Letters by composer Giuseppe Verdi to go under the hammer
More than 80 letters from Giuseppe Verdi to a friend are to go under the hammer in Italy next month in what organisers say is the largest collection of the composer’s correspondence ever to be put up for auction.
Sometimes earnest and political, other times whimsical and light-hearted, the missives date from 1861 to 1886, the first 25 years of Italy as a unified country.
The letters, described by auctioneers Bolaffi as “an extraordinary and rich piece of cultural and historic heritage”, will be offered on 13 May, with a starting price of €150,000.
Fittingly, the auction will take place at the Grand Hotel et de Milan, where Verdi lived for the last decades of his life, making the most of its central location only minutes away from La Scala opera house.
“Full of personal, political and musical information, these letters represent a cross section of the great composer’s full maturity, or rather of that period in which Verdi hit the headlines as guru of the Italian melodrama in addition to becoming, voluntarily or not, a kind of ‘national father’ during what was perhaps our country’s most delicate and heroic period in history,” reads the auction’s catalogue.
Alongside 223 pages of Verdi correspondence, Bolaffi will auction seven letters by another colossus of opera, Maria Callas, to her friend and teacher Elvira de Hidalgo. A fourth edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy, produced in Venice in 1491, is also for sale, with a reserve price of €14,000.
But it is the 82 letters from the composer of La Traviata and Nabucco to his friend, Opprandino Arrivabene, which are the undoubted highlight of the auction. In the correspondence an often despondent Verdi remarks on political developments, predicting in one letter: “The future [for Italy] will be ugly indeed.” But he also writes playfully on subjects including wine, gnocchi and, of course, music. One letter, dated 1863, is signed off by his dog, Blach.
Source: The Guardian
