Francesco Maria Piave - Career

Career

Piave was not only a librettist, but a journalist and translator. He was resident poet and stage manager at La Fenice in Venice, and later at La Scala in Milan. His expertise as a stage manager and his tact as a negotiator served Verdi well over the years, who bullied him mercilessly for his pains. For example, in the struggle to have the Venetian censor(s) approve Rigoletto, he goaded Piave: "Turn Venice upside down to make the censors permit this subject" He followed this up with the admonition not to allow the matter to drag on: If I were the poet I would be very, very concerned, all the more because you would be greatly responsible if by chance (may the Devil not make it happen) they should not allow this drama

But Piave nonetheless became Verdi's lifelong friend and collaborator, "someone Verdi loved", following Salvadore Cammarano as Verdi's main mid-career librettist for Ernani (1844), I due Foscari (1844), Attila (1846), Macbeth (first version 1847), Il Corsaro (1848), Stiffelio (1850), Rigoletto (1851), La traviata (1853) Simon Boccanegra (first version 1857) and La forza del destino (first version 1862). Like Verdi, Piave was an ardent Italian patriot, and in 1848, during Milan's "Cinque Giornate," when Radetzky's Austrian troops retreated from the city, Verdi wrote to Piave in Venice addressing him as "Citizen Piave."

Piave would have also prepared the libretto for Aida when Verdi accepted the commission for it in 1870, had he not suffered a stroke which left him paralyzed and unable to speak. Verdi helped to support his wife and daughter, proposing that "an album of pieces by famous composers be compiled and sold for Piave's benefit" and paid for his funeral when he died nine years later in Milan at age 65 and was interred there in the Cimitero Monumentale.