DOI:10.1111/j.1741-2005.2012.01489.x Giuseppe Verdi and the Atoning Cost of Forgiveness Gavin D’Costa and Sara M. Pecknold Giuseppe Verdi (1813 – 1901) is not usually regarded as a Catholic theologian, but rather as one of the greatest Italian opera composers. Like many of the intelligentsia of his day, he found the Roman Catholic Church irrelevant and inhibiting. He celebrated the Pope’s fleeing from Rome with his overly nationalistic opera, La battaglia de Legnano after the 1848 Roman revolution. He defiantly cohabited with his mistress, Giuseppina Strepponi, for some years before their eventual marriage in 1859. 1 Why then suggest that Verdi’s work might be profoundly theological? The answer is simple: it just is. The Catholic culture of sacrificial atonement was part of the furniture of Verdi’s Italy just as much as the nationalism (the Risorigimento) that Verdi so strongly supported. Whatever the causality, the theme of sacrificial atonement drives some of his greatest middle period operatic works. And it is this theme in two of those operas that we wish to inspect, collaborating as theologian and musicologist. One biographical detail is important to our theme. In 1836 Verdi married Margherita Barezzi and had two children: the first, a daugh- ter, named after the Virgin Mary, Virginia Maria Luigia, and the second, a son, Icilio Romano, already indicating Verdi’s patriotism. Verdi was devoted to his family. He suddenly had to face a tragic and almost operatic catastrophe. First, he was crushed by the death of his daughter, followed by the death of his son, and within a year, Margherita’s death in 1840. When Gustav Mahler’s son died, Mahler visited Freud to discuss this and other traumas. Perhaps Verdi worked out this loss in his music? He is compulsively interested in father-daughter and father-son relationships and the power of family relationships to both destroy and separate as much as to unite and create. 2 In the two operas we examine, the uniting and creating is both personal and political. Forgiveness and sacrifice are required as 1 For the autobiographical background, see Julian Budden’s authoritative, Verdi, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008 (3 rd ed.), and John Roselli, The Life of Verdi, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000. 2 See Gilles de Van, Verdi’s Theater. Creating Drama through Music, trans. Gilda Roberts, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1998 [1992], 157–67 on the ‘Father Figure’ in Verdi’s operas. C  2013 The Author. New Blackfriars C  2013 The Dominican Council. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 2013, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK, and 350 Main Street, Malden MA 02148, USA