Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/126

 Young Verdi had lessons from the Busseto bandmaster, and soon succeeded him. He then composed quantities of pieces of church music and band music. "As a religious and military musician," writes Camille Bellaigue, "he threw to all the winds of the Lombard plain pious hymns and double steps, waltzes, mazurkas and canticles; the church and square of his village resounded with nothing but his notes. His youth 'made a noise'—a tulmultuous, violent noise, often trivial and as it were half wild, but already quivering with passion and life."

The excellent Barrezzi's subsidies enabled him to pay several visits to Milan, where amongst other things he was rejected by the conservatoire, and where he succeeded in giving in 1839 his first opera, Oberto, Count of San Bonifacio. From that time his position was established; by that I mean that he could not be overlooked, and that theatres accepted and performed his scores. But he had to compose ten operas and wait ten years before accomplishing his master strokes. Of these he produced three in close succession Rigoletto came in 1851, the Trovatore in 1853, and the Traviata was written during the rehearsals of the Trovatore.

These three works have gone round the world and round again and have not grown old. Why? Because they are free from artificiality. They have gaps, rough places, and insipid passages too, and it is astonishing to think of all the resources of musical language that Verdi fails to employ, resources which might have served him, beyond all doubt, in passages that have been left weak, one might almost say meaningless and have been filled up with more noise than expression. He is incapable of rendering, or so it seems to me,