Giuseppe Verdi

Giuseppe Verdi was an Italian composer, chiefly of opera, active through the nineteenth century. He was born near Busseto in what was then the Taro department of the Napoleonic French Empire (the territory later reconstituted as the Duchy of Parma in 1814). He trained locally under Ferdinando Provesi, then in Milan under Vincenzo Lavigna after the conservatory declined to admit him; he returned to Busseto in the mid-1830s, married Margherita Barezzi there in 1836, and served as the town's maestro di musica before relocating to Milan, where Oberto (1839) and the triumph of Nabucco (1842) established his career at La Scala. Over some five decades he produced operas including Rigoletto, Il trovatore, La traviata, Aida, Otello and Falstaff, alongside the Requiem. His music became associated with the Italian unification period, and he briefly served in the first national parliament. From around 1851 his principal residence was his estate at Sant'Agata near Villanova sull'Arda, and for roughly three decades he kept a winter residence in Genoa (Palazzo Sauli, later Palazzo Doria). He endowed a rest home for musicians in Milan, where he died in 1901.