On May 29, 1848, near two villages called Curtatone and Montanara, a few miles from the fortified city of Mantua, an astonishing struggle took place. Field-Marshal of the Empire of Austria Count Johann Joseph Radetzky took his Austrian Army Corps, nearly 35,000 strong on a manoeuvre to surround and destroy the Tuscan-Neapolitan lines facing Mantua, held by little more than 4.800 men - an odd mix of soldiers from several small armies and poorly-armed and unruly volunteers - that stood between them and the main enemy body. Radetzky had quietly marched his troops out of the safe and distant stronghold of Verona two days earlier to outflank King Charles Albert's regular soldiers, his main enemy, from the south; the small Italian outpost was in his way - placed there exactly to hold out against such a possibility - and it had to be smashed.
The battle is particularly remembered for the mad gallantry, driven equally by patriotism and by youthful recklessness of the volunteer students of the Battaglione Universitario, poured ouf the universities of Tuscany and Emilia, with their professors promoted as officers. But we should not forget the old men. The battle was directed by two indomitable veterans. Field-Marshal Radetzky was indeed the man for whom the famous march was written, and he deserved it. Active, energetic and far-sighted, this 78-year-old had saved his Army Corps from certain destruction, marched it to safety, and, not satisfied with having survived, was trying a brilliant surprise manoeuvre against the lumbering Charles Albert. On the other, General Count Cesare De Laugier de Bellecour, from Portoferraio, Isle of Elba, who had fought with Napoleon in Russia and Spain and had lived a life worthy of an adventure novel. But that was the only similarity: Radetzky was at the head of a practiced war machine which he had had two months to restore to perfect efficiency; Laugier had a ramshackle, untrained force whose command he had only just taken (three days before the battle). And while sources disagree about the relative numbers of Austrians and Italians, they agree on one terrible fact: the Austrians had 130 cannons, the Italians 6 and two howitzers.
However it seems clear that Laugier had arranged his forces well. Radetzky's first attempt at surrounding them failed completely: the troops seem to have been arranged in such a way as to make surrounding them impossible. The Austrians realized that it was a matter of breaking them down man to man.
Military theory says that to break a well-entrenched enemy with a frontal charge requires a superiority of five to one. The Austrians had that and more; they were professional soldiers, famous for dash and marksmanship; and they had the cannons. They came three, four, five, six times, each charge carried out by new fresh troops. The stories that came out of that day have more to do with Homeric legend than with the way we imagine normal life; but they happened. Early in the fight, one of the two Italian artillery posts was hit by an Austrian rocket that blew up some ammunition. Only one man, Gunner Elbano Gasperi, remained standing; and this half-naked, wounded regular took on himself to operate the whole battery, servicing his three cannon alone, running from one to the other like a maniac, charging, aiming, firing. Even the volunteers' indiscipline served the day: when, after two hours of fighting, General de Laugier ordered them into the line, he found that he had almost nobody to order - they had all already run to the sound of the guns, and it was their nearly insane recklessness that had done much to blunt Austrian assault after assault. Under the fearful, precise fire of the 130 Austrian artillery pieces, the outnumbered Italians fought for seven hours in the savage May sun, dying like flies, but holding the line. At four in the afternoon, realizing that there were no reinforcements coming, General de Laugier ordered his men to withdraw - and, astonishingly, it was not a rout, but a textbook disengagement under the covering fire of a sharpshooter regiment. The next day, Charles Albert, doing something right for once, fell upon the Austrians and hammered them back. The incredible struggle of the boys of Curtatone and Montanara had been worth something - for a while. (One of the young men who survived the battle was Carlo Lorenzini, who later, as "Carlo Collodi", was to create the immortal Pinocchio.)
That war ended badly, thanks in great part to the talent and courage of old Field-Marshal Radetzky and the underhanded stupidity of Charles Albert - a king with the soul of a party political hack. But there was to be another war, and another, till Italy was free. Radetzky had seen this coming, and being put in charge of Austria's Italian colonies after his victory, had devised a political strategy that might have worked, if someone had thought of it thirty years earlier: divide the patriot-minded upper and middle classes from the working people, and present the Austrian government as the paternal protector of the poor. As a part of his strategy of mixed conciliation and repression, a number of revolutionaries had been allowed to leave the country or even to remain quietly at home; and in the surrounding Italian states, dependent on Austria, similar strategies had led to odd results such as General de Laugier becoming the Minister for War of the Grand-Duke of Tuscany, whose soldiers he had led against the Austrians.
So it happened that one day de Laugier and Radetzky met at a State dinner. Radetzky, according to eyewitnesses, said something like: "Here you are at last! It is since that May 29 that I was eager to make your acquaintance. Bravo! Indeed, bravi! You were little more than a bunch of kids, and you managed to hold us back for seven hours. You practically had us all thinking that we were facing Charles Albert's best professional units!" That day it was proved that "it's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog": that pathetically ramshackle, ill-armed, ill-trained unit held back a well-trained, overwhelmingly superior professional army till they had lost a whole precious day, and then executed a textbook retreat and left the Austrians to be defeated on the following day by the dilatory and incompetent Charles Albert, who, without them, would have certainly been defeated then instead of a year later.
What does this have to do with opera? Simply this: that opera was the music that all those people, Italians and Austrians, heroes and villains, the gentleman Radetzky and his colleague the Butcher Eylau, the resolute De Laugier and the nerveless Charles Albert, loved and sang and paid to listen and in some cases composed. Verdi was the leading single personality among the patriot party in Italy, and Wagner actually took part in the fighting in Germany at the same year. This was the music of a manly age that went to war when they saw need and killed and died without softness, but who were also capable of mutual chivalry and understanding such as in the memorable scene between Radetzky and de Laugier. And to hear it called "poofy music" is to me not only an instance of utter barbarity of taste, but of atrocious ignorance of our culture history.
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