House That Giovanni Built

"Either accept my conditions or burn the score. I will prepare the fire, and I will personally put Falstaff and his stomach on the flames." So wrote fiery-tempered, 79-year-old Composer Giuseppe Verdi in a letter to his publisher in 1892. But Verdi, who had already received one of the handsomest premiums ever offered a composer, was persuaded not to burn Falstaff. Along with the originals of Verdi's 26 other operas, it was long stored in Milan in a plain brownstone office building at No. 2 Via Berchet, not far from La Scala. The opera house is more famous, but the office building has done at least as much to shape the rhapsodic flow of Italian music. Its name: Casa Ricordi.

Casa Ricordi owns an estimated 150,000 pieces of original sheet music, can furnish scores and orchestral parts of 2,000 operas and 500 symphonies. The firm discovered, nurtured and financed virtually every major composing talent in Italian opera, e.g., Donizetti, Bellini, Verdi, Puccini, many of whose original manuscripts, for safekeeping, now lie crammed into 17 zinc cases, 45 feet below ground in a Milan bank. The House of Ricordi still publishes the works of many of the world's leading composers, including Francis Poulenc, Gian Carlo Menotti, Edgard Varese. Now 151 years old, the firm is making news by breaking with its own austere traditions and branching out into new fields. Items: Ricordi is 1) exchanging its old, cramped print shop for a brand-new, concrete-and-glass plant on Milan's outskirts; 2) moving into the recording business; 3) continuing its forays into the pop field, having just launched an 18-year-old, blue-jeaned, guitar-whanging singer named Giorgio Gabor (no kin). Ricordi executives hope that Giorgio will turn out to be a prosciutto version of Presley.

Pet Hates. Casa Ricordi was founded in Milan in 1808 by a violinist who, so the legend goes, noticed that the workers around La Scala wore paper hats made of discarded musical scores. Giovanni Ricordi investigated, found that valuable scores and orchestra parts were stacked high in La Scala's cellar. He began to buy up some of the scores, set himself up as a copyist, got a contract stipulating that all the scores he produced would remain his property after a performance. In an age without copyrights or royalties on performances, he funneled some of his earnings back to the composers. In 1839 he shrewdly bought the rights to the new opera Oberto from an unknown provincial composer named Verdi.

Giovanni's son Tito took over the firm, but the dynasty's organizational genius was Grandson Giulio, an ironic, meticulously dressed man, who dabbled in poetry and chamber music, negotiated so shrewdly that Casa Ricordi realized as much as 65% from the earnings of its composers' work. With a near-monopolistic control over Italian opera, Giulio attended rehearsals at La Scala, recommended the hiring or firing of singers, publicly castigated conductors. A pet hate for a time: Toscanini, whose style he once likened to a "mastodonic mechanical piano." Above all, Giulio commissioned Arrigo Boito to write the librettos of Otello and Falstaff, which fired the aged Verdi into composing again. Although Puccini drew monthly advances for nine years before paying the money back, their friendship was sometimes stormy. "All composers," Giulio wrote him once, "French, English, German, Turkish and Abyssinian, [are] a bunch of idiots."

No Dogs. The last of the Ricordis to head the firm was Tito II, who expanded Casa Ricordi into the sprawling complex that now has branch offices in a dozen countries, and a chain of Italian retail stores. But Tito was unpopular and dictatorial, resigned in 1919. The business passed to Accountant Renzo Valcarenghi and Composer-Stage Designer Carlo Clausetti, whose sons now run the firm. Today Casa Ricordi is doing brisker business than ever, despite World War II bomb damage. The firm remains stiffly self-conscious about its artistic obligations, maintains a string of opera scouts throughout Italy. Says one Ricordi executive: "We see to it that no dog ever sings Boheme."

In 1961 Ricordi's European copyrights on the works of Verdi will expire, to be followed before too long by the works of Puccini.*The firm may then become largely a record company (present U.S. distributors: RCA Victor, Mercury and Westminster). Artists-and-repertory chief of its burgeoning record division: Carlo Emanuele ("Nanni") Ricordi, 26, great-great-great grandson of Giovanni.

*European copyrights expire 50 years after the death of all of the authors, including the librettists. In the U.S., where all of the works of Verdi and some of Puccini's are now in the public domain, copyrights are protected only 56 years after each work's first publication.

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