Lanza's career and personal life are examined with great sensitivity and the authority of more than twenty years of research with the full cooperation of Lanza's family.

Blessed with one of the great tenor voices of all time, Mario Lanza (1921-1959) rose to spectacular heights in a film, recording, and concert career that spanned little more than a decade. Groomed at the outset for a career on the opera stage, Lanza instead flourished in Hollywood where his films, most notably The Great Caruso, broke box-office records the world over and influenced the careers of countless musicians. To this day, the Three Tenors cite him as an inspiration for their own careers on the classical stage. Lanza's recordings for RCA sold in the millions, and he remains the crossover artist supreme. But his tremendous success was derailed by his self-destructive lifestyle, and by age thirty-eight he was dead, with his extraordinary promise left unfulfilled. Newly revised and updated for its first U.S. edition, Mario Lanza: Singing to the Gods is the definitive account of the remarkable life and times of one of the twentieth century's most beloved singing stars. This richly detailed work also contains a selection of rare photographs, several of which are drawn from Lanza's estate. With the support of Lanza's daughter, Ellisa Lanza Bregman, the tenor's colleagues, and his closest friend, Terry Robinson, Derek Mannering has chronicled a fascinating and unforgettable life. From the fabulous successes of the early MGM years through the disastrous walkouts and cancellations that sent Lanza's career into freefall, Mannering objectively and movingly reveals the story of a great star torn apart by his own troubled psyche and undisciplined lifestyle.

Traces the life and career of the opera singer from his childhood, his recording and concert career, and his movie stardom, to his untimely death at the age of thirty-eight

(Amadeus). His exceptional good looks made him a matinee idol, and Franco Corelli the Prince of Tenors was dubbed "Mr. Soldout" for 20 consecutive years. In 1958, just seven years after beginning his career, he was already the highest-paid tenor in Italy. Following his Met debut in 1961, he was celebrated as the greatest tenor in the world, a position that he retained until his departure from the Met in 1975. His charismatic performances in such operas as La Vestale and Fedora (both in collaboration with Maria Callas), coupled with a formidable mystique, as well as a number of notorious and colorful incidents, including his real-life sword fight with Boris Christoff in Rome, the Callas walkout there, the beating up of a spectator in Naples, and the alleged biting of Birgit Nilsson on a Boston tour of Turandot , created a mania for Corelli. Nearly a decade in the making, this definitive biography is based on the author's extensive research of theater archives and interviews with the opera star's numerous friends, family members, colleagues (Nilsson, Pavarotti, and many others), as well as the management of some of the world's leading opera houses.

Maria Callas called him the greatest tenor who ever lived. Vocally and technically, Mario Lanza was a genius. Like Callas, Lanza's was a phenomenal talent complimented by a more than monstrous ego. Suffering from what would today be diagnosed as bi-polar disorder, he lived virtually his whole life with his finger firmly pressed on the self-destruct button. Too undisciplined to remain in opera, Lanza found himself sucked into the Hollywood whirlpool, engulfed by the opulent lifestyle this offered: easy money, good living, and limitless food, sex and drugs, to which he became increasingly addicted. Lanza took his frustration out of others, frequently launching an uncontrollable temper on those around him and earning himself a reputation as one of the movie stars who were most disliked by their peers in the studio system years. Lanza's scatological pranks were as legendary as his drinking, womanising and gorging sprees, each one followed by crash diets and periods of dark depression and self-loathing which made him virtually impossible to control. Yet he produced arguably the finest tenor recordings of popular music and opera of the last century as well as some classic films, including The Great Caruso and Serenade. In Sublime Serenade, David Bret uncompromisingly but lovingly, and in his unique and celebrated style, tells the Lanza story, from his birth in a poor district of Philadelphia, to his death in Rome 38 years later and his involvement with the Mafia. A must for all music and movie fans alike. David Bret was born in Paris and is a leading celebrity biographer. His many acclaimed books include biographies of Edith Piaf, Doris Day, Clark Gable and Joan Crawford. He lives in Yorkshire.

Master composer Ennio Morricone's scores go hand-in-hand with the idea of the Western film. Often considered the world's greatest living film composer, and most widely known for his innovative scores to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and the other Sergio Leone's movies, The Mission, Cinema Paradiso and more recently, The Hateful Eight, Morricone has spent the past 60 years reinventing the sound of cinema. In Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words, composers Ennio Morricone and Alessandro De Rosa present a years-long discussion of life, music, and the marvelous and unpredictable ways that the two come into contact with and influence each other. The result is what Morricone himself defines: "beyond a shadow of a doubt the best book ever written about me, the most authentic, the most detailed and well curated. The truest." Opening for the first time the door of his creative laboratory, Morricone offers an exhaustive and rich account of his life, from his early years of study to genre-defining collaborations with the most important Italian and international directors, including Leone, Bertolucci, Pasolini, Argento, Tornatore, Malick, Carpenter, Stone, Nichols, De Palma, Beatty, Levinson, Almodóvar, Polanski, and Tarantino. In the process, Morricone unveils the curious relationship that links music and images in cinema, as well as the creative urgency at the foundation of his experimentations with "absolute music". Throughout these conversations with De Rosa, Morricone dispenses invaluable insights not only on composing but also on the broader process of adaptation and what it means to be human. As he reminds us, "Coming into contact with memories doesn't only entail the melancholy of something that slips away with time, but also looking forward, understanding who I am now. And who knows what else may still happen."