Giuseppe Verdi remains the greatest operatic composer that Italy, the home of opera, has ever produced. Yet throughout his lifetime he claimed to detest composing and repeatedly rejected it. He was a landowner, a farmer, a politician and symbol of Italian independence; but his music tells a different story.An obsessive perfectionist, Verdi drove collaborators to despair but his works lauded from the start as dazzling feats of composition and characterization. From Rigoletto to Otello, La Traviatato to Aida, Verdi’s canon encompassed the full range of human emotion. His private life was no less complex: he suffered great loss, and went out of his way to antagonize supporters and his own family. An outspoken advocate of Italian independence and a sharp critic of the church, he was often at odds with nineteenth-century society.In Verdi: The Man Revealed, John Suchet attempts to get under the skin of perhaps the most private composer who ever lived.
John Verdi probes how the inexplicable connections of words can help us understand the ever-changing connections of things that we actually see in everyday experience. In his preface he writes, "I explore two related concepts: aspect-seeing and experiencing the meaning of a word." Verdi considers how our experience of seeing aspects, wherever they appear, helps us imagine possible meanings for philosophy's opening question: "What is there?" He illuminates Ludwig Wittgenstein's ideas on language and perception while challenging readers to think through for themselves the different ways in which we see. A major influence in the development of analytic philosophy, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was a leading thinker in the study of logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language.
One summer two PhD students of a world-renowned professor of Verdi die in apparent accidents. Is someone trying to punish him? Could it be another of his students? His grandson, helping uncover the facts, becomes enmeshed in a deadly spiral of murder that takes him from New York to Wyoming, London, Paris, Vienna and Milan before a final confrontation in Verona's amphitheater at a performance of Verdi's Il Trovatore. Carefully researched, Verdi Overtures brings to life the world of opera -- its passion and power and effect on those who live it to the full, from the 18th century world of Gluck through the 19th century world of Verdi to the present day.
This book examines the figure of Joan of Arc as depicted in stage works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially those based on or related to Schiller’s 1801 romantic tragedy, Die Jungfrau von Orleans (The Maid of Orleans). The author elucidates Schiller’s appropriation of themes from Euripides’s Iphigenia plays, chiefly the quality of “sublime sanctity,” which transforms Joan’s image from a victim of fate to a warrior-prophet who changes history through sheer force of will. Finding the best-known works of his time about her – Voltaire’s La pucelle d’Orléans and Shakespeare’s Henry VI, part I – utterly dissatisfying, Schiller set out to replace them. Die Jungfrau von Orleans was a smashing success and inspired various subsequent treatments, including Verdi’s opera Giovanna d’Arco and a translation by the father of Russian Romanticism, Vasily Zhukovsky, on which Tchaikovsky based his opera Orleanskaya deva (The Maid of Orleans). In turn, the book’s final chapter examines Shaw’s Saint Joan and finds that the Irish playwright’s vociferous complaints about Schiller’s “romantic flapdoodle” belie a surprising affinity for Schiller’s approach.
In Joyce's Grand Operoar, two internationally respected Joyce scholars join forces to present over 3,000 of Joyce's opera allusions as they appear in Finnegans Wake. Ruth Bauerle's long, richly detailed, and often amusing introduction critically interprets Joyce's life and work in terms of its operatic and literary interconnections. The resulting volume will delight both opera lovers and Joyceans.
In this guide, Julian Budden reviews the difficulties that faced the management that had commissioned La traviata and how, in some previously unpublished letters, Verdi fought their views on casting the leading lady. Denis Arnold contributes a musical commentary. April FitzLyon discusses the social background of the "e;lady of the camellias"e; in fact, fiction and on the stage, and Nicholas John compares the libretto with the play to show how skilfully it was adapted for the operatic stage.Contents: Introduction, Nicholas John; Verdi and the Singers for 'La Traviata', Julian Budden; La Traviata: from Real Life to Opera, Denis Arnold; Alexandre Dumas the Younger and 'La Dame aux camelias', April FitzLyon; An Introduction to the Libretto, Nicholas John; La traviata: Libretto by Francesco Maria Piave; La traviata: English Translation by Edmund Tracey
Aida is, for most of us, the quintessence of Ancient Egypt, but it is certainly not just for archaeologists. Michael Rose points out that it is really about patriotism - an issue of burning importance to Verdi and his contemporaries. Music critic William Mann reflects that even a short look at the score reveals subtleties that repay careful listening. And Verdi's own letters show the germs of the opera grow from suggestion to creation.Contents: Verdi's 'Egyptian business', Michael Rose; 'Aida' - Text and Music, William Mann; The Genesis of 'Aida', Roger Parker; Aida: Libretto by Antonio Ghislanzoni; Aida: English version by Edmund Tracey
In its revised third edition, this volume argues that an appreciation of opera is based on understanding of several key aspects: history, language, theatrical production, the power of the conductor, vocal tradition and standard repertory. This unique approach is intended for the newcomer curious about the art form. The author discusses how opera has changed in the last three decades and how it is now more easily enjoyed than ever before. Originally published in 1986, this book has been translated into four languages and has been used as an "Introduction to Opera" text in college classrooms around the world.
In 1944 Italian officer Captain Francesco Verdi is captured by Allied forces in North Africa and shipped to a POW camp in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where the senior POW, the ruthless Kommandant Vogel, demands that all prisoners adhere to his Nazi dictates. His life threatened, Verdi escapes from the camp and meets up with an American woman, Chiara Frangiapani, who helps him elude capture as they flee to the Lower Peninsula. By 1956 they have become Frank and Claire Green, a young married couple building a new life in postwar Detroit. When INS agent James Giannopoulos tracks them down, Frank learns that Vogel is executing men like Frank for their wartime transgressions. As a series of brutal murders rivets Detroit, Frank is caught between American justice and Nazi vengeance. In Wolf ’s Mouth, the recollections of Francesco Verdi/Frank Green give voice to the hopes, fears, and hard choices of a survivor as he strives to escape the ghosts of history.
Twenty great composers of Italian art songs from Scarlatti to Puccini are represented in songs that have been chosen for their appeal to young singers. Musical excerpts studied in Gateway to Italian Diction appear as complete scores.
John Mauceri, who has stood on podiums before storied symphonies, operas, and ballets around the world, brings a lifetime of experience to bear in this informative, brilliantly entertaining exploration of his profession. As Mauceri traces the lineage of his craft, from Felix Mendelssohn (the first to use a baton) to the present day, he shows us how conducting is itself a composition: of legacy and tradition, of techniques handed down—and more than a trace of ineffable magic. Weaving clear musical explanations together with memorable accounts of working alongside masters like Bernstein and Stokowski, Mauceri reveals how conductors approach a piece with a combination of personal interpretation, imagination, and insight into the composer’s intent; what it takes to communicate solely through gesture, with sometimes hundreds of performers at once; and the occasionally glamorous, often challenging life of the itinerant maestro. Illuminating and instructive, inflected with candor, humor, and grace, Maestros and Their Music is the perfect guide to the allure and theater, passion and drudgery, rivalries and relationships of the conducting life.
Twenty great composers of Italian art songs from Scarlatti to Puccini are represented in songs that have been chosen for their appeal to young singers. Musical excerpts studied in Gateway to Italian Diction appear as complete scores.
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