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!