Franco Ghione Met Verdi
‘‘Addio‘ Speranze dell ’arte futura' Studiate! Studiate! Studiate!” Franco Ghione, the principal conductor of the Italian Grand Opera Company, is among the diminishing band of musicians who actually met Giuseppe Verdi, the great operatic composer, face to face. “It will always remain the most vivid memory I have of my boyhood," says the maestro. “I was only 11 years of age then, a violin student at the Parma Conservatoire of Music. It was the eighty-eighth birthday of Verdi, and we were celebrating it at the Conservatoire. Afterwards some of us went out to Verdi’s villa, which was not far away, in the hope of seeing the god of our idolatry.” “We were ushered into a large room,” says Signor Ghione. “Here we stood waiting awkwardly, until suddenly a door at the far end opened, and in came the little old man, with a white beard. He nodded pleasantly this way and that to us boys, and then spoke the lines, which mean—after the salute—that we were the hope for the art of the future—followed by the injunction to study, study, and study. . . . “Verdi died the same year.”
Permanent link to this item
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/GISH19490406.2.14
Bibliographic details
Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 22915, 6 April 1949, Page 3
Word Count
191Franco Ghione Met Verdi Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 22915, 6 April 1949, Page 3
Using This Item
The Gisborne Herald Company is the copyright owner for the Gisborne Herald. You can reproduce in-copyright material from this newspaper for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). This newspaper is not available for commercial use without the consent of the Gisborne Herald Company. For advice on reproduction of out-of-copyright material from this newspaper, please refer to the Copyright guide.
Log in