Description
Book SynopsisGiuseppe Verdi remains the greatest operatic composer that Italy, the home of opera, has ever produced. Yet throughout his lifetime he claimed to detest composing and repeatedly rejected it. He was a landowner, a farmer, a politician and symbol of Italian independence; but his music tells a different story.; An obsessive perfectionist, Verdi drove collaborators to despair but his works were rightly lauded from the start as dazzling feats of composition and characterisation. From Rigoletto to Otello, La Traviatato to Aida, Verdi's canon encompassed the full range of human emotion. His private life was no less complex: he suffered great loss, and went out of his way to antagonise many erstwhile supporters, including his own family. An outspoken advocate of Italian independence and a sharp critic of the church, he was o en at odds with nineteenth-century society and paid the price.; In Verdi: The Man Revealed, John Suchet attempts to get under the skin of perhaps the most private composer who ever lived. Unpicking his protestations, his deliberate embellishments and disingenuous disavowals, Suchet reveals the contradictory and sometimes curmudgeonly character of this great artist, convicted throughout much of his life but ultimately unable to walk away from the art for which he will be forever known.
Table of ContentsContents; 1; Confused Beginnings ...1; 2; A Father and His Daughter ...13; 3; `He Is a Rude, Uncivil Scoundrel' ...21; 4; Intolerable Losses ...33; 5; Another Loss and a Fiasco ...43; 6; `Little By Little the Opera Was Composed' ...51; 7; The Galley Years ...61; 8; `Signor Maestro' ...71; 9; Verdi, Man of Property ...81; 10; Queen Victoria Is Not Amused ...91; 11; `The Hour of Liberation Has Sounded' ...101; 12; Verdi Sets Tongues Wagging ...111; 13; The Opera Is `Repugnant, Immoral, Obscene' ...121; 14; A Rift in the Verdi Family ...131; 15; A Question of Identity ...139; 16; `Without You, I Am a Body Without a Soul' ...147; 17; The Bear of Busseto ...157; 18; Verdi, Gentleman Farmer ...165; 19; `Verdi Is My Tyrant' ...175; 20; A Wedding At Last ...183; 21; A Soprano Impresses Verdi ...193; 22; `I Am an Almost Perfect Wagnerian' ...203; 23; An Opera for Cairo ...213; 24; `The All-Powerful Corruptor of Italian Artistic Taste' ...223; 25; Scandal and Comedy ...233; 26; `One Button More, One Button Less' ...243; Afterword ...255; Notes ...267; Bibliography ...270; Index ...272
