Con moltissima passione. Ritratto di Giuseppe Verdi

Verdi’s personality, career and output are investigated in a comprehensive recognition which aims to avoid the traditional life & works approach. Verdi’s biography is scrutinized through a geographical rather than the typical chronological approach, analyzing the composer’s presence and activity in the most significant towns of his life (Milan, Paris, Venice, Rome, Naples, Genoa), describing the social and cultural environment which ultimately affected him as a man and an artist, resulting in his cultural formation and stylistic development. Verdi’s professional life, his approach to the opera industry, his relationship to opera houses, patrons, singers, librettists, censors, musicians, critics, audiences, authorities and friends are discussed in the context of contemporary politics through nine decades moving from Restoration to Italy’s Unity through Risorgimento, taking into account the composer’s active participation and the creation of the myth of Verdi as a father of the country’s liberty. Taking advantage of the most advanced research of the last decades, Verdi’s output is comprehensively discussed in its dramatic models, its strategies, its characters and ideology. Specific focus is devoted to the development from the original project to the final libretto and the staging of the opera, the dependence from European modern literature (a major concern and leading idea of the book), the composer’s personal interpretation of Romantic esthetics. Verdi’s works, including sacred and instrumental works from the composer’s youth and maturity, are also considered in their stylistic development from Rossini’s and Donizetti’s models to the final Falstaff. A final chapter is devoted to Verdi’s myth in the 19th and 20th centuries. The book is completed by several indexes, a chronology, a catalogue and a comprehensive bibliography.