In an 1879 letter to his friend Clarina Maffei, Verdi expressed his distaste for réclames (marketing and puffery) and wrote that he wasn’t one for idle compliments. He also mocked the self-importance and pretensions of various musical capitals:

La Scala is the greatest theatre in the world.

In Naples: The San Carlo is the greatest theatre in the world.

In the past, they said in Venice: La Fenice is the greatest theatre in the world.

In Saint Petersburg: The greatest theatre in the world.

In Vienna: The greatest theatre in the world (and this I would endorse)

In Paris, then, the Opéra is the greatest theatre of two or three worlds!

In the 1870s, Verdi took the Manzoni Requiem on tour to various European capitals, and he raved about the Vienna Philharmonic. His admiration for the orchestra is documented by that rather surprising parenthetical admission in his letter to Maffei and in other correspondence.

The Aida clip at the start of this post is a promotional video. Still, it is interesting because Maestro Nikolaus Harnoncourt knows of what he speaks and rightly comments on Verdi’s admiration for the Wiener Philharmoniker.

(The clip is sad, too, because two of the artists shown—Vincenzo La Scola and László Polgár—left us recently and much too soon.)

The following clip, instead, features the Ballo prelude played by the orchestra of the Wiener Staatsoper under Claudio Abbado. Sadly, most of the excerpts from the remarkable 1990 Salzburg Ballo, including one that I posted here, have been removed from YouTube. I find that the Viennese players have the ideal tone for this music: warm, elegant, humane.

A good weekend to all!

UTET have created a new site about Verdi, part of their Passione per la cultura series. One of the Leibig figurine shown on the site is on the cover of Gundula Kreuzer’s wonderful study Verdi and the Germans.

The Catholics are still trying to claim Verdi as one of their own. Nice try! Remember what Boito wrote of Verdi: “In the ideal, moral and social sense he was a great Christian, but one must be very careful not to present him as a Catholic in the political and strictly theological sense of the word: nothing could be further from the truth.”

Apparently Verdi figures in a children’s book about a Venetian cat.

An exhibit entitled “Giuseppe Verdi, musical glory of the Risorgimento” is travelling the world, visiting Beirut, Ciudad de México, Seoul, and other cities. And in the meantime, some fourteen months before the event, Italy has not yet funded the bicentennial of Verdi’s birth.

A Wall Street Journal writer is the latest to propose a Shakespeare-and-opera festival. Personally, I would be happy if we New Yorkers could see respectable and carefully prepared productions of Macbeth, Otello, and Falstaff—leaving Papà Shakespeare, with all due respect, to fend for himself.

These are the last weeks of an exhibit I sorely wish I could see, “Hayez nella Milano di Verdi e Manzoni,” at the Pinacoteca di Brera.