Roberto Piana - Giulio Ricordi: Piano Works (2013)

Precisely a century separates us from the death of Giulio Ricordi, the most gifted musical publisher of all time, who was born in 1840 during the Risorgimento and died on 6 June 1912 when the Belle Époque was ending; who plunged into the Scapigliatura, came close to Wagnerism, worshipped Verdi and was fascinated by young Puccini.

And he was a musician. Actually, in Verdi’s opinion, he was “the only one among the young people to be really well-versed in music”. Almost every evening during the last decades of his life, Giulio shed his role of “important person”, sat down at the piano and composed, using music almost as a therapy, as a sort of receptacle for emptying out his brain, where notes by various composers lingered and eventually agglomerated almost by themselves, as in a kaleidoscope, creating delightful new patterns.