Word: verdis
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Either accept my conditions or burn the score. I will prepare the fire, and I will personally put Falstaff and his stomach on the flames." So wrote fiery-tempered, 79-year-old Composer Giuseppe Verdi in a letter to his publisher in 1892. But Verdi, who had already received one of the handsomest premiums ever offered a composer, was persuaded not to burn Falstaff. Along with the originals of Verdi's 26 other operas, it was long stored in Milan in a plain brownstone office building at No. 2 Via Berchet, not far from La Scala. The opera house...
Casa Ricordi owns an estimated 150,000 pieces of original sheet music, can furnish scores and orchestral parts of 2,000 operas and 500 symphonies. The firm discovered, nurtured and financed virtually every major composing talent in Italian opera, e.g., Donizetti, Bellini, Verdi, Puccini, many of whose original manuscripts, for safekeeping, now lie crammed into 17 zinc cases, 45 feet below ground in a Milan bank. The House of Ricordi still publishes the works of many of the world's leading composers, including Francis Poulenc, Gian Carlo Menotti, Edgard Varese. Now 151 years old, the firm is making news...
...scores he produced would remain his property after a performance. In an age without copyrights or royalties on performances, he funneled some of his earnings back to the composers. In 1839 he shrewdly bought the rights to the new opera Oberto from an unknown provincial composer named Verdi...
...Scala, recommended the hiring or firing of singers, publicly castigated conductors. A pet hate for a time: Toscanini, whose style he once likened to a "mastodonic mechanical piano." Above all, Giulio commissioned Arrigo Boîto to write the librettos of Otello and Falstaff, which fired the aged Verdi into composing again. Although Puccini drew monthly advances for nine years before paying the money back, their friendship was sometimes stormy. "All composers," Giulio wrote him once, "French, English, German, Turkish and Abyssinian, [are] a bunch of idiots...
...Verdi first wrote Macbeth when he was 33, but 18 years later (1865) revised it, adding some of its best music...