Despite the similarity of their names (Verdi means greens and Monteverdi means green mountain), the opera composers Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) and Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) were not related to each other. Since Monteverdi was born 256 years earlier, he could have been Verdi’s great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, but he wasn’t. Geographically, however, they were Read More …
Cremona is located on the left bank of the Po River, which is the longest river in Italy. It starts in the Alps and flows in a generally West-to-East direction across all of northern Italy, before emptying into the Adriatic Sea near Venice. Since I live in Germany I suppose Read More …
Opera was an invention of the Renaissance, starting around the year 1600. Perhaps the world’s first full-scale opera, or one of the first, was L’Orfeo by Claudio Monteverdi, composed in 1607. I have seen L’Orfeo several times at the Bockenheimer Depot in Frankfurt am Main, as staged by David Hermann, Read More …
Except for people like me, who immediately think of Monteverdi, the Italian town of Cremona is best known for its long tradition as a violin-making town. It was the home of Antonio Stradivari (1644-1737), maker of the famous Stradivarius violins. His statue appropriately shows him passing on his violin-making knowledge Read More …
The composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) arrived in Cremona on January 20, 1770, a week before his fourteenth birthday. He was traveling with his father, Leopold Mozart, and they were on their way from Salzburg to Milan, where Wolfgang in the next two years would compose three operas for the Read More …