next work, a comic opera known alternatively as ‘Un Giorno di Regno’ and ‘Il Finto Stanislao’ (1840) was a failure.  ‘Nabucodonosor’ (1842) and ‘I Lombardi’ (1843) established his reputation in his own country and won favour abroad; but the opera which gave him European fame was ‘Ernani’ (1844).  The story is an adaptation of Victor Hugo’s famous play.  Elvira, the chosen bride of Don Silva, a Spanish grandee, loves Ernani, an exiled nobleman, who has had to take refuge in brigandage.  Silva discovers their attachment, but being connected with Ernani in a plot against Charles V., he defers his vengeance for the moment.  He yields his claim upon Elvira’s affection, but exacts a promise from his rival, that when he demands it, Ernani shall be prepared to take his own life.  Charles’s magnanimity frustrates the conspiracy, and Silva, defeated alike in love and ambition, claims the fulfilment of Ernani’s oath, despite the prayers of Elvira, who is condemned to see her lover stab himself in her presence.  Hugo’s melodrama suited Verdi’s blood-and-thunder style exactly.  ‘Ernani’ is crude and sensational, but its rough vigour never descends to weakness, though it often comes dangerously near to vulgarity.  ‘Ernani’ is the opera most typical of Verdi’s earliest period.  With all its blemishes, it is easy to see how its masculine vigour and energy must have captivated the audiences of the day.  But there were political as well as musical reasons for the instantaneous success of Verdi’s early operas.  Italy in the forties was a seething mass of sedition.  Verdi’s strenuous melodies, often allied to words in which the passionate patriotism of his countrymen contrived to read a political sentiment, struck like a trumpet-call upon the ears of men already ripe for revolt against the hated Austrian rule.  Such strains as the famous ’O mia patria, si bella e perduta’ in ‘Nabucodonosor’ proclaimed Verdi the Tyrtaeus of awakened Italy.

‘Ernani’ was followed by a series of works which, for the sake of Verdi’s reputation, it is better to pass over as briefly as possible.  His success provided him with more engagements than he could conscientiously fulfil, and the quality of his work suffered in consequence.  There are some fine scenes in ‘I Due Foscari’ (1844), but it has little of the vigour of ‘Ernani.’  ‘Giovanna d’Arco’ (1845), ‘Alzira’ (1845), and ‘Attila’ (1846), were almost total failures.  In ‘Macbeth’ (1847), however, Verdi seems to have been inspired by his subject, and wrote better music than he had yet given to the world.  The libretto is a miserable perversion of Shakespeare, and for that reason the opera has never succeeded in England, but in countries which can calmly contemplate a ballet of witches, or listen unmoved to Lady Macbeth trolling a drinking-song, it has had its day of success.  ‘Macbeth’ is interesting to students of Verdi’s development as the first work in which he shows signs of emerging from his Sturm und Drang period.  There