Giuseppe Verdi in 1900, with Maria Carrara Verdi, Barberina Strepponi, Giuditta and Giulio Ricordi, Teresa Stolz, Umberto Campanari and Leopoldo Metlicovitz. Archivio Storico Ricordi, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Busseto, Tuesday 12 October 1813, 9 am. Before the deputy mayor, who serves as registrar for a municipality of the department of the Taro, appears an innkeeper of twenty-eight from Le Roncole. His name is Carlo Verdi, and the clerk writes it Charles, because these lands have been annexed to the French Empire and the registers are kept in French. Carlo presents a baby boy, born to him and Luigia Uttini, and the record sets down the date with the exactness of a Napoleonic administration: born on the tenth day of the current month, at 8 pm.
The day before, the baby had already been carried to the baptismal font of San Michele Arcangelo, at Le Roncole. There too someone had taken note: the baptismal register for 11 October records Giuseppe Francesco Fortunino, “born yesterday,” son of an innkeeper and a spinner. The parish and the State, which in those years agreed on almost nothing, seem here to say the same thing. Taken literally, that “born yesterday” lands on the day of the civil record, Sunday 10 October 1813. But in the countryside of the time the day was often counted from sunset, and for a child born at 8 pm the boundary between one date and the next was less clear than it seems.
Verdi, however, counted differently. He celebrated his birthday on 9 October, as his mother had told him, and that is how his biographers remember it. For many years he even got the year wrong. The Enciclopedia Italiana, in its entry on the composer, puts it without detours: for a very long time Verdi believed he had been born in 1814, because that, he said, was what his mother had always told him. Order was restored only by the birth record published by Carlo Gatti, his biographer, long after the composer was dead. That is why even today some encyclopedias, the Encyclopaedia Britannica among them, prudently write 9 or 10 October, with a slash in between.
Where his mother’s error came from can only be guessed at, but there is a clue, and it is in the calendar. A tradition gathered at Le Roncole ties that birth to the feast of San Donnino, patron of the diocese of Borgo San Donnino, today’s Fidenza. The saint is celebrated on 9 October. In 1813 the 9th fell on a Saturday and the 10th on a Sunday, and a village feast does not look at the calendar with a notary’s precision. For a country woman giving birth in an inn, the surest memory is the saint, even before the number of the day. The saint said 9. The civil registry, which knows no saints, said 10.
There is also a simpler reason, and perhaps a truer one. In a family of innkeepers and spinners in the lowlands, at the start of the nineteenth century, age was an approximate matter, and nobody asked to see a certificate. His mother’s word was enough, and a man who would argue with publishers and impresarios over every clause of his contracts held on for decades to a date that no document supported.
Age, for that matter, weighed on him at least once, and not for a day. In June 1832 the Milan Conservatory turned him away, among other reasons because the regulations set admission at fourteen and he was eighteen. With his mother’s wrong year he would have been seventeen: three too many instead of four, and the verdict would have been the same. The 9th or the 10th, 1813 or 1814 remained family matters until someone went to look for the papers.
The difference is one day, and it is the difference between memory and paper. Memory remembers feasts; archives have no memory, they have ink. And the ink of the Busseto register says one more thing, which no family voice had handed down. The first public document in the life of the composer of Nabucco is written in French, and the child is entered in it as Joseph Fortunin François.