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Casa Verdi

by Eric Bachmann

Photographs: Eric Bachmann

Publisher: Edition Patrick Frey

153 pages

Pictures: 92

Year: 2015

ISBN: 978-3-906803-25-8

Comments: Hardcover, 17,5 × 25 cm

In 1981, even before Daniel Schmid presented a deeply compassionate portrait of retired singers at the Casa Verdi in his 1984 film Il Bacio di Tosca, Swiss photographer Eric Bachmann and German journalist Christian Kämmerling put together a report on the elegiac world of this remarkable retirement home for a Swiss magazine.
Casa Verdi now brings together in a single volume the bulk of Bachmann's photo archive, Kämmerling's sensitive essay, and by and large reconstructed biographies of the retired musicians and singers. What precious few biographical facts were available after the war serve here as posts between which mostly imagined life stories have now been stretched. Rather like the sixty-odd last names posted on the little board in the porter's dark lodge at Casa Verdi: some of the yellowed plastic block letters don't stick very well anymore and dangle there crookedly, as if hanging by a thread. Behind them lie the fates of each resident, each of which has in its way turned out differently from what they'd originally hoped: How come I never made it big? How come he did and I didn't?—Or others who had more success: What in the world became of the fortune I made back in the day? Squandered. But on what?
And yet despite all the questions about the reasons for their own bad luck, there is a silver lining here at the Casa di Riposo, where those taken in need worry no more about their twilight years: Verdi bequeathed to the home—which he called his “finest work”—the cornerstone of his huge fortune, namely the rights to all his operas.

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look inside

Casa Verdi

by Eric Bachmann

Photographs: Eric Bachmann

Publisher: Edition Patrick Frey

153 pages

Pictures: 92

Year: 2015

ISBN: 978-3-906803-25-8

Comments: Hardcover, 17,5 × 25 cm

In 1981, even before Daniel Schmid presented a deeply compassionate portrait of retired singers at the Casa Verdi in his 1984 film Il Bacio di Tosca, Swiss photographer Eric Bachmann and German journalist Christian Kämmerling put together a report on the elegiac world of this remarkable retirement home for a Swiss magazine.
Casa Verdi now brings together in a single volume the bulk of Bachmann's photo archive, Kämmerling's sensitive essay, and by and large reconstructed biographies of the retired musicians and singers. What precious few biographical facts were available after the war serve here as posts between which mostly imagined life stories have now been stretched. Rather like the sixty-odd last names posted on the little board in the porter's dark lodge at Casa Verdi: some of the yellowed plastic block letters don't stick very well anymore and dangle there crookedly, as if hanging by a thread. Behind them lie the fates of each resident, each of which has in its way turned out differently from what they'd originally hoped: How come I never made it big? How come he did and I didn't?—Or others who had more success: What in the world became of the fortune I made back in the day? Squandered. But on what?
And yet despite all the questions about the reasons for their own bad luck, there is a silver lining here at the Casa di Riposo, where those taken in need worry no more about their twilight years: Verdi bequeathed to the home—which he called his “finest work”—the cornerstone of his huge fortune, namely the rights to all his operas.

more books tagged »swiss« | >> see all