Happy 200th birthday, Signor Verdi!

Today's the big day for Giuseppe Verdi, the greatest of the Italian operatic masters, who was born in the village of Le Roncole, in the duchy of Parma, on Oct. 10, 1813.

He took the line of Bellini, Rossini and Donizetti to its greatest heights, to be followed by Puccini. In his long and successful career, Verdi wrote (and usually directed) dozens of operas -- Nabucco, MacBeth (one of his favorite sources was Shakespeare), Luisa Miller, Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, La Traviata (the last three, among his greatest works, premiered over just two years), Un Ballo en Maschera, my personal favorite Aida, then at the end of his career Otello and the comedy Falstaff. He also composed a masterful Requiem and other choral works. And those are just his greatest hits!

Verdi never gave up the tradition of "set pieces" -- aria, recitative, duet, quartet, chorus, etc. -- but he worked closely with his librettists to turn his operas into continuous, compelling music dramas.

He almost gave up writing music early in his career, after the deaths of his wife of only four years and their two infant children. But the inspiration never quit, and his first work after those devastating events was Nabucco, whose tale of an oppressed people struck a chord with his fellow Italians and across 19th century Europe.

Because of his many "political" subjects, Verdi always had trouble with the censors. In Un Ballo en Maschera, about the assassination of a Swedish king, he had to change the setting in its early performances to the American colonies of the 1600s, where the major characters took such names as Tom and Sam.

Verdi supported the cause of Italian reunification, and after that was achieved in 1861, he served briefly in the Italian Parliament, although he was never much interested in politics. Some of his fellow compatriots furthered their cause by using the popular Verdi's name in the cry "Viva Verdi" as an acronym for Vittorio Emanuel, Re D'Italia," referring to King Victor Emmanuel II.

Verdi lived to be 87 years old. He died Jan. 27, 1901, in Milan. His funeral was attended by some 200,000, who heard a large orchestra and chorus composed of musicians from throughout Italy, conducted by Arturo Toscanini, perform appropriate selections from his works, including the well-known chorus "Va Pensiero!" from his first big success, Nabucco.

A friend of mine once remarked about how classical composers often have what are, to us out here in the sticks, strange-sounding names: Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, etc. Nary a Smith or Jones among them. I pointed out that one of the great composers of 19th century opera was a fellow named Joe Green.

And Joe Green did as much as anyone to move the genre of opera away from just a string of songs to a unified and powerful drama. On his 200th birthday, hats off to the Italian Maestro -- Giuseppe Verdi!

The Steel Curtain Falls on NYCO

The sad news was announced last week that the New York City Opera is canceling its 2013-14 season and filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization. Or, I guess I should say, what was left of one of this country's great opera companies.

The demise of any arts organization, especially one as feisty but esteemed as the NYCO, is a loss for all of us. And Lord knows we've had too many such losses over the last few years.

Long known as New York's antidote to the staid Metropolitan Opera, NYCO was always a champion of American works and young American artists. At the same time, it offered fresh takes on the old standards.

Perhaps the company's greatest legacy to the world of opera is the use of supertitles. When introduced with the strong endorsement of its general director, Beverly Sills, in 1983, supertitles -- projecting a translation above the stage of the text being sung -- were a controversial novelty. Now, there is almost no opera house in the world that doesn't use them in some form. And they can largely be credited with the resurgence in opera's popularity after their debut.

The many problems that plagued New York City Opera, leading to last week's announcement, were to a great extent the result of a string of bungled efforts by its top management to keep the company afloat.

In 2006, the NYCO board hired Gerard Mortier, who ran the Salzburg Festival and the Paris Opera, to be general manager and artistic director. Here was a guy who was very comfortable using Europe's generous government funding to mount radical modern operas or the kind of nonsensical versions of standard works that more sensible operagoers might call "Eurotrash."

And now he was in charge of a company that always had to run on a shoestring. As the financial crisis hit, the board pared its promise of $60 million to mount a 2009-10 season of all-20th century works down to $36 million. So he quit.

The NYCO then turned to a dark horse -- a fellow who had just taken his first job running an opera company a few weeks earlier -- to lead the company, with the economy in almost full collapse. The dark horse was George Steel, who was at the time general director of the Dallas Opera.

In his brief tenure in Dallas, Steel managed to piss off just about every constituency that could have made him a success -- the board, major donors, the artists and musicians, the staff -- so no one was actually sad to see him go, and so quickly!

By all accounts, Steel apparently took the same tack in New York. He put his well-honed arrogance to use alienating everyone involved in this storied institution. And, having no clue how to keep a struggling New York City Opera afloat in tough times, he began to dismantle it, ensuring the company's doom. It was the one thing George Steel was singularly capable of doing.

And so, tragically ...

"La commedia è finita!"