Casa Verdi

In 1981, even before Daniel Schmid presented a deeply compassionate portrait of retired singers at the Casa Verdi - an old-age home founded in 1896 by Giuseppe Verdi for musicians and opera singers who find themselves penniless in their sunset years - in his 1984 film Il Bacio di Tosca, Swiss photographer Eric Bachmann and German journalist Christian Kammerling put together a report on the elegiac world of this remarkable retirement home for a Swiss magazine. Casa Verdi now brings together in a single volume the bulk of Bachmann's photo archive, Kammerling's sensitive essay, and by and large reconstructed biographies of the retired musicians and singers. What precious few biographical facts were available after the war serve here as posts between which mostly imagined life stories have now been stretched.