Transcript of a letter by Arrigo Boito on Verdi's Last Days

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“He carried away with him a great quantity of light and vital warmth. We had all basked in the sun of his Olympian old age. He died magnificently, like a fighter, redoubtable and mute. The silence of death fell on him a week before he died. With his head bent, his eyebrows set, with half-shut eyes he seemed to measure an unknown and formidable adversary, calculating in his mind the force that he could summon up in opposition. Thus he put up a heroic resistance. The breathing of his great chest sustained him for four days and three nights; on the fourth night the sound of his breathing still filled the room; but what a struggle, poor maestro! How magnificently he fought up to the last moment! In the course of my life I have lost persons whom I idolized, when grief was stronger than resignation. But I have never experienced such a feeling of hate against death, such loathing for its mysterious, blind, stupid, triumphant, infamous power. For such a feeling to be aroused in me I had to await the end of this old man.”