Verdi by John Suchet

Author:John Suchet
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2018-06-21T16:00:00+00:00

15

A QUESTION OF IDENTITY

What follows is an amalgam of fact and speculation. Speculation in a biography, I believe, is permitted when it is made clear that it is speculation, and where it is based on known fact.

For what follows I am heavily indebted to Verdi’s most comprehensive biographer, Mary Jane Phillips-Matz, who carried out more extensive research in Busseto and the surrounding area than any other modern biographer, to the extent of living in Busseto, befriending and speaking to local people, hearing their stories and legends of Verdi, and examining records there and in other towns that had never before been made public. I shall tell this particular story largely as she tells it.

On 14 April 1851, at half past nine in the evening, a newborn baby girl was placed in the turnstile set into the wall at the Ospedale Maggiore in Cremona. The bell was rung, the turnstile revolved, and the nuns took the baby in.

Unusually for an abandoned baby, the nuns found a name for the baby inside the basket, and the following day she was baptised Santa Streppini. In every section of the baptismal register, in answer to details such as name of father, name of mother, and so on, is the word ‘unknown’.*

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