Baltimore Opera Company

Study Guide

La Traviata

About the Librettist – Francesco Maria Piave

Like the teams of Lerner & Loewe and Rodgers & Hammerstein, the team of Piave & Verdi supplied the world with masterful lyric creations. Piave was born in Murano , Italy , on May 18, 1810 and seemed destined for a life of letters and philosophy. He even attended seminary in the hopes of becoming a priest, but wound up, due to financial difficulties, being a newspaper proofreader! Fortunately, due to contacts he had at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice , he met the similarly impecunious Verdi, with whom he forged a lifetime friendship and collaboration. After discussing several historical projects based on the lives of Oliver Cromwell and Allan Cameron, they turned to adapting Victor Hugo's play Hernani . Their version, Italianized to Ernani (1844), was an immediate hit and led to other collaborations: I Due Foscari (1844), Macbeth (1847), Il Corsaro (1848), Stiffelio (1850), Rigoletto (1851), La Traviata (1853), Simon Boccanegra (1857), Aroldo (1857), and La Forza del Destino (1862). When one looks at these operas and the novels or plays from which the majority came, it is obvious that Piave's great talent was in adaptation, rather than seminal and original creation. Nevertheless, it was a tremendous talent that he had: to transcend, subjugate, refine, cut, lengthen and be adaptive to Verdi's sometimes intransigent demands. Those demands occasionally strained their relationship, but the somewhat sycophantic Piave always acceded to Verdi's requirements.

As Verdi's talent developed and progressed, he became aware that Piave's style was somewhat passé. He twice had to call on another librettist for help: Andrei Maffei for Macbeth and Antonio Ghislanzoni (later collaborated with him on Aïda ), for help with the revision of La Forza del Destino , when a crippling and debilitating illness forced Piave to bow out of the enterprise. Piave died in the Italian capital of Milan on March 5, 1876.

Ever the wordsmith, once he was strolling and saw a woman who had scorned him. As she passed, he loudly sang the words he had written for the Duke in Rigoletto :

“La donna é mobile (Woman is fickle)
Qual piuma al vento (As a feather in the wind).”

Obviously she had some literary talent as well for she equally as loudly replied:

“É Piave é un asino (And Piave is an ass)
Che val' per cento (Who is worth nothing).”

Obviously not a happy collaboration like the one he enjoyed with Verdi!

James Harp

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