The Life and Music of Giuseppe Verdi

This is much more than just a musical biopic of Verdi. It is beautifully composed, just like all the music of Verdi himself, starting at the point of his dying, when he remembers his first wife, and then the first 40 minutes are all about their very tragic love story, which will make you start melting in tears, which then will go on throughout the film.

After Margherita Barezzi, the first wife and her untimely death at only 26, following the deaths of both her children (the film includes only one and spares the audience the double tragedy), there is the case of his second wife, which it took him a long time to settle for. She was an experienced woman and famous singer who had had a number of lovers and children and therefore felt unworthy of Verdi, and the film tells a beautiful romanticized story of how they found each other all the same, his father-in-law Barezzi acting as the father in "La traviata". The film culminates with that opera, which definitely brought them together.

It's an advantage that the film is in black and white, it enhances the traumas, the pathos and the seriousness of the tragedies of Verdi's life and gives justice to his personality. This is a classic not only of musical biopic films but of film history, as it is more a study in human compassion and depth of feelings of love, actually touching the core of the very mystery of love, in a manner which only Italian films have been truly capable of - I am thinking most of all of the films of Vittorio de Sica.