Musical Destinations
Parma: Italy
Elinor Cooper pays homage to Verdi in Parma
Elinor Cooper travels to the musical heart of Italy for a festival celebrating little-known operatic gems by the region’s most iconic composer, Giuseppe Verdi
The Italian province of Parma is world famous for its fine food – Parma ham and Parmesan cheese are the just two of its tasty products. But it also has an important role as a historical centre for art and music. Renaissance painter Corregio did some of his finest work in the ceilings of Parmese churches, the famous diva soprano Renata Tebaldi attended the local conservatory, and – nearly 500 years ago – Monteverdi wrote music for the Parmese ducal family.
But over all of these luminaries towers the figure of the great opera composer Giuseppe Verdi, who was born just a few miles north of the city in a village called Le Roncole.
Today, the tavern in which he was born is a national monument to his memory, a museum, and point of pilgrimage for lovers of Verdi’s music.
It’s just one of many potential stops on a Verdi road-trip: in nearby Busseto you can visit Casa Barezzi, the home of Verdi’s patron Antonio Barezzi, where Verdi gave his first ever public performance in 1830 on a piano which is still there today. The Barezzi museum boasts a huge collection of portraits of Verdi and his family, and letters from the composer to his publishers, singers
Verdi conducted his operas in front of the ferocious Parmese
and colleagues. You can also visit the two churches where Verdi worked as organist as a young man, and the Teatro Verdi, which was built 1868 and named after the composer. On opening night the operagoers all wore green as a sign of affection towards the maestro (‘Verdi’ means ‘green’ in Italian), but Verdi didn’t show up.
Not long before the opening of the theatre, Verdi had returned to Busseto from Paris with the actress and soprano Giuseppina Strepponi. Scandalously for the time, they weren’t married. The town shunned Strepponi, and so began a long-running feud. The Verdis soon moved away from Busseto to Sant’agata, where Verdi had a new residence built especially for them: the Villa Verdi. They lived here until Strepponi’s death in 1897, after which the composer moved to Milan, unable to stay in Parma without his beloved second wife. The villa is now a museum, kept exactly as it was the day he left.
Today, this pilgrimage around the composer’s life in Parma is topped off by the annual Verdi Festival – a celebration of his life and music. ‘Even though his works are performed all over the world, there is a huge amount of hidden repertoire that could be better known,’ says general manager of the festival Anna Maria Meo, ‘and there’s no better place to show this than in Parma, at the heart of the “Verdian lands”’.
Busetto’s Teatro Verdi is one of the main venues for the festival, alongside Parma’s two main theatres – the Teatro Regio and Teatro Farnese. The Teatro Regio was a regular performance venue for Verdi, who often conducted his own operas here, in front of the famously ferocious Parmese audience.
The local opera crowd first earned a reputation as being hard to please in 1816, when the tenor Alberico Curioni was arrested after shouting obscenities back at the audience during opening night. At the end of the run Curioni got his revenge: halfway through the final performance he stopped singing and began whistling instead. He was again arrested and incarcerated for eight days, before being banned from ever visiting Parma again.
After you’ve jeered or cheered with the Parmese opera crowd, there’s plenty more to see in this ancient city. ‘Parma has such a monumental heritage,’ says Meo. ‘We have historic buildings, beautiful art galleries, and a fantastic gastronomic tradition!’ This tradition is good an excuse as any to raise a glass of the local Lambrusco to the memory of the composer whose music lives on here, in the heart of Italy.