Verdi

Giuseppe Verdi's twenty-six operas remain some of the most widely performed music in the world. Titles such as Rigoletto, Il trovatore, La traviata and Aida show how he shaped the sound of Romantic opera, and audiences on every continent still respond to them.

Verdi was born in 1813 in a village outside Parma, the son of a little-known innkeeper. Musical gifts showed up early: by nine he was serving as organist at his village church. After the Milan conservatory turned him away, he trained on his own and quickly had an opera staged at La Scala. Nabucco brought him fame across Italy, and Ernani made him a name across Europe. At the peak of that success came Il trovatore, which was the most popular opera worldwide for much of the 1850s. His private life had its sorrows and scandals as well. He lost his young wife and two children to illness within three years, and later lived for a decade with the singer Giuseppina Strepponi, a arrangement that shocked provincial society before the couple married.

Julian Budden's study first follows Verdi's life, then offers detailed discussion of each opera. The book closes with a chronology, a list of works, a who's who of people in Verdi's world, and a select bibliography. It also includes a glossary of nineteenth-century operatic terms such as "cabaletta" and "cavatina", words that appear often in writing about opera but are rarely explained with precision.