2023-12-23 18:19:35
Mozart’s birthplace in Salzburg should serve as a model for the renovation, said the conductor. The Italian Ministry of Culture initiated proceedings to expropriate Verdi this week.
The Italian conductor Riccardo Muti has launched an appeal to the Italian authorities to save the villa of the composer Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) in Sant’Agata, near Piacenza, northern Italy. Mozart’s birthplace in Salzburg should serve as a model for the renovation, said Muti, according to media reports on Saturday. The Italian Ministry of Culture initiated proceedings to expropriate Verdi this week.
The aim is to save the house in which Verdi lived for around 50 years from decay. With the expropriation, the Italian state wants to avoid the villa being sold at auction. Because the artist’s heirs had been at loggerheads for years and no one was able to pay off the other, a court decided in the final instance that the house should be sold and auctioned off. Officials visited the property and found some of it to be in “poor condition”.
“I don’t judge the manner of expropriation, but if the goal is to make Verdi’s house like, for example, Mozart’s birthplace in Salzburg, I can only be happy. “Hopefully it will be an important center for the world to learn regarding the environment in which Verdi created most of his operas,” said Muti.
Hundreds of sketches from Villa brought to the state archives
More than 600 sheets of sketches and drafts for operas, most of them unpublished, were taken from the villa in 2017. They are located in the State Archives of the City of Parma. Verdi composed some of his most beautiful operas in the villa. Here you can find the maestro’s furniture and personal belongings, including a Viennese fortepiano made by Fritz, on which he composed “Il Trovatore” and “La Traviata”.
Muti completed the “Autumn Trilogy” on Friday evening at the Teatro Dante Alighieri in Ravenna. In a single week he conducted Vincenzo Bellini’s opera “Norma”, Verdi’s “Nabucco” and a gala evening with Verdi arias with the “Luigi Cherubini” youth orchestra. Muti was named conductor for life of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in June. The maestro ended his 13-year tenure as music director of the orchestra with three concerts. (APA)
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