Verdi’s librettists were educated in one of the oldest, most conservative poetic traditions in the world. For an Italian writer, it was practically
impossible to resist the influence of Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, the Roman
Virgil, or more recent Arcadians such as Metastasio. Not even the greatest poets of nineteenth-century Italy, Ugo Foscolo and Giacomo Leopardi,
could detach themselves from this heritage, so that a “classicizing” tendency
persisted well into the 1800s. Italian Romanticism was born late, around
1810, and interested primarily asmall group of intellectuals. Decades earlier,
however, Romantic taste had infiltrated popular culture, primarily through
distribution of late eighteenth-century English and German novels and
poetry: Melchiorre Cesarotti’s translations of James Macpherson’s poems,
attributed to the mythic Ossian (1763), were particularly important. Later,
French theatre was influential, from the innumerable m;elodrames imported
by itinerant theatre companies to the plays of the young Victor Hugo. The
language, images, and poetics of these models guided early nineteenthcentury Italian librettists from Gaetano Rossi to Felice Romani, and are
found in the works of Verdi’s most frequent collaborators – Temistocle
Solera, Salvadore Cammarano, Andrea Maffei and Francesco Maria Piave –
and in other Romantic poetry. Even Verdi’s last librettist, Arrigo Boito,
avowedly distanced himself from these models only to present them in
revamped form.6 In short, the Italian nineteenth-century libretto documents a diffusion of a literary taste that permeated social custom and general parlance. Only a few decades ago, familiar phrases from librettos could
still be heard in the everyday language of the Italian middle class.
