SOME FACTS ABOUT GIUSEPPE VERDI

Read these facts about Giuseppe Verdi, and try to write his story out of them, using your own words.

When your story is finished, ask your mother or your teacher to read it. When you have made it as perfect as you can, copy it on pages 14, 15 and 16.

1. Giuseppe Verdi was born in Roncole, Italy, October 10, 1813.

2. He began to learn the Spinet when he was seven years old.

3. The Spinet is an early form of the piano.

4. Among the great composers who were alive when Verdi was a little boy were: Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz and Schumann.

5. He became organist at Roncole when he was ten years old (1823).

6. He went to school in Busseto and lived with a cobbler.

7. After a time he studied in Milan.

8. But not at the famous Milan Conservatory, for he was told there that he had no special talent for music.

9. Verdi wrote thirty operas.

10. The first was performed in 1839, when he was twenty-six years old.

11. One of his operas has its scene laid in Boston, Mass.

12. Another is about Egypt, and the scene is laid in Memphis and Thebes, in the time of the Pharaohs.

13. Verdi founded, for aged musicians, the Casa di Riposo (House of Rest).

14. Besides the thirty operas Verdi wrote a string quartet, The Manzoni Requiem, and a National Hymn.

15. For a period of sixteen years Verdi wrote no operas. Then he produced his two great works, Othello and Falstaff.

16. He died at St. Agatha, January 27, 1901.