Verdi, Giuseppe

about Giovanni Rizzi's volume of poetry Un grido, voicing his opinion that the public seems to admire Rizzi's "satanic style", which Madame de Stael so derided, expressing the hope that the veristi, satanists and communards do not finish by burying Europe under a pile of ash ("...Se il mondo d'adesso vuole Satana, se lo tenga, i popoli hanno quello che si meritano diceva credo, La Stael...a meno che questi Veristi, Satanisti  e più ancora i Communards  non resep[p]eliscano l'Europa sotto una mucchia di cenere..."), 

1 page, 8vo, [c.1879], small tears to margins and paper-loss to lower corner, apparently without loss of text 



 

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Unpublished.  Verdi wrote to Clara Maffei on 21 February 1879 about volume of poetry by Professor Rizzi, which she had sent him, promising to read it: see I copialettere, ed. A Cesari & A. Luzio, p.280.  This letter must have been drafted a short time later.   Countess Clara Maffei corresponded with Verdi from the 1840s until her death in 1886; she was the estranged wife of the poet Andrea Maffei, who wrote the libretto of I masnadieri and revised Macbeth.