Autograph receipt for Keats's piano signed by Anna Angeletti

Shortly after their arrival in Rome Keats asked Severn to find a piano, ‘for not only was he passionately fond of music’, Severn later recalled, ‘but he found that his constant pain and o’erfretted nerves were much ooth’d by it.’ Severn played Keats arrangements of Haydn symphonies, and the poet would exclaim delightedly that Haydn was like a child, ‘for there is no knowing what he will do next’. When the contents of Keats’s bedroom were burned after his death, the sitting room escaped the same fate, Severn said, ‘mainly on account of the hired pianoforte, which I refused to be allowed to be touched; and as in connection with my protesting guardianship of it I was able to prove that I had never carried my dying friend into the room, it followed that nothing else therein could be touched’.

Angeletti, Anna (autographer)

Rome

1820 November – December

1 sheet

manuscript

paper

eng

autographs (manuscripts)
financial records

1820

Gift of Mrs Eleanor Furneaux, 1911.

KSH

Keats Room

KTS-1.18