These 301 letters between Verdi and Bioto show a picture of daily life of European art and artists during the last decades of the 19th century.

This investigation offers new perspectives on Giuseppe Verdi’s attitudes to women and the functions which they fulfilled for him. The book explores Verdi’s professional and personal relationship with women who were exceptional within the traditional socio-sexual structure of patria potestà, in the context of women’s changing status in nineteenth-century Italian society. It focusses on two women; the singers Giuseppina Strepponi, who supported and enhanced Verdi’s creativity at the beginning of his professional life and Teresa Stolz, who sustained his sense of self-worth at its end. Each was an essential emotional benefactor without whom Verdi’s career would not have been the same. The subject of the Strepponi-Verdi marriage and the impact of Strepponi’s past deserve further detailed and nuanced discussion. This book demonstrates Verdi’s shifting power-balance with Strepponi as she sought to retain intellectual self-respect while his success and control increased. The negative stereotypes concerning operatic ‘divas’ do not withstand scrutiny when applied either to Strepponi or to Stolz. This book presents a revisionist appraisal of Stolz through close examination of her letters. Revealing Stolz’s value to Verdi, they also provide contemporary operatic criticism and behind-the-scenes comment, some excerpts of which are published here in English for the first time.

This comprehensive research guide surveys the most significant published materials relating to Giuseppe Verdi. This new edition includes research since the publication of the first edition in 1998.

Later life is a fraught topic in our commercialized, anti-aging, death-denying culture. Where does creativity fit in? The canonical composers whose stories are told in this book--Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901), Richard Strauss (1864-1949), Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992), and Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)--offer radically individual responses to that question. In their late years, each of these national icons wrote an opera around which coalesced major issues about their own creativity and aging, ranging from declining health to the critical expectations that accompany success and long artistic careers. They also had to deal with the social, political and aesthetic changes of their time, including World Wars and the rise of musical modernism. By investigating their attitudes to their creativity in the face of aging, together with their late compositions and the critical reception of them, this book tells the stories of their different but creative ways of dealing with those changes. Bringing their respective specialties of medicine and literary criticism to bear on the study, the authors show how the late nineteenth century, where these stories begin, saw the discovery and definition of "old age” as a social, economic, and medical construct. And thus were born, in the twentieth century, both geriatrics and gerontology as disciplines. Despite recent medical advances and increased life expectancy, the strikingly dichotomous cultural views of age and aging--both positive and negative--have not changed much at all. What also has not changed are the reception of late-life works as caught between decline and apotheosis and the fraught discourse of "late style.” The stories in this book weave all these elements together, highlighting both the shared vicissitudes of aging and the individual power of creativity as a way to meet them.

First Published in 1998. Giuseppe Verdi already stood out as a distinctive and unusually significant composer by the time his career was barely underway. Today, Verdi scholars build their work on a vast foundation of earlier research. For researchers who have not spent years with the Verdi literature or who may just be starting to explore some aspect of this giant’s fife and works, this foundation may seem daunting indeed. It is primarily for these researchers that this guide is intended. Its purpose is to index and describe some of the most significant studies about the composer, presenting enough material in annotations that researchers may survey the many myriad directions Verdi research has gone, ascertain the relevance of individual items to their individual interests, and pursue significant patterns and threads in which they are interested.

Great Shakespeareans offers a systematic account of those figures who have had the greatest influence on the interpretation, understanding and cultural reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and internationally. In this volume, leading scholars assess the contribution of Berlioz, Verdi, Wagner and Britten to the afterlife and reception of Shakespeare and his plays. Each substantial contribution assesses the double impact of Shakespeare on the figure covered and of the figure on the understanding, interpretation and appreciation of Shakespeare, provide a sketch of their subject's intellectual and professional biography and an account of the wider cultural context, including comparison with other figures or works within the same field.