7 Giuseppe Verdi 7Commissioned by the khedive of Egypt to celebrate the
opening of Cairo’s new Opera House in 1869, Aida pre-
miered there in 1871 and went on to receive worldwide
acclaim.
Late Years
In 1873, while waiting in a Naples hotel for a production of
Aida, Verdi wrote a string quartet, the only instrumental
composition of his maturity. In the same year, he was
moved by the death of the Italian patriot and poet
Alessandro Manzoni to compose a requiem mass in his
honour. One of the masterpieces in the oratorio tradition,
the Manzoni Requiem is an impressive testimony to what
Verdi could do outside the field of opera.
After 1873 the maestro considered himself retired, at
long last, from that world of opera to which he had been
bound for so many years. He settled in at Sant’Agata,
where he became a major landholder and a very wealthy
man. His unintended and unimagined return to the stage,
many years after Aida, was entirely due to the initiative of
his publisher, Giulio Ricordi, who proposed that Arrigo
Boito should write a libretto based on Shakespeare’s
Othello. The Othello project then took shape, very slowly,
on and off, until the opera finally opened at La Scala in
- In his 74th year, Verdi, stimulated by a libretto far
superior to anything he had previously set, had produced
his tragic masterpiece.
After a rapturous tour with Otello throughout Europe,
Verdi once more retreated to Sant’Agata, declaring that
he had composed his last opera. Yet Ricordi and Boito
managed to intervene one more time. With infinite skill,
Boito converted Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor,
strengthened with passages adapted from the Henry IV
plays, into the perfect comic libretto, Falstaff, which Verdi