Giuseppe verdi brief biography of albert

Music with Ease > 19th Century Italian Opera > Life of Verdi

Born in1813, within a few months of Wagner, Giuseppe Verdi survived Wagner for eighteen years, and when he died in January 1901, at the long age of eighty-seven, he was living a life free from care and full of happiness in a magnificent villa only a few miles from his birthplace.

He went to his rest crowned with honours, the most striking phenomenon that the history of opera has to record. For Verdi had met with a modest operatic success before he was long out of his teens; and after sixty years of almost continuous labour, he startled the art world with a consummate masterpiece, "Falstaff," written, with all the verve and vitality of youth, when he was eighty.

It required a strong character to live the life that Verdi lived; to preserve at the end of eighty-seven years that freshness of interest, that intensity of purpose, that industry which char