The Man Who Would Be Verdi
Giuseppe Verdi (blogclasico.blogspot.com)
Despite the comparisons to Giuseppe Verdi and the earlier predictions of his being the great man’s heir apparent, Gomes never attained the success and adulation in his chosen profession that had once been expected of him:
“In the music of Guarany, Verdi recognized much of himself, in so far as the ardor and dash of the Brazilian composer reminded him of the brilliance and excitement of his own youth. And Gomes was very much aware of the great Maestro’s liking for him and faith in him; in his last years when, after [his final opera] Condor, he felt all his bold hopes finally evaporate, he felt infinitely bitter. ‘You see’ – he told me one day in a moment of great dejection – ‘what grieves me most is my failure to live up to his prophetic words and become his successor…’ ”
— Quoted by Marcello Conati in Encounters with Verdi (1984)
“The issue of who would be the Successor to Verdi meant much more than who would write the next popular operas,” wrote author William Berger in Puccini Without Excuses. “It was a search for someone to justify the Italian national identity,” which, in one fell swoop, left anyone not fitting that description (i.e., Gomes) completely out of the running.
Whereas the teenaged Tonico once filled his tender thoughts with the melodic riches of Il Trovatore, the now prematurely gray-haired Carlos Gomes began to give way to despair, especially after the February 1887 unveiling of Otello, Verdi’s penultimate — and no doubt greatest — stage work:
“ ‘What genius!’ [Gomes] continued, growing excited – ‘after Otello, I can no longer begin to measure it… It frightens me!’ ” (Quoted by Conati, above)
Two years earlier, Gomes had expressed recurrent yearnings for his own guileless past in a heartfelt tribute to his former hometown: “The Tonico of 1836 has turned into a grouchy old man, but his country-bumpkin heart is young enough to love Campinas and the city of his birth.”
Decimated by Disease
By that time, disease had ravaged the European Continent and taken its toll on several of the composer’s offspring. His two remaining children, five-year-old Ítala Maria and the eldest, Carlos André, were kept informed of their mother Adelina’s steadily declining condition.
Vila Brasilia in Maggianico (gounin.net)
Her untimely demise of tuberculosis in August 1887, at the age of 45, occurred six months after the Otello premiere, just as Gomes’ financial health took a decisive turn for the worse. The costly upkeep of his impressive Villa Brasília property in Maggianico, near Lecco, had led to his filing for bankruptcy protection and eventual selling off of the estate.
Gomes must have sensed that his afflictions were imposed upon him from above, in much the same manner as those suffered by the tragic figure of Othello, the Moor of Venice, the tortured Shakespearean soul that a “grouchy old man” named Verdi had turned into the greatest operatic creation the Italian stage had ever known. If the bad-humored Bear of Busseto once “recognized much of himself” in the Brazilian composer’s work, then it went without saying that Gomes must have contemplated as much in comparing the Moor’s troubles to his own.
Both Shakespeare and Verdi sympathized with the difficulties of a black man living in an all-white society — again, the analogy of Gomes, a dark-skinned outsider, trying to make a life for himself in the racial uniformity of late novecento Milan. While he was a part of that society, Gomes never learned to love wisely, nor even too well. He carried on several romances at once, which only added to his already suspect reputation as a ladies’ man.
Hariclea Darclee (apropo.ro)
His most tempestuous affair was with the Romanian diva Hariclea Darclée (whom Adelina dubbed her “bad luck charm”), acclaimed a few years later for her portrayal of Puccini’s Tosca, as well as for Odaléa in the Brazilian’s last opera, Condor. Together, the thoroughly besotted composer and his “prima donna” took their amorous liaison as far away as Russia before calling it a night.
(End of Part Four)
Copyright © 2013 by Josmar F. Lopes
