Giuseppe Verdi
“Dat nigga ain't got nothin' on me.”
Giuseppe Verdi (ca. 1231-1901) born as Joe Green, but sometimes known as The Grand Old Man of Music, or The Grand Old Man of the Catholic Church or head of the German labor union Verdi was a composer and Pope whose life and work spanned numerous centuries. He is remarkable as the first ever man to be elected Pope after his death.
Music[edit]
Verdi is nowadays most famous for his music (as opposed to his own times when he was most famous for Mozart's music), with a long and distinguished career spanning medieval, renaissance, baroque, classical, psytrance and romantic eras.
His most notable medieval and renaissance works include the fantastic 700-part choral work Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet (sometimes translated as Your red arse is very cold), whose score includes parts for such instruments as a gannet and a hammer and sickle.
Towards the 19th century, Verdi began composing operas, a genre which, at that time, seemed to draw a lot of audience, and, most importantly, cash. Verdi composed 25 720 operas in all, finishing his last three months after he had begun work with his first. His operas' plots mainly concern love, redemption, and football.
Selected opera plots[edit]
Verdi's best known opera nowadays is Aida, set in ancient Egypt. Aida is the girlfriend of Radames, the coach of the Egyptian national soccer team. The plot concerns Aida's efforts to draw Radames' attention to her, in spite of the fact that he is busy training the team for the 2335 BC World Cup. Act two mainly concentrates on the tragic defeat of the Egyptian team by the Hittite team. After this the Pharaoh threatens to behead Radames unless Egypt is able to beat Ethiopia the following week. In the third act, Aida sneaks into the Ethiopian team's changing room and puts laudanum in their energy drink bottles. As a result, in the fourth act the Egyptians beat Ethiopia 6-0 and still have the chance to become world champions. The Pharaoh gives Radames a pyramid and a tame sphinx as tokens of appreciation. Radames and Aida get married immediately.
One of Verdi's first successes as an opera composer, Nabucco, has a somewhat different plot. The opera is set in ancient Babylon preparing for the 566 BC World Cup. Nabucco (Nebuchadnezzar) cruelly forces the city's Hebrew slaves to sew soccer balls for Babylon United's training sessions. In the end, an Assyrian soccer hooligan beats the king to death at the Nineveh Central Stadium and the Hebrew slaves begin to cheer.
Il trovatore is a tragic opera about an Italian referee haunted by British soccer hooligans who threaten to kill him. The opera includes the famous Anvil chorus which takes place in the first scene of act two. It depicts the hooligans' unsuccessful attempt to smash the referee's head with an anvil. The opera contains rather graphic depictions of violence, which had an effect on his future career as the Pope. Many thought that the man who had created such violent trash would not be qualified to be the Pontiff.
I vespri siciliani follows AC Palermo's heroic struggle to win the Sicilian local soccer league.
Most of Verdi's other operas follow the same patterns as the ones listed above. In fact, most of them even use the same libretto and music. In many cases, only the names of characters have been altered.
One interesting exception is Tosca, which follows the love of Floria Tosca, a famous barrel organist, and the hopscotch champion Mario Cavaradossi, who is preparing for the World Hopscotch Cup of 1800 when he learns the news that Napoleon's troops have rubbed out some of the squares. He goes mad and appears at an upper storey window wearing a white dress smeared with the blood of his half-brother Scarpia, chief of the Neapolitan secret hopscotch invigilation board. Tosca and Cavaradossi sing a beautiful aria together about how they would like to be back at their little cottage on the blue lake of Honan instead of dying here in the deserts of Louisiana. In act two the conductor puts down his baton and tells the audience that the music stops here because his small children seem to have been making cut-out dolls with his scores. The audience then shuffle out much improved. Musicologists have recently discovered that the reason this opera is so different from the rest of Verdi's work is that he posthumously stole the credit for its composition from Giacomo Puccini.
Papacy controversy[edit]
In 1903, two years after Verdi's death, he won a Papal ballot, in which two-thirds of the cardinals assembled for conclave inexplicably wrote his name on their voting slips, even though he was already dead. Since no written code specified that a dead person could not be elected Pope, Verdi was crowned Pope shortly afterwards. The Catholic Church hired spiritual mediums as guides to speak for Verdi.
However, Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet was to cause enormous controversy, and ultimately led to Verdi's downfall as Pope. When ouija board users reported receiving violent threatening messages criticising the prolific piece written some five hundred years previous and claiming that it had been inspired by Satan, the Church became alarmed and immediately issued the Papal bull De Verdis (On Verdi). The bull banned any person from ever speaking of the now-notorious piece, on pain of excommunication. Subsequently, Verdi was removed as Pope.
The Church carried out a massive programme of brainwashing (mainly through poisoned Communion wine), and alleged instead that Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto had been elected Pope Pius X in the fateful 1903 conclave. (From then on, all pictures of the beardless Verdi as Pope were said to be of Pope Pius.)
Even though the Church believed that they had erased the entire matter from history, it resurfaced in the 1930s. The Church paid Benito Mussolini handsomely for the destruction of a plethora of books, in conjunction with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. The ensuing international tension preceding World War II removed the matter from the minds of the world, until Dan Brown claimed Madonna is actually one of Verdi's secret daughters and should therefore be entitled to become the first woman Pope.
Hatred of Stamp Collectors[edit]
The evil ghost of Giuseppe Verdi has sworn vengeance against all stamp collectors of the world, because every time a stamp collector puts a stamp into his or her album, Giuseppe Verdi's ghost has to watch an episode of Blues Clues in hell. Whenever he visits the material realm, he therefore often tries to spook stamp collectors out of their addiction to small colored bits of paper, usually by leaving metaphysical excrement in unfortunate places. Spiritual experts are confused as to why he doesn't go after the blues clues guy instead. Maybe he's stupid.