Giuseppe Verdi, pastel by Giovanni Boldini (1886). Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
June 1832. An eighteen-year-old from Busseto, supported in his studies by a provincial patron and by the coffers of a local congregation, presents himself at the Royal Conservatory of Milan for the entrance examination. His name is Giuseppe Verdi. The committee’s verdict is no.
The records of the inquiry exist and tell of a rejection more bureaucratic than musical, which makes it worse. Verdi was four years too old: the regulations set entry at fourteen, he was eighteen. He was a foreign subject, of the Duchy of Parma, and the free places went to Lombardy-Venetians. And the committee found fault with his hand position at the piano, judged incorrect and by now hard to straighten; on the compositions he presented, the judgement was more open, but not enough to justify an exception to the rules. Nobody ever wrote “lacking talent”: they wrote “outside the rules”. It is the way institutions reject without getting their hands dirty.
Verdi stayed in Milan at the expense of his patron and father-in-law and studied privately with Vincenzo Lavigna, a conductor at La Scala, taking the path the Conservatory had denied him: counterpoint, fugues, and evenings in the theatres learning the real trade. What followed is well known: the production system of Italian opera took him and made him its emperor. The revenge came posthumous and perfect: since 1901, the year of his death, the Milan Conservatory has been called the Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi. When the dedication had been put to him while he was still alive, the old man had answered with the line every rejected person in history should frame: they didn’t want me young, they want me old.
The moral is not that committees are always wrong: it is that regulations cannot read the future, and whoever applies them without looking at who stands in front of them turns an office into a joke that lasts two centuries. The story of Hans Rott says what happens when the rejected one breaks; Verdi’s says what happens when the rejected one wins. In between are all the others, the ones we will never know about: and it is of them that every musical institution should think when it writes up its next set of minutes.