Who is composer Giuseppe Verdi?

But how much do you know about one of the worlds greatest ever operatic composers?

A remarkable talent who overcame immense personal tragedy to produce some of the most enduring operas, Verdi’s story is a fascinating one. And so as we welcomed Opera North’s version of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra to the Southbank Centre in May 2025 we took a closer look at the composer, discovering how some of the world’s best known operas almost never saw the light of day.

He was a paid musician from the age of eight

Giuseppe Verdi was born in the village of Le Roncole – then within the First French Empire, now in the province of Parma, Italy – in 1813 to parents Carlo and Luigia, an innkeeper and spinner respectively. From a young age he showed a great interest in music, learning to play the organ under the tutorship of his schoolmaster, Baistrocchi, who was also organist at the local church. When Baistrocchi passed away a couple of years later, the young Verdi – still only eight years old – succeeded him as the church’s paid organist.

He was a student of Ferdinando Provesi

A well-regarded Italian composer of opera in particular, Provesi was also the master of music at Busseto’s St Bartolomeo Cathedral, and co-director of the local Philharmonic Society. With Busseto just a few kilometres from Le Roncole, it was here that Verdi would study from the age of 11. Under Provesi, Verdi wrote what he later described as ‘a motley assortment of pieces’, including marches, sinfonie, concertos and cantatas, and upon joining the Philharmonic Society, quickly became its brightest star. In 1829, Verdi’s studies in Busseto came to an end, chiefly as Provesi declared he had nothing more to teach him.

He was rejected by the Milan Conservatory

After completing his studies under Provesi, Verdi applied to study at the Milan Conservatory, but was unsuccessful. However, with the support of Provesi’s co-director of the Philharmonic Society, Antonio Barezzi, he became a private pupil of Vincenzo Lavigna, a former concert master of Milan’s La Scala opera house.

His first opera premiered at La Scala

It wasn’t just Lavigna’s teaching that benefitted Verdi in Milan, his time in the city also saw him forge connections that would prove valuable in bringing his talent to a wider audience. Verdi had returned to Busseto in 1835, as director of the Busseto school, and the following year married Barezzi’s daughter, Margherita. It was here that he penned his first opera, Oberto, and when the time came to premiere it, his Milanese connections smoothed a route to the impresario and then manager of La Scala, Bartolomeo Merelli. Oberto’s success in 1839 saw Merelli contract Verdi for three further works.

However his second opera was almost his last

Though his career as a composer was taking off, this was a tragic time for Verdi. Margherita and he had two children – Virginia and Icilio – but both died within 18 months of being born, and then whilst Verdi was working on his second opera, Un giorno di regno, Margherita too passed away, of encephalitis, at the age of just 26. Already in a great depression at the death of his beloved wife and children, when Un giorno di regno flopped, Verdi vowed never to compose again. Thankfully, Merelli eventually managed to convince him otherwise.

And it was his third opera with which his career truly began

With Merelli’s encouragement, Verdi returned to composing in 1841, writing his third opera, the four-act, Nabucco. First performed at La Scala in March 1842 it proved a huge success. So much so that when the season recommenced in the autumn, it ran for an unprecedented – and unequalled – 57 performances. It was subsequently performed in Vienna, Lisbon, Barcelona, Berlin, Paris, Hamburg and, by 1848, in New York. Verdi was now a global name, as the composer himself says of Nabucco, ‘this is the opera with which my artistic career really begins’.

In total he wrote 26 operas

And sixteen of those were written in the decade following Nabucco. It was an incredibly prolific period for Verdi that concluded with three of his most famous operas; Rigoletto, written in 1851, and featuring the hugely popular canzone ‘La donna è mobile’, and Il trovatore and La traviata, both written in 1853.

At the peak of his fame, he preferred life on the farm

After turning 40, Verdi’s prolificacy slowed a little. He had returned to Busseto where he was living with the singer Giuseppina Strepponi in a newly constructed Villa that sat on farmland owned by the composer. Here Verdi threw himself into farm life as energetically as he had done opera, as Strepponi documented in a letter to the publisher Léon Escudier.

‘His love for the country has become a mania, madness, rage, and fury—anything you like that is exaggerated. He gets up almost with the dawn, to go and examine the wheat, the maize, the vines… Fortunately our tastes for this sort of life coincide, except in the matter of sunrise, which he likes to see up and dressed, and I from my bed.’

Giuseppina Strepponi, writing on Verdi

In his later career, he was offered huge fees for new operas

Verdi’s success, and the earnings it brought him. allowed him a freedom in his later work, as he was less reliant on commissions for new operas. But such was his star that when offers did come his way they were often sizable. In 1860 Verdi accepted a commission offer of 60,000 francs plus expenses from St Petersburg’s Bolshoi, for which he produced La forza del destino. And a decade later he was commissioned by the Egyptian government to the tune of 150,000 francs to compose an opera for Cairo’s Khedivial Opera House as the country celebrated the opening of the Suez Canal. Aida, a four act tragic opera, premiered in Cairo in 1871.

Opera wasn’t the only string to his bow

Though Verdi is best known for his operas, he also wrote many other pieces including a number of sacred works, most notably Messa da Requiem, his tribute to the poet and novelist Alessandro Manzoni. In 1873, whilst he was supervising a production of Aida in Naples, Verdi wrote a string quartet. His first chamber work, Verdi said of the piece, ‘I don’t know whether the Quartet is beautiful or ugly, but I do know that it’s a Quartet!’. It is the only major string quartet to be written by an Italian of the 19th century.

He continued to compose into his eighties

And whilst he was no longer as prolific as he had been in his thirties and forties, there was certainly no drop off in the quality of Verdi’s later work, with his final two operas, Otello and Falstaff, often considered to be among his very best work. Such was the appreciation for Falstaff that when it premiered at La Scala the applause reportedly lasted for an hour, and when the opera moved on to Rome, the crowds of well-wishers that greeted Verdi at the city’s railway station were so fervent he had to take refuge in a tool shed. 

His immense popularity in Italy became clear at his funeral

Verdi had, quietly, in his own relatively private way, become a national hero in Italy; the most famous composer in the country’s most popular music form and a strong advocate of Italian identity. So much so that his death, in 1901, was a national tragedy; it’s estimated that between 300,000 and 350,000 people attended his funeral cortege; the largest public gathering in Italian history.