The Man Verdi

Knopf, 1962 - Composers - 526 pages

"In a world where his operas are constantly performed and are known and admired by more music-lovers than at any previous time, Verdi the man remains nevertheless something of a mystery. The known facts of his long and active career--his business relations with publishers, impresarios, librettists--have all passed into musical history. But the man who is said to have been able to compose masterpieces with intense concentration, and then turn with calm deliberation to the cultivation of his garden and fields as part of the pattern of his working day, has been a distant figure, protected by a habitual reserve and mistrust, whose letters and conversations have revealed little about his intimate private life. In his belief that material for assessing the real Verdi did exist, Frank Walker consulted every promising source, including the famous Villa Verdi archives, the Scala Museum, Milan, the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence, and the Boito archives at Perella. In addition to reevaluating what had previously been written on Verdi, the author drew upon material left by those who knew Verdi personally: his benefactor and father-in-law Antonio Barezzi, his devoted pupil Emanuele Muzio, Giuseppina Strepponi, Mariani, Teresa Stolz, and Boito, the librettist with whom Verdi created his supreme works, Otello and Falstaff, at the end of his long life (the latter at the age of nearly eighty). The author holds that the gaps in our knowledge of the composer have been filled in by inventions, which, endlessly repeated and amplified, have come to be accepted as truth. In following documentary evidence, this book destroys the apocryphal stories. The rediscovery of Giuseppina Strepponi's letters to Alessandro Lanari, the impresario, has thrown new light on her early life and the antecedents of her relationship with Verdi, and the author makes no apology for devoting a large section of his book to this remarkable and most lovable woman, who became Verdi's second wife. These and a whole series of other letters written by Verdi, or about him, have been drawn upon, ending in the remarkably revealing letters of Boito which underline Verdi's undiminished creative power at an advanced age. During the past fifteen years the author worked in Italian libraries and consulted many authorities in the preparation of this book. In its authenticity and scholarship The Man Verdi is a worthy successor to Frank Walker's previous book on Hugo Wolf." --Dust jacket.