’s aria encouraged a reconsideration of Verdi’s affective role in the Risorgimento. The vocal power of Odabella’s ‘ma noi donne italiche’ was seen as providing an example of how feelings central to historical remembering could be mobilised, the musically instilled relationship between drama and emotion being key to understanding the ongoing efficacy of the opera, regardless of textual specifics. The emphasis on the aural rupture in Odabella’s aria in the opera’s 1951 reception thus provides an intriguing counter-narrative to the story frequently told in scholarship on the political efficacy of Verdi’s music in relation to the Risorgimento, which has often sought to locate patriotic ‘meaning’ in the evocations of the literary texts.Footnote ¹⁰

Re-evaluating the music’s affective power in its own right also served as a way of underlining the opera’s universality and incorruptibility. Just like Verdi’s tomb, Attila was established as something that could be returned to again and again, and that still had visceral force. ‘Allor che i forti corrono’ was portrayed as incorruptible, just as Verdi’s physical corpse had been, both rendered as such so that they could become metonymical symbols of an earlier time – as well as encapsulating the affective state of the present. Excavating the commemorative events of 1951 thus tells a common story of a longing for permanence despite the inevitability of change; but it also tells of the potential political power of the idea of exhumation, of the canonic drives of musical incorruptibility, and of the shifting patterns of opera reception and discourse. Amid post-war disillusionment with the nation’s past, Verdi and his music offered a more positive way of rewriting history, as miraculously preserved emblems capable of endless exhumation.