Verdi's exceptional women: Giuseppina Strepponi and Teresa Stolz

© 2015 Dr. Caroline Anne EllsmoreThis thesis investigates several of the persistent myths that surround Verdi’s life and career and those of the women with whom he had intimate relationships. Verdi’s self-image as a poor peasant whose success owed nothing to anyone else except his father-in-law, and the unwillingness in the scholarly literature to acknowledge any permanent threat to the unassailable solidarity of his marriage to a saintly wife whose past left no scars, reveal conflicts between public myth and private reality. In addition, the stereotype of the imperiously demanding ‘diva’, when applied to the two women under discussion, is not sustainable on close investigation. This thesis explores Verdi’s professional and personal relationship with exceptional women, focussing on two of the most important women in his life, the singers Giuseppina Strepponi and Teresa Stolz. It demonstrates his shifting power-balance with Giuseppina Strepponi as she sought to retain intellectual self-respect while his success and control increased. It presents a fresh appraisal of Teresa Stolz through examination of her letters from 1871 to 1895 and claims that, far from showing her to be an unintelligent and sometimes malicious gossip as is often stated in the scholarly literature, the letters demonstrate her astute evaluations of operatic performances and her buoyant affection for Verdi. The thesis argues that the two women fulfilled different functions as ‘handmaidens’, the one supporting and enhancing Verdi’s creativity at the beginning of his professional life, the other sustaining his sense of self-worth, at the end of his professional life; that each woman was an essential benefactor without whom Verdi’s career would not have been the same