In Italian - La visitta di Simonetta Puccini

Un ricordo del 1986 - La visita di Simonetta Puccini - PDF

Puccini Legacy Discussed - PDF

Program of Events, Western Ontario Conservatory of Music and Ann Summers Resource Centre For Career Performing Artists - PDF

I accompanied Simonetta Puccini to visit to the house of Maria Rosé, widow of Alfred Rosé who was the nephew of Gustav Mahler; they had come to London after WWII. Western University has the privilege of owning a collection of musical treasures housed in the Mahler-Rosè Room ADD LINK: http://www.lib.uwo.ca/music/gmar.html  Maria was unable to receive Simonetta herself, as she was in the hospital on that day, and it was her friend and researcher Richard Newman who let us in the house, and gave Simonetta a tour during which she could view and touch the memorabilia that she instantly recognized, as they had belonged to the world in which also her grandfather Giacomo Puccini had lived. In two notebooks of autographs that had belonged to Alfred Rosé and his sister Alma, Simonetta saw the signature of her grandfather, from 1920, and deciphered the names of all the great singers, and other personalities who had signed their autographs for the young Alma and Alfred.

Puccinni's photo is the second from the left, next to Toscannini's. At the end Rodin's bust of Mahler.

In the letter Simonetta Puccini sent me as soon as she returned to Italy in October 1986, she wrote: “Mi è molto interessata la collezione Mahler e ho trovato la casa della signora Rosé deliziosa, un angolo di Mittel-Europa e anche commovente per la presenza dei ricordi di mio nonno.”

(See Alma Rosé: Vienna to Auschwitz, by Richard Newman with Karen Kirtley, Amadeus Press, 2000)

Ascolta la voce di Puccini (1907)