Verdi is described as "tall, agile, vigorous, endowed with an iron constitution and an energy of character that promise lifelong virility." His friend and _collaborateur_, Signor Ghislanzoni, says of him: "I have known artists who, after having been recklessly prodigal of good humor and affability in their youth, have become gloomy and almost irritable under the burden of glory and honors. Verdi, on the contrary, seems to have left behind him at each upward step in his career a part of that hard, rough exterior that belonged to his earlier years." At eighty he is still young, still vivacious.
That Verdi is one of the most popular opera composers of his time must be freely conceded. That he is a great musician in any exacting sense of the word cannot be so readily granted. He has been in no sense an innovator, and as far as his influence on opera is concerned, he leaves it where he found it, except inasmuch as he has followed the changes that the musical development of his time has made in every branch of the art. He has not been an epoch-maker in opera, as was Rossini, and in nothing that he has written has he made such an impression on his contemporaries in opera as was made by the "La Sonnambula" and the "Norma" of Bellini, and the "Lucia di Lammermoor" and the "La Favorita" of Donizetti. As it seems to us, he was the logical outgrowth of the latter, as Donizetti was of Bellini, as Bellini was of Rossini, and as Rossini was of the _finales_ of "Il Nozze di Figaro." Gifted with an inexhaustive fund of melody, and a strong feeling for dramatic effect, he trusted to these gifts without paying especial heed to any philosophical principle on which operas should be composed, and appealed to the nerves and the ephemeral emotions of his public, rather than to its heart or its intelligence, for its plaudits. The immense vogue he has won, not only in his own country but in every land where a taste for opera is cultivated, shows that this form of appeal was not made in vain. Nevertheless, the twenty-seven operas which form the great bulk of his musical life-work, in spite of their wealth and variety of melody, the extraordinary resources of invention they exemplify in their composer, and the fluent skill exhibited by him in saying the same thing in an infinite number of ways, do not present anything of the highest order, even in their kind. Not one of these operas is great in the sense that Rossini's "Il Barbiere di Seviglia" is great, or in the sense that the first act and the meeting of the cantons in the same master's "William Tell" are great. There are beauties innumerable in them, but they do not lie deeper than the surface. They are affluent in inspiration of a certain order, but it is the inspiration of a prolific tune-maker, with an instinct for opera writing, and without any very high musicianship or any very sincere artistic feeling. More spontaneous, perhaps, than Meyerbeer, in the invention of melody, he has never risen to the height of the magnificent duet between Raoul and Valentine, in the fourth act of "Les Huguenots," and the fine trio in the last act of "Robert le Diable."