Verdi at 200: Recent Scholarship on the Composer and His Works

The 100th anniversary of Verdi’s death, observed in 2001, inspired nearly a dozen academic conferences. At the dawn of his 2013 bicentennial, a celebratory year shared with Richard Wagner, hundreds of recent studies assess Verdi’s life, his works, and his impact. The present article surveys a selection of books and articles published between these two commemorations. A popular topic is Verdi’s role as a national icon, the calculated product of Italy’s search for a postunification identity. His engagement with foreign cultures has also received attention, for his German literary sources, his forays into French grand opera, and his use of exotic settings. Recent studies of Verdi’s operas often focus on the testing of boundaries, whether between genres, genders, or psychological states. While musical analyses still engage with operatic convention, they also examine other features, such as melody, meter, and tempo. Visual aspects of performance (set design, lighting, staging), considered separately in some studies and as a unified concept in others, constitute a newer area of scholarly interest

Revising Cio-Cio-San

Some of the mast extensive and significant textual changes in all of Puccini\u27s operas appear in the published revisions of Madama Butterfly. Many of these verbal modifications, together with cuts and additions to the score, influence the dramatic depiction of the protagonists. Changes to Pinkerton\u27s character soften an insensitive and even offensive figure who, after all, needs to be convincing as the object of Butterfly\u27s love. For Cio-Cio-San, three rounds of revision mean a gradual loss of complexity on any fronts, bringing an exotic, mercurial heroine closer to operatic convention. The Butterfly that we know today has a more Westernized outlook than her original incarnation, and fewer distractions compete for her-- and our--attention. But revision is not always synonymous with unqualified improvement, and opera\u27s multifaceted nature ensures that even the simplest modifications sometimes have wide-ranging consequences. While transforming Cio-Cio-San\u27s character may not have been Puccini\u27s goal in every instance of revision that affects her, the changes are nonetheless apparent, and their cumulative result may have exceeded expectation

Otello

Verdi\u27s penultimate opera represents his first new work for the stage after a nearly sixteen-year hiatus. As battles raged over the future of Italian opera-whether it should remain rooted in song or follow foreign trends that assign a greater role to the orchestra-Giulio Ricordi and Boito patiently lured Verdi back into the fray. Boito\u27s libretto, an ingenious and at times eccentric adaptation of Shakespeare\u27s Othello, inspired the composer to a highly personal fusion of tradition and innovation. At its premiere Otello was widely hailed as a masterpiece, an emphatic and fundamentally Italian answer to the debate over music and drama. Although it remains both admired and respected, Otello tends not to be performed frequently, owing to the difficulty of casting its vocally demanding title role

The Verdi Forum

The peer-reviewed journal of the AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR VERDI STUDIES (AIVS). Early issues, first titled A/VS Newsletter (1976) and later Verdi Newsletter (1977-98), were edited by the AIVS\u27s director, Martin CHUSID. They featured scholarly articles, essays of more general interest, and news items about performances, recordings, and conferences. While Nos. l-7 were issued semi-annually, beginning with No. 8 (1980) the Verdi Newsletter became an annual publication. Nos. 7 (1979), 9-ro (1981-82), and 17-18 (1989-90), collectively titled \u27The Verdi Archive at New York University,\u27 document the history and holdings of the AIVS Archive at that time

Scapigliatura

An artistic movement founded in the 1860s by Arrigo Boito, Emilio Praga, and other young Italians seeking to revitalize culture by rejecting middle-class values

Unni e i Romani, Gli

A censored version of Attila first performed at Palermo\u27s Teatro Carolino in 1854

The Verdi Archive at New York University: A LIst of Verdi\u27s Music

A catalog of scores and parts (mostly on microfilm, with some hard copy) for the compositions of Giuseppe Verdi in the collection of the American Institute for Verdi Studies at New York University

Real Americans Mean Much More: Race, Ethnicity, and Authenticity in Belasco\u27s Girl of the Golden West and Puccini\u27s La Fanciulla Del West

Conceived by Belasco and filtered through Puccini, the characters in La fanciulla del West exhibit a diversity that is unusual even for an opera with an exotic setting: Mexicans, Australians, and European-Americans of various backgrounds reinvent themselves in a new land of seemingly endless possibilities, while the area\u27s native inhabitants struggle to survive. California\u27s multi-cultural population as understood by Belasco, by his Broadway audience, and by Puccini and his operatic audience create compound layers of difference that both focus and obscure the racial and ethnic hierarchies that played out in the 1840s and 50s. This article will begin to untangle these relationships by examining the experiences of three racial or ethnic groups in the historical Gold Rush, as well as their representations in the fictional Gold Rushes of both Belasco and Puccini. It will also consider the unique status of La fanciulla del West, an opera whose setting is simultaneously exotic to its composer and familiar to a large segment of its audience, and will conclude by considering how Americans\u27 heightened sensitivity to questions of authenticity in this work relates to issues of racial and ethnic representation in other operas