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During the three-hour journey from Milàn, they have decided to choose as their soundtrack I Lombardi alla Prima Crociata, the lyrical drama written by Giuseppe Verdi that received its first performance in Milàn on a day like today in 1843, so it was a good way to remember this musical genius with his work based on the Lombards.
I Lombardi alla Prima Crociata (The Lombards on the First Crusade) is an operatic dramma lirico in four acts by Giuseppe Verdi to an Italian libretto by Temistocle Solera, based on an epic poem by Tommaso Grossi, which was very much a child of its age; a grand historical novel with a patriotic slant.
Its first performance was given at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan on 11 February 1843. Verdi dedicated the score to Maria Luigia, the Habsburg Duchess of Parma, who died a few weeks after the premiere.
In 1847, the opera was significantly revised to become Verdi's first grand opera for performances in France at the Salle Le Peletier of the Paris Opera under the title of Jérusalem.
Grossi's original epic poem had plot complications that required the librettist to make significant changes; the historical characters portrayed in the original do not appear and the story becomes that of a fictional family and its involvement in the First Crusade. Julian Budden's analysis of the opera's origins notes: In 1843 any subject where Italians were shown united against a common enemy was dangerous, especially in Austrian Milan. Yet strangely enough it was not the police but the church that took exception to I Lombardi, since the Archbishop of Milan had heard rumours that the work contained specific elements of Catholic ritual. However, given Verdi's refusal to make any changes to the music, it is fortunate that the result of the police chief's investigations of the archbishops complaints required only very minor alterations.
While the premiere performance was a popular success, critical reactions were less enthusiastic and inevitable comparisons were made with Nabucco. However, one writer noted: If [Nabucco] created this young man's reputation, I Lombardi served to confirm it. Budden himself disagrees with this contemporary view, noting that Nabucco is all of a piece, a unity, however crude; I Lombardi is an agglomeration of heterogeneous ideas, some remarkable, some unbelievably banal.
Budden notes that for many years I Lombardi enjoyed the same kind of popularity as Nabucco, but he states that it did not fare well in Venice the following year and that it received few performances outside of Italy. However, within Italy, the opera was presented in Lucca in the summer of 1843, in Florence and Lucca in the autumn, and during the 1843/44 carnival season it was given in Trieste and Turin, while performances in 1845 were presented in Bologna and later, in the 1845/46 season, in Palermo and Mantua, in Macerata in the summer of 1846 and various other cities well in to the 1850s. Even in the late 1880s, well after Jérusalem had been given, it was presented in Florence.
This was the first of Verdi's operas to be heard in the United States, at Palmo's Opera House, on 3 March 1847 in New York. In the prior year the opera's British premiere had taken place on 12 May 1846 at Her Majesty's Theatre in London, Verdi having been invited there by the theatre's impresario, Benjamin Lumley: ...I will go to London to write an opera he had written, but in the end, illness prevented him from doing so.
However, with Italy approaching unification in the 1850s and in the decade following it in 1861, I Lombardi's call to peoples' patriotic instincts seemed to keep it alive, albeit that, by 1865 when Arrigo Boito saw a performance, he remarked that the opera was beginning to show its age.
I Lombardi was presented in 1930 at La Scala in Milan as the season's opening production.
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my heart pounds and the tears stream from my eyes,
and my emotion and my joys are too much to bear.
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