The first act of Giuseppe Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra concludes with an intense crowd scene. As usual, Verdi knows how to covey that intensity through his music. However, there is one particular motif in that turbulent music that always seized my attention. This is because it never fails to remind me of Ludwig van Beethoven.
More specifically, there is a very brief motif that may well have been inspired by the Presto movement in Beethoven’s Opus 130 string quartet in B-flat major. That is the shortest movement in the quartet, and it comes and goes like a flash of lightning. However, it is so distinctive that I have to wonder whether or not Verdi was as intrigued by it as I am and decided that, because it was so brief, he could “refresh” it in his score of Boccanegra. As the old joke goes, if you are going to steal a theme from another composer, then at least steal from the best!
