"Cammina! Cammina!"

ORPHEUS AT EIGHTY (372 pp.)--Vincent Sheean--Random House ($5).

To the Austrians who ruled northern Italy in the mid-19th century, the word Verdi was a nightmare. It haunted them from the very walls in huge letters, like the V sign of World War II. The great risorgimento that threw out the alien rulers and made the Italians a nation used Verdi as its symbolic pun--a tribute to Italy's greatest composer and a proud abbreviation for the name and title of its King, "Vittorio Emanuele, Re e d'Italia."

Nobody can explain just how the operas of Giuseppe Verdi became an "electrical communication with the spirit of the time." The idea "just grew"--to the point where Italian patriots detected in the most innocent little note or inflection of a Verdi aria a cry for liberty and revolt. When Cavour received one night the telegram that began Italy's second War of Independence, he said not a word to his aides. He merely flung the window open and bellowed a phrase of Verdi's // Trovatore to his sleeping countrymen.

Wounds & Distress. Vincent Sheean calls his book Orpheus at Eighty because it recounts Verdi's long life in a series of flashbacks showing the old composer looking back on the struggles and triumphs of his stupendous career. It is Sheean's best book since Personal History (1935), and if its prose could be rid of repetitions and the parentheses that break out half a dozen to the page, it would be the best introduction to Verdi and his music in the English language. Clearly a labor of love, it is at once a fine tribute and a history of bitter wounds and infinite distress.

Verdi was born of peasant stock near the town of Busseto in the Po Valley in 1813. When he was 18, the townsfolk sent him to Milan Conservatory, hoping that he could be trained to become Bus-seto's organist and orchestra director. But the conservatory examiners flunked Verdi; his talent for composition, they said, was "passable," but his pianoforte technique was ruined by "a faulty position of the hands and wrists." This "blow to all his pride and hope was so terrible" that Verdi never forgot, never forgave it. Helped by a friendly patron, he buckled down to a period of remorseless study and composition. By 22 he had won his post as Busseto organist over violent opposition and married his childhood sweetheart, daughter of his patron. Their two children died in infancy, and wife Margherita followed them to the grave after only four years of marriage and just before her husband's first big success, the opera Nabucco.

Calling the Tune.. Author Sheean is fascinated by Verdi's "peasant" response both to the grim tragedies of his youth and the fame of his later years. The words that appear in Verdi's last and perhaps greatest work, Falstaff--"Cammina! Cammina!" (keep going, keep going)--were already his maxim in his null and he kept going at the rate of more than an opera a year. Verdi hated Milan, hated the power of La Scala's management, hated "the rule of the foreigner and the secret police." But to "keep going." he pruned, cut and distorted "his rugged talent to suit the conditions of the time." With peasant toughness. Verdi awaited the day when he would call the tune as well as write it.

Generous and faithful to his friends, adored by those who loved him. Verdi nonetheless spent the second half of his life punishing those who had dictated to him in the first. There was no way to cajole or force the beak-nosed peasant-composer, who put his attitude in three plain words: "I am inexorable." He treated the great Scala Opera House with vengeful contempt, denying them year by year the premieres of his works. (La Traviata was first performed in Venice. Don Carlos in Paris and A'ida in Cairo for the opening of the Suez Canal.) When respectable Busseto turned up its nose at the mistress he eventually married, angry Verdi built a huge wall around his farm, put the whole town in the doghouse for 50 years. His peasant obstinacy was so formidable that Russia's Czar Alexander II, pleading with him for a new opera, promised that Verdi might set any conditions he chose "excepting that obliging the Emperor Alexander to proclaim the Republic in Russia.''

Struggle for Perfection. Author Sheean goes to the root of the tragedy in Verdi's life by showing that for the most part, Verdi was not "inexorable" at all, but the victim of circumstances beyond his control. In Verdi's day, opera was little better than a fashionable madhouse--undisciplined to the point of chaos, negligent of the talents of composers and librettists. When Verdi died at 87 in 1901, this chaos had been reduced. But the present discipline of opera was the lifework of a ferocious little man who once played the cello in Verdi's Otello under the old maestro's very eyes and saw for himself the lines of pain that marked the face of "poor Verdi." The savage screams and dictatorial rages of Cellist-Conductor Arturo Toscanini "may even have been a desire to avenge" the dead composer and by means of a "fanatical and exhausting struggle for perfection" to achieve the "inexorable" at last.

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