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This chapter examines the creation of Giuseppe Verdi's American opera Un ballo in maschera, first performed around the time of Italy's Second War of Independence, in 1859. Un ballo in maschera was the first modern Italian opera set across the Atlantic. The history of its creation and the subsequent debate around it serves as a classic example of the cultural imagination surrounding life in the New World as well as the wider social impact of political ideas in nineteenth-century Italy. The chapter first considers Un ballo's close connection to the Unification of Italy before offering a reading of the opera. It also explores how Verdi depicted America in his opera and how his depiction relates to Italian debates about America at the time. Finally, it assesses the impact of censorship on the plot of Un ballo.

This chapter is a systematic study of the presence of convivial scenes in Verdi’s operas. The chapter begins by showing how Mozart’s Don Giovanni inspired Verdi to create a fully embodied form of musical tragedy. It offers then an in-depth analysis of La traviata as exemplifying the basic functions of food in opera: ritual (including religious meals or fasts), social (establishing or breaking relationships), intimate (exchange of food between two characters, often to establish a romantic relationship), denotative (revealing identity), and medicinal (affecting the mind or body). The chapter presents a systematic examination of convivial gatherings in Verdi’s operas and their meaning in terms of defining relationships and creating or resolving dramatic tension and it offers a reflection on fasting heroes and heroines and a corpulent hero like Sir John Falstaff, building on studies of body image and representation.

This chapter reports that both Hector Berlioz and Giuseppe Verdi were dominant presences in the European obsession with opera in the nineteenth century. An analysis of some complex confluences of Shakespearean history, politics and performance is presented. The chapter then explores in detail the genesis and first performances of Otello. Some of the major recorded interpretations of the role of Otello during the twentieth century are reviewed. It also shows that the performance history of Otello is as contested and complex as the original play upon which Verdi and his team of collaborators drew. Today, the world's opera houses offer only one of many outlets for operatic performances. There are any number of iconic singers whose interpretations of the canonical Shakespearean operas either on recordings or on film deserve wider exposure and further examination beyond the remit of classical music and opera scholars.

Chapter five is dedicated to bass clarinet music grouped in the categories: early reported works; notation practice; a chronological description of works from 1834 to 1860 listed by composer; band music; and music written for the contra bass and contra alto clarinets.

This chapter begins with Giacomo Meyerbeer's Robert le diable (1831) because a single aria from that opera exerted a powerful magnetism for Giuseppe Verdi. It looks at the conjunction between melodic climax and kneeling gesture in Verdi's career. One context for Verdi's kneeling scenes can be found in Enrico delle Sedie's 1885 treatise on operatic acting, the Estetica del canto e dell'arte melodrammatica. Given the kneeling gesture's roots in the lexicon of mélodrame, it is hardly surprising that a very similar pose appears in Verdi's own grand opera—although the scene for a kneeling soprano in Don Carlos (1867) is far less static and less semiotically transparent than the stock situations of mélodrame. Verdi's near-erasure of pulse and emphasis on consummation in the afterlife in both the Don Carlos and Aida (1871) duets leave behind early nineteenth-century aesthetics of sensibility, to move both toward a more “transcendent” musical style and toward a dramatic mode in which the body (and especially the female body) is more symbolic than concrete.

Julian Medford Budden (1924–2007), a Fellow of the British Academy, was the finest scholar of nineteenth-century Italian opera of his generation. He will be remembered for his achievements as a producer at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), for his broadcasts and reviews, and above all for his books on Giuseppe Verdi and Giacomo Puccini. Indeed, his passing leaves a huge gap in the field of opera studies. Budden was born in Hoylake, near Liverpool, on April 9, 1924, the only child of Lionel Budden and Maud Budden. In 1951 he started at the BBC, where he remained for his entire working life. Budden's first post was as a clerk and script editor; he then rose through the ranks to become a producer, Chief Producer of Opera, and finally External Services Music Organizer. Two aspects of Budden's background were likely to have been fundamental to his scholarly achievement: his exposure to Classics at Oxford University and his career in BBC Radio.

This chapter revisits the politics of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida by exploring the media ecology that underpinned early stagings of the opera in Cairo (1871) and Milan (1872). By attending to the technologies that constituted Aida’s production and reception networks, and to the aesthetic stances nurtured by some of these media, the chapter suggests that the opera’s politics cannot be fully captured if examined through the prism of Orientalism alone. A concern with temporality underlay Aida’s history from inception to performance and beyond: from Verdi’s plans to premiere it near-simultaneously in Egypt and in Europe, to repeated blurring of the dates of its premieres, to “instantaneous” telegrams that conjured socio-operatic connectivities both old and new. When in 1873–74 the composer advocated that Aida be produced contemporaneously in multiple theaters, Italians’ temporal experience had been going through a process of gradual standardization, which was making distant simultaneity not only conceivable in abstract, scientific terms, but also perceivable. The chapter, which begins by evoking telegraphy as a set of figurative possibilities that might have informed Verdi’s aesthetics, therefore ends by suggesting that late-nineteenth-century operatic stagings fed—or aspired to feed—back into the larger technological and political endeavors of the time.

This chapter focuses on Giuseppe Verdi's operas Rigoletto, Il trovatore, and La traviata. These works are among the earliest operas by any composer to have retained a place in the repertory since the moment of their arrival. It questions the tendency to group the three works together and highlights the similarities and differences among them.

Giuseppe Verdi wrote operas. He did not add music to plays full of superficial philosophy or bogus psychology. Verdi carried on his drama by means of lyric song. His orchestra, it is true, has a wonderful sonority, but it is the voice on which he counts to elucidate the situation. Verdi realised that song can carry on a plot in a way which words alone can never do. A good example of this comes from the last Act of the Verdi opera, Rigoletto. This chapter also discusses Verdi's Requiem, which is a heap of contradictions. It gives the strongest proofs that there are no canons of art. Any right-minded musician who only knew the Requiem from description would certainly condemn it. Verdi frankly makes frequent use of such well-worn aids to excitement as the diminished seventh and the chromatic scale.

This chapter examines the dynamics of race and race relations in Giuseppe Verdi's Aida in the context of nationalism in nineteenth-century Egypt. The world premiere of Aida took place at the Cairo Opera House on December 24, 1871. However, there seems to be little information available on the opera's Cairo production, particularly with regards to Egyptian reaction to this first performance. Focusing on its Cairo premiere, this chapter analyzes Aida's libretto and music in order to elucidate the workings of racial difference as it lies on the surface of the opera. It suggests that, for Egyptians, Aida may have spoken to a sense of emergent Egyptian identity. It also reveals Aida's racial dynamics by linking it to discourses of light-skinned Egyptian superiority and dark-skinned African inferiority. Furthermore, the relationships between characters in the opera highlight the specificities of Egypt's relations with its racial-national Others, implying a larger project of Egyptian identity formation through “racial fabrication.”

Verdi’s compositional influence and emphatic involvement in promoting his operas in Paris make him an important force, with an operatic oeuvre that includes works that can be labeled “French” because of his use of French literary sources and musical forms. During his career, Verdi’s use of coloratura changed greatly, but key examples are still found in his middle-period operas, in Rigoletto, La traviata, and Les Vêpres siciliennes. This chapter examines how these moments of coloratura signify much more than their apparently straightforward melismatic text treatment might suggest. Arias such as “Caro nome” employ coloratura to suggest a dramatic subtext, uncovering the inner psychological voice of the character. Close readings of these arias suggest that Verdi’s use of coloratura serves as an omen, foreshadowing tragedy for the character singing. With these mid-century examples, we see that Verdi as a modern composer in a sense writes coloratura out of Italian opera.

This chapter examines Giuseppe Verdi's opera Falstaff. It suggests that one of the notable aspects of Verdi's late compositional practice is that there emerged important discontinuities, both with his previous methods and, arguably, within the works themselves. It evaluates Verdi's work in relation to Theodor W. Adorno's discussion and criticism on Richard Wagner's works. It also discusses the moral lessons in the different chapters of Falstaff.

This chapter considers European opera after Rossini and the waning presence of Turkish figures and themes in nineteenth-century opera. Ottoman reform under Mahmud II and Abdülmecid I (including the reform of Ottoman music, led by “Donizetti Pasha,” the brother of the famous composer), brought about some cultural convergence with Europe. At the same time the modern Eastern Question transformed European-Ottoman relations into an unoperatic calculus of the balance of power, and introduced modern European colonialism in the Ottoman lands, beginning with the French seizure of Algeria in 1830. The presence of the singing Turk in the operatic repertory became less and less viable, as was notably apparent in the cases of Verdi’s I Lombardi and Il Corsaro in the 1840s. The chapter concludes by observing subliminal traces of Turkishness in the modern operatic repertory without Turks and the lingering presence of Turkishness in ballet and operetta.

This chapter places Monteverdi, the dramatist, within the context of the history of opera, as initiator of and participant in the grand tradition that links him with such figures as Handel and Mozart, and especially his co-nazionale—and near namesake—at the other end of that tradition, Giuseppe Verdi. Although the modern Monteverdi revival came long after his death, Verdi, by the example of his last operas, may have prepared the way for that new appreciation, reaffirming the dramatic power of music which his Venetian predecessor had first demonstrated over three centuries earlier.

This chapter explores representations of blackness in opera in relation to masculinity and morality. More specifically, it considers the changing codes of masculinity in leading male roles and how they are calibrated differently for white European characters and nonwhite characters with non-European ancestry. It also looks at the ways in which masculinity and heroism are brought together differently for black and non-black characters. In order to elucidate these issues, the chapter analyzes Giuseppe Verdi's Otello (1887), focusing on its references to getting the “chocolate” ready and the way Verdi dramatizes Otello's vicious murder of Desdemona. Four other operas written in the first half of the twentieth century, two of which feature white European title characters and the other two feature African American protagonists, are examined: Alban Berg's Wozzeck (1925), Ernst Krenek's Jonny spielt auf (1927), George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1935), and Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes (1945).

This chapter examines the history of French opera during the Second Empire. It suggests that some of the most significant figures in Second Empire opera were Léon Carvalho and his counterpart at the Opéra-Comique, Émile Perrin. The chapter highlights the emergence of French operetta and describes some of the works during this period, including those of Giuseppe Verdi, Victor Massé, and Charles Gounod.

This chapter focuses on Maria Callas's prodigious weight loss of nearly 80 pounds preceding her legendary interpretation of the consumptive heroine in Luchino Visconti’s production of Verdi’s Traviata. The chapter reconstructs facts and legends surrounding Maria Callas's relationship with food, including her favorite recipes and her famous slim diet, showing how her body became a battleground between traditional and progressive values about the public regulation of food consumption and body image. Both the Callas recipes and the Callas diet are gastronomic signs, carefully chosen, staged, and transmitted to convey meaning and define her persona in terms of class, gender, and ethnicity. Ultimately, the Callas diet represents an epochal shift in opera culture from separation to conflation of the dramatis persona and the singer’s persona.

When Friedrich Nietzsche turned against Richard Wagner, one of his complaints was that Wagner was an incorrigible “man of the theater,” “the most enthusiastic mimomaniac” who ever existed. With this, Nietzsche was pointing (among other things) to Wagner's continuing attachment to an earlier model of gesture and stage movement, to the composer's affection for extended pantomime scenes and to his frequent reliance on small-scale coordination between music and gesture, both of which betray a hidden debt to the aesthetics of melodrama. One surprising result of retracing nineteenth-century operatic history in relation to gesture and gestural music is to unsettle the traditional opposition between Wagner and Giuseppe Verdi, and to highlight the debt to French drama and to grand opera shared by these supposed antipodes of nineteenth-century operatic style. The bodies animated and transformed by the kinds of musical effects discussed here do not only belong to women; “mimomania” can confer authority equally on male and female characters. The appeal of this inquiry into opera's bodies is tightly entwined with the representation of gender.

This chapter focuses on the creation of spaces which brought a new political aesthetics—the European political aesthetics. Strikingly different from Muslim patriotism, images of Ismail Pasha as a sovereign ruler were created according to western European styles of representation. This representation system was a tool to fabricate the sovereign image of the khedive, to obscure his Ottomanness. The government production of a history of “independence” started at this moment with the instrumentalization of European art. The chapter then looks at the life of Paul Draneht Bey, who helped to fabricate this “internal Europe” and directed the theaters between 1869 and 1878. It concludes with an exploration of the “portrait of the pasha” and the main product of early khedivial culture: Giuseppe Verdi's opera, Aida (1871).