Experiencing Verdi: A Listener's Companion [Hardcover]

Released in 'The Listener's Companion' series,?Experiencing Verdi provides musical amateurs with a thorough introduction to the life and works of one of operas most important composers.?A short survey of pre-Verdian opera is followed by an in-depth discussion of 11 of the composers most important and popular operas in addition to the Requiem. Plot and musical synopses alternate with biographical and historical background as it pertains to each work.?Less-known works are treated sparingly but provide important context for a long career noted for its musical relevance and adaptability. Sanders has written a work whose style and content should appeal to opera aficionados and novices alike.?His ability to impart musical and historical insight in lay terms makes for easy and enjoyable reading.?Even relatively sophisticated topics, such as bel cantoera style and structure, form, and instrumentation, are treated in a clear and comprehensible fashion tailored to informed yet non-expert readers. The book includes a time line of the composers life, a glossary of musical and foreign language terms, notes, and selected reading and listening lists. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates; general readers.No composer wrote more staples of the operatic repertoire than Giuseppe Verdi, whose bicentenary this year is. In what may be the only general-audience book in English that coincides with the occasion, Sanders provides plot and musical synopses of a dozen operas and a musical synopsis of the Manzoni Requiem, all within a chronological pr?cis of the composers life and the greater events, principally the Risorgimento, that affected him. To reach the broadest possible audience, Sanders eschews all written notation of the music and provides a four-page glossary of musical terms, access to which is signaled by printing the terms in boldface when they first appear in the text. Lacking all condescension, Sanders writing couldnt be clearer, with the plotl3