Synopsis: An intimate glimpse into lives of celebrated opera singers and musicians living out their ‘third act’ while mentoring music students at Casa Verdi Milan, built by Giuseppe Verdi in 1896.
Stars: Claudio Giombi, Chitose Matsumoto, Catherine Feller, Tina Aliprandi, Marco Rosetti
Director: Yvonne Russo
Rated: NR
Running Length: 78 minutes
Movie Review in Brief: I only watched Viva Verdi! because it got an Oscar nomination. Now I want everyone I know to see it. 78 minutes of aging musicians living with more passion and dignity than most films know what to do with. The credits will get you.
Review:
Here is how Viva Verdi! got on my radar: it received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song. That’s it. I had never heard of it before the morning nominations were announced. I would almost certainly have missed it entirely. This is exactly why I say every year that you should do your level best to watch all the Oscar-nominated films.Â
Time after time, the movies that sneak in from the edges are almost always the ones that surprise you most. I went in expecting to feel vaguely charmed. I came out genuinely moved.
Giuseppe Verdi's Last Gift
The subject of Viva Verdi! is Casa Verdi, a retirement home in Milan that Giuseppe Verdi — the most influential Italian opera composer of the 19th century — built at the end of his life for aging singers and musicians who had no pension and nowhere else to go. To live there, you must have practiced music professionally. Singers, conductors, dancers, composers, teachers: if music was your life, Casa Verdi is where your life can continue.
Many residents pay what they can. Those with nothing, if they qualify, live out their remaining days there for free. Verdi willed his own fortune to the place. The royalties from La Traviata and Rigoletto kept it running for decades before new donors stepped in.
Director Yvonne Russo first discovered Casa Verdi while producing a National Geographic Television episode on Milan’s hidden treasures. The project that followed took thirteen years to complete — shot across multiple trips to Italy, edited between continents, navigating a pandemic with the residents and with their own lives as the clock ran alongside the camera. That timeline is not a production anecdote. It is the film’s most important fact. Because you can see it unspool right in front of you.
The Residents Are the Film
Claudio Giombi is a baritone and music instructor who opens his suitcase of memories for the camera with the energy of a man who has earned the right to toot his own horn — and then proceeds to back it up with review clippings and photographs of himself performing alongside Pavarotti. He is larger than life and completely magnetic.
Chitose Matsumoto traveled to Italy from Japan at twenty years old and spent decades breaking through a performance culture that literally picketed her shows and called her an invader. She arrived at Casa Verdi with one suitcase. Her story is told without self-pity and with extraordinary dignity.
Tina Aliprandi, a violinist who survived the war, appears at 91, playing with the focused precision of someone who has never once considered stopping. The film was shot over six years, and by the end of that span she is 96 and in a wheelchair. In the production notes, co-writer/ producer Christine La Monte described watching this arc unfold: the first time they saw Tina, she was 91 and playing violin. The last time, she was 96 in a wheelchair celebrating her birthday. The film captures all of it. There are no other words for it except that.
Lina Vasta, a soprano and vocal coach the film describes as “ageless,” was forbidden to sing in Sicily as a young woman — female musicians were considered disreputable. When she married, her husband grew so jealous of her applause that she stopped performing in his presence. Casa Verdi gave her back the stage. Russo captures her dressed immaculately for the camera, performing with the total commitment of someone for whom music was never a career choice so much as a biological imperative.
Orchestrating Behind the Camera
Cinematographer Jacek Laskus shoots the building with real warmth, finding the lyre-shaped door handles and the instrument-lined corridors and the music rooms where decades of dedication are still echoing off the walls. Nicholas Pike‘s score is elegant and unobtrusive.
His original song “Sweet Dreams of Joy,” featuring soprano Ana Maria Martinez, is the film’s Oscar-nominated piece and a genuinely lovely one. The editing team, led by Federico Conforti and Darianna Cardilli, keeps the film moving at a pace that feels like a conversation rather than a catalogue.
A Few Fair Caveats
The film is somewhat loose in its structural logic. There is no clear timeline, and residents appear and reappear at different points in their physical lives without much signposting of when each sequence was shot. Some interview segments feel like chapters that could be rearranged without changing the film’s overall impact.
The student mentorship program — sixteen gifted international students living among the residents, learning things that cannot be found in textbooks — gets mentioned more than it gets developed. That cross-generational exchange is the film’s most compelling idea, and it deserves more screen time than it receives.
The documentary is also frank enough to acknowledge, implicitly, that it had to make painful choices about who to follow over six years. People who are 80 at the start of production are not all present by the end. The film does not dwell on this. It does not have to. The closing credits do the work, set to Pike’s nominated song, and after you have spent 78 minutes with these people, the credits will hit you somewhere you did not expect.
Worth Every Minute
There is a moment near the end where a resident in her 80’s apologizes to her fellow musicians for not hitting a high note (after wowing us with a stunning coloratura). The room responds with warm, genuine applause. No performance anxiety. No judgment. Just people who understand what it costs to try. That is what Casa Verdi is. That is what this film is about.
I went looking for an Oscar completionist check mark. I found something I am already recommending to everyone I know. That is the highest compliment I can give a documentary about aging opera singers that somehow also turned out to be about the rest of us.
Tell me this is not basically waiting to be turned into a narrative feature. Roberto Benigni, you free? Though on the smaller side, you’d be a great stand in for Claudio.Â
Highly recommended, especially for those who believe the life you dedicate to something beautiful should end with dignity.
Looking for something? Search for it here! Try an actor, movie, director, genre, or keyword!
