In 1981, Swiss photographer Eric Bachmann and German journalist Christian Kämmerling put together a report on the elegiac world of the Casa di Riposo per Musicisti, a remarkable retirement home founded by Giuseppe Verdi in 1896 for musicians and opera singers who found themselves penniless in their sunset years. Casa Verdi 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 who inhabited the home, some whose passion for a labor of love made them have-nots their whole lives or those who, as Verdi put it in his modest way, simply “had less luck than I”. What precious few biographical facts were available after the war serve here as posts between which mostly imagined life stories have now been stretched. Thanks to Edition Patrick Frey (Zurich). 153 pages, 25 x 17.5cm, softcover, Edition Patrick Frey (Zurich).
