Verdi’s aggressive retort may be understood as yet another facet of an insurrectionist nature: he had, from the very beginning of his creative life, a well-articulated mission to escape and subvert the rigid culture of Italian opera composition and its concomitant mercantilism. The independence and strength of his relationship with Strepponi seemed to intensify that ambition, which he reiterated in a letter of 25 February 1850 to librettist Salvadore Cammarano, regarding a never fully realized opera based on Shakespeare’s King Lear: ‘You know that we should… treat it in an entirely novel manner… without regard to conventions of any kind’.
Such clearly articulated personal and artistic radicalism would soon manifest itself in his choice of outré subjects and situations for the three operas written between April 1850 and March 1853. In Rigoletto (1851), a hunchback’s beautiful daughter is abducted and raped; in Il trovatore (1853), a mad gypsy’s vengeful act of throwing an infant into a fire leads to fratricide; and in La traviata (1853) a consumptive courtesan’s love for a man above her social class climaxes in a passionate reunion and a tragic death.
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