Arrigo Boito

Arrigo Boito earned recognition as an Italian author and musician chiefly through the libretti he supplied for operas. Though he completed just two of his own stage works, both stood out because of their inventive storylines, expansive dimensions, and varied rhythmic character.

Born in Padua in 1842, he grew up alongside his elder brother Camillo. Their mother, the Polish countess Józefina Radolińska, raised the children alone after their father, the painter Silvestro, abandoned the household while the boys were still small. She relocated the family to Venice, where Boito received instruction from Antonio Buzzolla, Giovanni Buzzolla, and Luigi Plet until he reached the age of ten. In 1853 he entered the Milan Conservatory and trained under Alberto Mazzucato, the composer then serving as principal conductor at La Scala; during these studies he also met fellow student Franco Faccio. The two formed a close friendship and jointly produced a pair of cantatas. Their second effort, Le sorelle d’Italia, captured first prize in a competition held in 1861, securing each composer a one-year grant for further study in Paris.

While there in 1862 Boito encountered Rossini and Berlioz and prepared the text for Verdi’s Inno delle nazioni, which received its premiere in London two months afterward. The following year he provoked Verdi’s displeasure by delivering the ode “All’arte italiana,” a poem that voiced critical views of Italian artistic traditions. For the next fifteen years Boito sustained a successful livelihood writing music criticism for Il Figaro, La Perseveranza, and the Giornale della Società del quartetto di Milano. This period was interrupted in 1866 when he enlisted under Giuseppe Garibaldi for the Seven Weeks’ War.

After returning, he began work on the opera Mefistofele, supplying both music and libretto drawn from Goethe’s Faust. The project marked the first occasion on which La Scala presented an opera whose score and text had been created by a single individual, arousing considerable local curiosity. Boito heightened anticipation by circulating printed copies of the libretto weeks beforehand; yet a dispute with the conductor forced him to direct the performance himself. The 1868 premiere proved disastrous despite a large turnout: the evening extended beyond six hours, spectators erupted into clashes over the composer’s modernist and Wagnerian tendencies, and only the prologue remained clearly audible. A second staging met the same fate, prompting the authorities to prohibit further performances. Discouraged, Boito abandoned composition and devoted himself instead to writing libretti and operatic criticism.

A well-received rendering of the prologue in 1871 prompted him to undertake extensive revisions. The complete score reached the stage in 1875 at the Teatro Comunale in Bologna, where listeners responded favorably; a further revival followed at La Scala in 1881. Around the same time Boito reconciled with Verdi and supplied new texts for Simon Boccanegra, Otello, and Falstaff.

During the 1890s he joined a state-appointed panel charged with reforming music instruction throughout Italy and also campaigned to better the working conditions of performers and staff at La Scala. Following Verdi’s death in 1901, Boito resumed work on Nerone, the project he had first sketched in 1877 and left unfinished. He was named a senator in 1912 and died of heart disease in Milan six years later. The incomplete Nerone was subsequently revised by Arturo Toscanini, Vincenzo Tommasini, and Antonio Smareglia before its 1924 presentation at La Scala.