The Cambridge Companion to Verdi

Front Cover
Scott L. Balthazar
Cambridge University Press, 2004 M11 18 - 336 pages
This Companion provides a biographical, theatrical, and social-cultural background for Verdi's operas, examines in detail important general aspects of its style and method of composing, and synthesizes stylistic themes in discussions of representative works. Aspects of Verdi's milieu, style, creative process, and critical reception are explored in essays by highly reputed specialists. Like others in the series this Companion is aimed primarily at students and opera lovers.
 

Contents

Verdis life a thematic biography
3
The Italian theatre of Verdis day
15
Verdi Italian Romanticism and the Risorgimento
29
The forms of set pieces
49
New currents in the libretto
69
Words and music
88
French influences
111
Structural coherence
139
Chhai di nuovo buffon? or Whats new with Rigoletto
197
Verdis Don Carlos an overview of the operas
209
Desdemonas alienation and Otellos fall
237
An introduction to Verdis working methods
257
Verdi criticism
269
Notes
282
List of Verdis works
309
Select bibliography and works cited
312

Instrumental music in Verdis operas
154
Verdis nonoperatic works
169
Ernani the tenor in crisis
185

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About the author (2004)

Scott L. Balthazar is Professor of Music History at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. He has lectured and published on stylistic aspects of nineteenth-century Italian opera and on contemporary theories of instrumental form in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Dr Balthazar is a contributor to the revised New Grove Dictionary of Music and the New Grove Dictionary of Opera, and his articles and reviews have appeared in a number of musicological journals.

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