Giuseppe Verdi, (born Oct. 9/10, 1813, Roncole, near Busseto, duchy of Parma—died Jan. 27, 1901, Milan, Italy), Italian composer. He was the son of an innkeeper, and he showed talent early. While earning a living as an organist, he began to write operas in Milan; in 1839 his Oberto was successfully performed at La Scala, and it initiated Verdi’s long association with the publisher Giulio Ricordi. His next opera, Un giorno di regno (1840), was a failure. Much worse, Verdi’s two young daughters and his wife died. He overcame his despair by composing Nabucco (1842); it was a sensational success and was followed by the equally successful I Lombardi (1843). For the rest of the decade he wrote a hit opera every year.

Rejecting the prevailing structure of Italian opera—a patchwork of open-ended scenes and inserted arias, duets, and trios—he began conceiving of an opera as a series of integrated scenes, then as unified acts. Specializing in stories in which people’s private and public lives come into conflict, he produced a series of masterworks, including Rigoletto (1851), Il trovatore (1853), La traviata (1853), Don Carlos (1867), and Aïda (1871).

A fervent nationalist, he was regarded as a great national figure. After composing his Requiem (1874), he retired, but when Ricordi brought him together with the poet and composer Arrigo Boito, initially to revise Simon Boccanegra, their mutual esteem led to the two great operas of Verdi’s old age, Otello (1886) and Falstaff (1890).