After the  Dream . . . .

Giuseppe Verdi Musician and Farmer

One might wonder what the relationship was between Giuseppe Verdi’s two main professions: music composition and agriculture.

Verdi himself says: ‘It is from the one that I draw the strength for the other. If I arrive here spiritually exhausted from my study, the intimate contact with nature,and in particular the practice of agriculture, gives me refreshment, restoring to my imagination and my spirit the tension necessary for creation”. “His love for thecountryside has become mania, madness, rage, fury, everything you can imagine that is more exaggerated: he gets up at the crack of dawn to go and examine the wheat, the corn, the vineyard, he comes back dead from fatigue and so how can you find a way to make him take up his pen?”

Giuseppina Strepponi wrote to the Parisian publisher Léon Escudier.

Busy working in the fields, building the embankments to protect them from the floodsof the Po, working on horses like his beloved Milord and the cows that he valued andbought in the markets between Piacenza and Parma, but also his passion for creating agarden, Verdi seemed to neglect his work as a composer.

In writing to his friend Opprandino Arrivabene, who was always travelling around the world and in various Italian locations, he informs himself of events…..but the ending is always the same:”…I’m leaving you and going to the fields”.

Between one opera and another, Verdi also visited some particularly avant—gardeItalian properties such as Leri, in the Vercelli area, owned by his friend CamilloBenso di Cavour.

But he also showed great concern for the social situation in the countryside and forthe serious problem of emigration and the needs of agriculture, as he wrote in a newspaper of the time:” …I wish this most noble science were cultivated more by us. A little less musicians, lawyers, doctors and a little more farmers: this is my wish for my country”.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the countryside in the province of Parma and Piacenza was very backward. The process of agricultural specialisation also took place in Verdi’s lands with the construction of new stables and dairiesfor raising livestock and producing milk and cheese.

Attendance at markets and exhibitions also contributed to the transmission ofagricultural innovations and the Master went

Verdi in his garden