thumb|upright|Painting by Karoly Gyurkovich ()

thumb|right|upright|Giuseppina Strepponi (c. 1865)

Clelia Maria Giuseppa (Giuseppina) Strepponi (Lodi, 8 September 1815 – Villanova sull'Arda, 14 November 1897) was a nineteenth-century Italian operatic soprano of great renown and the second wife of composer Giuseppe Verdi.

She is often credited with having contributed to Verdi's first successes, starring in a number of his early operas, including the role of Abigaille in the world premiere of Nabucco in 1842. A highly gifted singer, Strepponi excelled in the bel canto repertoire and spent much of her career portraying roles in operas by Vincenzo Bellini, Gaetano Donizetti, and Gioachino Rossini, often sharing the stage with tenor Napoleone Moriani and baritone Giorgio Ronconi. Donizetti wrote the title role of his opera Adelia specifically for Strepponi. She was described as possessing a "limpid, penetrating, smooth voice, seemly action, a lovely figure; and to Nature's liberal endowments she adds an excellent technique"; her "deep inner feeling" was also lauded.

Both her personal and professional life were complicated by overwork, by at least three known pregnancies, and by her vocal deterioration which caused her to retire from the stage by the age of 31, in 1846 when she moved to Paris to become a singing teacher. While it is known that she had a professional relationship with Verdi from the time of his first opera, Oberto in 1839, they became a couple by 1847 when they lived together in Paris, then moved to Busseto in 1849, married in 1859, and remained together until the end of her life.

Early life

Strepponi was born in the city of Lodi in the Lombard region of Italy. She was the oldest child of Rosa Cornalba and Feliciano Strepponi (1797–1832), who was the organist at Monza Cathedral and a moderately successful opera composer, his works having been performed in theatres in Milan, Turin and Trieste.

Career as an opera singer

The 1830s

thumb|upright|Giuseppina Strepponi in 1835 (Museo di La Scala)

thumb|left|upright|Baritone Giorgio Ronconi

thumb|left|upright|Tenor Napoleone Moriani

Strepponi made her professional opera début in December 1834 as Adria in Luigi Ricci's Chiara di Rosembergh at the Teatro Orfeo. She had her first major success during the following spring at the Teatro Grande in Trieste singing the title role in Rossini's Matilde di Shabran.

This success quickly led to numerous engagements at major opera houses throughout Italy and Giuseppina soon became her family's major breadwinner. In the summer of 1835, she went to Austria to sing Adalgisa in Bellini's Norma and Amina in Bellini's La sonnambula at the Theater am Kärntnertor in Vienna where she was praised highly by audiences and critics. Although she was highly talented, she never sang outside Italy after 1835. She persisted with Nabucco, singing all eight performances of Verdi's opera: in her words to Lanari, "I dragged myself to the end of the performances" and then told him that she had the possibility of an offer of marriage from a man who would only do so if she were free from contractual obligations. The doctors' conclusions would allow her to do that, but it took her more than a year to recover. and then began another hectic round of performances under an exclusive contract with Lanari announced in February 1838. Cirelli believed that he was the father,

However, sometime in the Spring of 1838, Strepponi became pregnant again and, in Florence on 9 February 1839, she gave birth to her second child, Giuseppina Fausta, only a few hours after completing a performance at the Teatro Alfieri and before leaving for an engagement in Venice. The child was placed in the turnstile for abandoned infants at the Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence under the name of "Sinforosa Cirelli". These children were known as the esposti, "the exposed", or as described by Phillips-Matz, "society's trash". Cirelli, who had returned to Milan, initially denied paternity, believing that she had taken another lover. But Cirelli then accepted paternity when the child was born prematurely and there was no time for her to be taken to somewhere private for the birth. and that this would cause her to be unavailable. But in February 1839 in Florence, she sang in Il giuramento with such dramatic intensity that it appears to have caused her to miscarry and, by necessity, withdraw from further performances for some time. Increasingly pressured by Lanari, she finally relented to appear at La Fenice, where she was a triumph in March. By April 1839 she was in Milan to fulfill those engagements, and her La Scala debut in I Puritani on 20th was another triumph. By March 1840, it appears that she may have given birth to a stillborn girl since Phillips-Matz notes that a combination of time taken out of her working schedule corresponds to around the 22 March records showing parents abandoning her in the parish in which she lived. During the following few months, letters between Strepponi and Lanari, in whom she had clearly confided, reveal the existence of "the despicable M ..." (and in another letter, he is "Mr. Mo..."), and she asks that he "kindly remind him of the important sum of money that through your offices he has agreed to pay." On 16 August she wrote again to Lanari, stating that "I have been too cruelly treated under the mantle of love ... But I do not wish him ill."

All of Frank Walker's investigations, using letters and performance histories of the different people involved in her life, put Strepponi together with only one man at the time that the three children must have been conceived. He concludes that it is the only man who must have been the father of the first two children, and who was then the prospective father of the third: it is Napoleone Moriani. Giuseppina had given birth to a girl in Trieste on 4 November 1841, Adelina Rosa Maria Carolina Strepponi. It appears that she then left the baby with a couple, the Vianellos, who took in illegitimate children. However, the child died of dysentery on 4 October 1842. Strepponi left for Venice with Cirelli with whom she had been living in Milan as a common law wife.

An early 20th-century biography of Verdi, as well as one written in 1938 about Strepponi's life by Mercede Mandula, both propose that Strepponi became Merelli's lover in the early 1840s and it is claimed that this relationship resulted in another illegitimate child. However, this account is vehemently disputed by both Frank Walker, who declares "but it is not true: it is fiction", as well as biographer Gabriele Baldini, who states "that it is certain that Giuseppina was not Merelli's lover, that she had no sons by him ...". Verdi's biographer, Mary Jane Phillips-Matz, in her account of Strepponi's life both before and after becoming Verdi's partner and then his wife, lays out in detail the singer's history up to the time of Nabucco and her investigations have produced no evidence of the accuracy of the early scenario.

Retirement in Paris

With Verdi, 1847 to 1849

In October 1846 Strepponi moved to Paris and became a singing teacher. She came out of her stage retirement briefly for one last opera appearance at the Comédie-Italienne which was not well received. Verdi, who was in England for the premiere of his opera I masnadieri in July 1847, returned via Paris and the two began a romantic relationship, with the composer remaining there for two years (albeit with short periods in Italy to firstly return to Milan in April 1848 after the nationalistic uprising there and then to oversee production of his new opera in Rome, La battaglia di Legnano in early 1849.

Return to Italy with Verdi, July 1849

thumb|left|upright|Palazzo Orlandi,<br>56 Via Roma in Busseto

thumb|left|upright|Villa Sant'Agata (Villa Verdi) Sant'Agata

The couple returned to Italy by July 1849 and began living together in Busseto, Verdi's hometown where they first lived at the Palazzo Orlandi. The reaction of many of the people of Busseto towards Giuseppina, a woman of the theatre living openly with the composer in an unmarried state concerned Verdi, and as such, she was shunned in the town and at church. While Verdi could "treat the Bussetani with contempt&nbsp;... Giuseppina, in the next few years, suffered greatly."

In other respects, she offered him much advice and, as Walker recalls from her account of being curled up in an armchair nearby, all the while offering comments and criticism while Verdi was composing, he speculates that "she must have sung many of these world-famous melodies for the first time from the manuscript sketches." At one point he took her advice not to have to compose on order by a certain date, but to find a suitable subject, then compose the music at his own convenience and then find a suitable venue and suitable singers, and he so informed Corticelli, the theatrical agent from Bologna.

In those years, Strepponi frequently suffered from stomach problems and arthritis and during her last year of life she could barely move from her bed. In the autumn of 1897, when the couple was once again preparing to spend the winter in Genoa in a more salubrious climate with proximity to the sea, Verdi made the decision to stay in Sant'Agata because his wife was bedridden. Giuseppina Strepponi died after a long illness on 14 November that year at Sant'Agata, due to pneumonia. She was initially buried in Milan. With the death of Giuseppina, Verdi became a widower for the second time and was once again tormented by the pain of losing one of the most important figures in his life. When Verdi died in 1901 he left instructions in his will to be buried next to Giuseppina, but he was buried in the main cemetery of Milan. The desire to see the couple together in the afterlife eventually led on 26 February 1901 to the transfer of both of their bodies to the oratory of the Casa di Riposo in Milan, the retirement home for musicians which Verdi had created. Arturo Toscanini directed a choir of 900 singers in the famous Va, pensiero from Nabucco.

Depictions in media

  • After Aida: Strepponi is one of the main characters in Julian Mitchell's 1985 play-with-music, which focuses on Verdi's life and compositions after 1879 and in persuading him to compose Otello
  • Risorgimento! (2011), the opera by Italian composer Lorenzo Ferrero.
  • Verdi und die Dame mit Noten, opera by Mathias Husmann (b. 1948), premiered at the Hamburger Kammeroper in 2015, conducted by Florian Csizmadia.
  • In November 2001, Tell Giulio the Chocolate is Ready, a radio play by Murray Dahm, was produced and broadcast by Radio New Zealand. The play is based on the letters of the Verdi-Boito correspondence and explores the genesis and production of Verdi and Boito's opera Otello including the role played by Giuseppina Strepponi. The play and broadcast included those sections of the opera as they appeared in the correspondence (such as Iago's Credo).

DVD 'Giuseppe Verdi' 2005 published by 'House of knowledge' Semi documentary biography of the composer's life and works. Ronald Pickup. An excellent well-documented dramatisation.

References

Notes

Sources

  • Baldini, Gabriele (1980), (trans. Roger Parker), The Story of Giuseppe Verdi: Oberto to Un Ballo in Maschera. Cambridge, et al.: Cambridge University Press, 1980. .
  • Budden, Julian (1984), The Operas of Verdi, Volume 2: From Il Trovatore to La Forza del Destino. London: Cassell. (hardcover) (paperback).
  • Budden, Julian (1998), "Giuseppina Strepponi", in Stanley Sadie, (Ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, Vol. Four, pp.&nbsp;582 – 583. London: Macmillan Publishers, Inc. . .
  • Kutsch, K. J. and Riemens, Leo (1969), A Concise Biographical Dictionary of Singers: From the Beginning of Recorded Sound to the Present (Trans. from German, expanded and annotated by Harry Earl Jones). Philadelphia, Chilton Book Company. .
  • Phillips-Matz, Mary Jane (1993), "Giuseppina Strepponi" (early life) and subsequent many references, Verdi: A Biography. London & New York: Oxford University Press. .
  • Rizzo, Dino (2019), "Giuseppina Strepponi", Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani - Volume 94, Treccani, Roma, 2019.
  • Többen, Irene (2003), "Ich wollte eine neue Frau werden", Giuseppina Strepponi, Verdis Frau, Ein Lebensbild. Berlin: Das Arsenal.
  • Walker, Frank (1962), The Man Verdi, New York: Knopf and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. .
  • Portraits of Strepponi at different times in her life on giuseppeverdi.it