This groundbreaking study illuminates the creation and early productions of Otello and the revised version of Simon Boccanegra by featuring Verdi's correspondence with his librettist, Arrigo Boito, and their publisher, Giulio Ricordi. An indispensable guide to Verdi's late works, the book also contains reviews of the early performances, production books kept by Boito and Ricordi, and biographical notes on all correspondents.

Opera is the only guide to the research writings on all aspects of opera. This second edition presents 2,833 titles--over 2,000 more than the first edition--of books, parts of books, articles and dissertations with full bibliographic descriptions and critical annotations. Users will find the core literature on the operas of 320 individual composers and details of operatic life in 43 countries. All relevant works through to November 1999 have been considered, covering more than fifteen years of literature since the first edition was published.

Otello, Verdi's penultimate opera, was composed more than a dozen years after Aida, which he had intended to be his last work for the stage. He was persuaded by his publisher Giulio Ricordi to work with the librettist Arrigo Boito on an adaptation of Shakespeare's Othello; the resulting work is one of the supreme examples of Italian opera. Greeted with enormous enthusiasm at its premiere at La Scala in 1887, Otello immediately went on to huge success in all the major opera houses of the world. The richness of its musical and dramatic inventiveness is largely unmatched in Verdi's output, and its title role is perhaps the most demanding for the tenor in any Italian opera.This volume contains articles describing how Verdi was persuaded to write the opera and extracts from the extended correspondence between Verdi and Boito during the period of composition, as well as a detailed musical commentary and a historical survey of important productions and performers of the principal roles. The guide includes the full libretto with English translation, a discography, a bibliography, and DVD and website guides.Contains:The Moor of Venice, Milan and Sant'Agata, Avril BardoniOtello: Drama and Music, Benedict SarnakerOtello: A Selective Performance History, Hugo ShirleyOtello: Libretto by Arrigo Boito after the play Othello by William ShakespeareOtello: English translation by Avril Bardoni

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.