In the early years of the nineteenth century—the artistically rich and immensely intense era of full-blown Romanticism, arguably the pinnacle of Western Civilization—two colossal figures of music come to life in the same year of 1813. Richard Wagner, born in Leipzig, embodies the essence of German culture; Giuseppe Verdi, born in Roncole, in Northern Italy, becomes the beloved composer who carried on the traditions of the Italian opera, and elevated them to lofty heights. They both died a few years apart: Wagner in 1883, curiously in Venice, and Verdi in 1901 in Milan.

Against a historical backdrop of ardent artistic development---kings and courts, patrons and active audiences, political upheavals and religious ferment--when philosophers tried to answer the same questions put forward by the Greeks centuries ago, and with respective fatherlands still fragmented during the first four decades of their lives, Wagner and Verdi created some of the most poignant and transcendental operas the world had ever heard, many of them still today in the active repertoire of major opera companies. Both men shared some similarities, but the differences between them were far more pronounced and evident.

Similarities between Wagner and Verdi are somewhat minimal from the point of view of their music, although slightly more numerous when considering the ethical side of their activities as composers. Both were men of the theater, albeit with major divergent concepts. Both were nationalistic in their aspirations of creating an art that would reflect their cultural milieu; their respective cultures, however, were different in substance, ways of life, expression and weltanschauung. Both longed for the unification of their motherlands. Wagner himself actively took to the streets in Dresden, being subsequently persecuted by police forces and fleeing to Switzerland for political asylum, while Verdi enjoyed seeing his name inscribed upon walls, posters and flags as Evviva Verdi (standing for Evviva Vittorio Emmanuelle Re D’ Italia, representing Italian unification under the House of Savoy). Both wanted their fellow citizens to applaud and support them. Wagner often despised his audiences, while Verdi looked onto his public as part of divine judgment of his operas. Also, both were fighters, yet Wagner, the true musical revolutionary, fought against his time, paying dearly for it, while Verdi simply continued the ennobled ideal of Italian opera inherited from Donizetti and Bellini.

Differences between both can be outlined easily. Throughout history, some composers have altered or fully transformed the technical and aesthetic aspects of music making. Such composers expanded form concepts, created larger musical structures, pushed forward the boundaries of aural perception, renovated horizontal melodic and vertical harmonic procedures to invent a given new musical language, and increased instrumental forces while imposing novel dramatic concepts of the theater, now married to music. All those were legendary, revolutionary composers, from Guillaume de Machault to Arnold Schönberg, from Claudio Monteverdi to Igor Stravinsky, from the sons of Bach to Richard Strauss, from Ludwig Van Beethoven to Gustav Mahler, from Hector Berlioz to Richard Wagner. Various other composers remained in history as followers of an evolutionary creed, never as radical and innovative as the revolutionary ones, inheriting a given style and carrying it to perfection without seminal or epochal changes. These are towering creators in their own non-remodeling ways, from Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina to Johann Sebastian Bach, from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to Franz Schubert, from Felix Mendelssohn to Johannes Brahms, from Vincenzo Bellini to Giuseppe Verdi. Easily, then, Wagner fits fully into the musical revolutionary category, while Verdi belongs to the category of cultivated traditionalists.

Invariably, the revolutionary composer exercises a far grander influence on both contemporary or subsequent generations. Wagner’s preponderance will prove huge. From the premiere of Der Ring des Nibelungen Wagner’s shadow of Wagner is cast widely throughout Europe, takes symphonic form with Anton Bruckner in Austria and Vincent D’Indy in France; enters Spain, where Felipe Pedrell becomes his distant follower; touches upon England, with Edward Elgar as his main exponent; and crosses the Atlantic to land in the United States, where Horatio Parker and George Whitefield Chadwick are his prime illustrators, and in Latin America, as exemplified by the symphonic poems of Cuba’s Guillermo Tomás. One has to wait until the rise of Claude Debussy, who in his youth travels admiringly to Bayreuth to hear Parsifal, to witness finally the aesthetic breakage of the Wagnerism’s chains. By contrast, Verdi’s musical and stylistic weight is almost nil, despite the love and admiration of millions of devotees, mainly in Italy, who were deeply touched by his inexhaustible melodic inventiveness, which parallels Mozart’s. As an aside, it must by pointed out that Verdi’s incredibly effective and beautiful vocal ensembles, from trios to septets, were modeled on Mozart’s. Interestingly, more than in Europe, Verdi’s operatic style was generously copied in Latin America, where operas by Brazilian Antônio Carlos Gomes and Cuban Eduardo Sánchez de Fuentes followed closely Verdi’s musical trends.

Starting with Der Fliegende Holländer (“The Flying Dutchman”) Wagner will change the concept of opera, slowly creating a total fusion between music and theater, poetry and stage work, lights and orchestral color, along with a completely new conceptual vision of singing at the service of dramatic plot. All of this, coupled with orchestral interludes within acts, commenting upon the rationalistic undercurrents of German history, Nordic mythology and Christian beliefs. In order to implement his ideas properly, Wagner, contrary to Verdi, who always used various writers for his libretti, authored his own texts. Indeed, Wagner’s texts, often long and convoluted, are always filled with philosophical and metaphysical elements. On top of everything mentioned before, Wagner, as yet one more of his revolutionary contributions, expanded the harmonic tapestry of the musical language, increasing chromaticism to the point where, as in many moments of Tristan und Isolde, tonality disappears. This will be the harmonic direction followed by Mahler, which reaches its ultimate goal in Schönberg’s atonality. Wagner’s harmonic language will go hand in hand with his use of expanded instrumental forces, which eventually will include instruments of his own creation, like the Wagner tubas that add unique new colors to the orchestra.

Again, in contrast, Verdi’s harmonic language remained anchored within the traditional boundaries of European developed tonality, his voice usage followed the lines of a slightly evolved Italian bel canto style, his orchestra was the conventional Beethoven one, his theatrical manipulations were effective but not terribly innovative, and his operatic characters never departed from realism or progressed beyond known human behavior. In Verdi’s operatic vision, unlike Wagner’s, there were no gods, giants, dwarfs, underworld activities, Amazons on flying horses, extra-human curses, or metaphysical soul cleansing. What made Verdi’s music magical was his soaring melodies, his theatrical sense of time and space, his moving portrayal of characters, and his firm and effective use of the traditional orchestra.

Curiously—with the exception of his first opera, Das Liebesverbot (“The Prohibition of Love”), which is untypically clearly related to the Italian operatic style of the time—Wagner, whose stage characters inhabited extra-terrestrial worlds, was most careful to make them dialogue musically like normal human beings: one person speaks, the other listens. Verdi, by contrast, the non-metaphysical composer, the portrayer of people always of this Earth, makes them sing at the same time while mixing words and sentences, in simultaneous ways that occur only when humans are angry at each other. As incongruent as it may seem, we must remember that in Verdi this superimposition of terms also happens in love duets, congenial trios and sympathetic ensembles.

Yet another important difference between Wagner and Verdi is based on the nineteenth century romantic concept of art, interpreted so opposedly by both. For Wagner, German instrumental music was most important; for Verdi, Italian vocal music reigned supreme. The intensity of Wagner’s artistic belief was of such proportions that it fitted perfectly into his egocentric, egotistic and narcissist character. For Wagner, Verdi scarcely existed. One seeks in vain for Verdi’s name to appear in Wagner’s copious essays and correspondence. By contrast, Verdi’s more noble character, attuned to the Italian way of contemplating life with a broad smile, surfaced clearly when in a letter to Giovanni Ricordi, his friend and publisher, dated one day after Wagner’s death, he says: “I was, as it were, prostrated with grief. Here we do not discuss the matter. A great personality has gone from us, a name which will leave the most powerful imprint upon the history of art”.

In order to appreciate fully how the music of these two nineteenth century splendid composers came about, and to comprehend thoroughly the different ways through which they attained musical immortality, one must understand the inner nature of both men, their environment and their goals. Although Wagner’s work was the embodiment of Romantic opera in a field prepared by Weber, Marschner and Meyerbeer, Wagner as a creator was a very different composer from his predecessors and contemporaries. He considered himself not a pure musician, but rather, a music-dramatist who tried to emulate a cross between Beethoven and Shakespeare. He envisioned the world as a recipient of his complex and new artistic-philosophical message. As Alfred Einstein remarked, “Even when he did not conquer the world he certainly did conquer the Nineteenth Century”. Wagner believed he was primordially a dramatist, a poet, who would immerse the word in music in order to make it more powerful. He wished to use music as a means of explaining the world, influencing it, intoxicating it, seducing it, all the while he would enhance it. His courage, his self-reliance, which never diminished even in his darkest hours, was able to move a king—Ludwig the Second of Bavaria—to put at his disposal the state coffers in order to help him complete The Ring cycle. Ludwig also aided with public donations to build his theater in Bayreuth, his ideal house for the performance of his operas—which he considered as a gift to Germany, far beyond an admiring public—so that Parsifal could have a proper frame for its first 1882 performance. This last of his operas he called “a sacred legend for the stage”, subsidized by King Ludwig with the promise that it was only to be heard at Bayreuth in the Festspielhaus. In fact, Parsifal was not produced outside Bayreuth until 1913, when it was first performed in Zürich.

Wagner’s personal life was much more turbulent than Verdi’s. His stormy first marriage, his love for Mathilde Wesendonck (wife of one of his most generous patrons), his adulterous relationship with Cosima von Bülow (daughter of Franz Liszt, his friend and admirer, and wife of an outstanding conductor who revered Wagner), his escapes from creditors, and his disdain for anything that would not serve his artistic aims, were all facets of the portrayed romantic artist. But Wagner was able to transform all of these dubious aspects of his existence into great musical works, from the Wesendonck-Lieder (1858) and Tristan und Isolde (1859), to Die Meistersinger (1867) (his second comic opera and his only truly German national work), the Siegfried Idyll (1870) (composed as a Christmas gift for his now wife Cosima) and Parsifal (1882). The latter, the libretto for which was the last straw that separated Friedrich Nietzsche from Wagner, following an admiring friendship born of the heroes and heroines of The Ring, due to Parsifal’s Catholic content, a sort of self-redemption and purification for the composer. Parsifal stands as a towering concluding document of the Romantic epoch.

By contrast, Verdi’s works remain as the opposite to Wagner’s orchestral operas. Verdi always based his art on his evident “Italianness”, and once wrote: “We, Italians, are positivists, and, to a considerable extent, skeptics. We are not inclined to believe much and are not able to believe for long stretches in the fantastic conceptions of the German foreign art, which is deficient in naturalness and simplicity”. And so, Verdi erected his art and his music on no fact other than being truthful to his feelings and to the clarity and directness of the melodic expressions. He distinguished himself from his Italian forerunners Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti and the rest, by his sheer earnestness. He would anger when people referred to opera as “entertainment”, but at the same time he refused to bring to his art metaphysical elements, larger-than-life heroes, obscure symbolisms, prophetic parleys, or rites of salvation through fire. For Verdi, life was more an everyday affair than a transcendental, mysterious theorem. As opposed to Wagner, Verdi’s characters do not inhabit pre-determined environments, except perhaps in Aïda, which he composed as a show opera for Cairo. If he needed to concoct a scene with a specific background (as for example the thunderstorm in the last act of Rigoletto, the lonely field at the start of Act II of Un Ballo in Maschera or his other big storm at the start of Otello), he did so with a few ingenious musical gestures, as opposed to the pomposity of Wagner’s orchestral painting.

In many ways, each of these grand composers was truly loyal to his own artistic belief and to his own culture. Each one spoke eloquently in a different artistic and conceptual language, and each one traversed, with musical honesty, his own diverse and at times difficult path. Their art left pedestrian and commercial routes to others and soared to those excelled heights which are only achieved by very few in each historical period. Invariably, the key to understand fully their epic legacy is to approach their music with full knowledge of what it was when composed and what it is today when we listen to it. The cliché classifications must be left aside. In reality, Wagner is no larger or better than Verdi, and Verdi is no larger or better than Wagner. Each one was a towering creator in his own way. Each was movingly true to a given way of expression. Each remains forever present in history. Each, when their music is rightly performed, brings out the best in their respective auditors.

May each, tonight and every night, day or place where their effulgent music is heard, touch hearts and minds in ways that allow one to leave behind the ugly emptiness and noise of daily vulgar life, thus entering the portals of beauty and exalted emotions.

Northridge, California, March of 2010