27 January 1901

Verdi died in Milano on 27 January 1901. He had suffered a stroke on 21 January in his apartments at the Grand Hôtel.

Arrigo Boito described Verdi’s death to Camille Bellaigue in a beautiful letter:

Verdi is dead; he has carried away with him an enormous measure of light and warmth. We had all basked in the sunshine of that Olympian old age.

He died magnificently, like a fighter, formidable and mute. The silence of death had fallen over him a week before he died.

Do you know the admirable bust by Gemito? That bust, made forty years ago, is the exact image of the Maestro as he was on the fourth day before the end. With head bowed on his breast and knitted brows he looked downwards and seemed to weigh with his glance an unknown and formidable adversary…

His resistance was heroic. The breathing of his great chest sustained him for four days and three nights. On the fourth night the sound of his breathing still filled the room, but the fatigue… Poor Maestro, how brave and handsome he was, up to the last moment! No matter; the old reaper went off with his scythe well battered.

My dear friend, in the course of my life I have lost those I have idolized, and grief has outlasted resignation. But never have I experienced such a feeling of hatred against death, of contempt for that mysterious, blind, stupid, triumphant, and craven power. It needed the death of this octogenarian to arouse those feelings in me.

He, too, hated it, for he was the most powerful expression of life that it is possible to imagine.

Verdi’s first funeral on 30 January was simple, in accordance with his wishes: “two priests, two candles, one cross.” He wanted no flowers, so his adopted daughter Maria Carrara Verdi and her daughter Peppina placed palm fronds in his coffin. Mary Jane Phillips-Matz tells us that a second-class hearse transported his remains. Verdi may have gone to eternal rest with the score of the Te Deum beneath the pillow in his coffin; this was family tradition.

Some of the earliest surviving Italian film footage documents his state funeral on 27 February 1901, when his remains and those of Giuseppina were moved to the crypt of the Casa di riposo, where we can pay our respects to them today. (The crypt is always my very first stop whenever I visit Milano.)

There is a YouTube clip of an elderly Milanese lady who saw Verdi’s funeral as a little girl.

It is said that a country priest sent a telegram to the Grand Hôtel upon learning of Verdi’s death. It read: La Vergine degli Angeli vi copra nel suo manto. This selection from La forza del destino was sung the day of Verdi’s state funeral; here it is in one of the greatest recordings ever made of Verdi’s music (or anyone else’s), sung by Rosa Ponselle and Ezio Pinza in 1928.

Of course, “Va, pensiero” from Nabucco was sung at the state funeral, too. Here is an historic performance from several months ago led by the great, the immense, Riccardo Muti. Background here. I dare you to try to watch this with a dry eye.

The final words of Mary Jane Phillips-Matz’s magnificent Verdi biography:

To the world, as to the nation he helped to found, Verdi left an enduring legacy of music, charity, patriotism, honour, grace, and reason. He was and remains a mighty force for continuing good.