Includes bibliographical references (pages 267-271) and index.
Contents:
Confused beginnings -- A father and his daughter -- "He is a rude, uncivil scoundrel" -- Intolerable losses -- Another loss and a fiasco -- "Little by little the opera was composed" -- The galley years -- "Signore Maestro" -- Verdi, man of property -- Queen Victoria is not amused -- "The hour of liberation has sounded" -- Verdi sets tongues wagging -- The opera is "repugnant, immortal, obscene" -- A rift in the Verdi family -- A question of identity -- "Without you, I am a body without a soul" -- The Bear of Busseto -- Verdi, gentleman farmer -- "Verdi is my tyrant" -- A wedding at last -- A soprano impresses Verdi -- "I am an almost perfect Wagnerian" -- An opera for Cairo -- "The all-powerful corruptor of Italian artistic taste" -- Scandal and comedy -- "One button more, one button less".
Summary:
Giuseppe 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 lauded from the start as dazzling feats of composition and characterization.
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