In this third edition of the classic Verdi, renowned authority Julian Budden offers a comprehensive overview of Verdi the man and the artist, tracing his ascent from humble beginnings to the status of a cultural patriarch of the new Italy, whose cause he had done much to promote, and demonstrating the gradual enlargement over the years of his artistic vision. This concise study is an accessible, insightful, and engaging summation of Verdi scholarship, acquainting the non-specialist with the personal details Verdi's life, with the operatic world in which he worked, and with his political ideas, his intellectual vision, and his powerful means of communicating them through his music. In his survey of the music itself, Budden emphasizes the unique character of each work as well as the developing sophistication of Verdi's style. He covers all of the operas, the late religious works, the songs, and the string quartet. A glossary explains even the most obscure operatic terms current in Verdi's time.

In this third edition of the classic Verdi, renowned authority Julian Budden offers a comprehensive overview of Verdi the man and the artist, tracing his ascent from humble beginnings to the status of a cultural patriarch of the new Italy, whose cause he had done much to promote, and demonstrating the gradual enlargement over the years of his artistic vision. This concise study is an accessible, insightful, and engaging summation of Verdi scholarship, acquainting the non-specialist with the personal details Verdi's life, with the operatic world in which he worked, and with his political ideas, his intellectual vision, and his powerful means of communicating them through his music. In his survey of the music itself, Budden emphasizes the unique character of each work as well as the developing sophistication of Verdi's style. He covers all of the operas, the late religious works, the songs, and the string quartet. A glossary explains even the most obscure operatic terms current in Verdi's time.

Julian Budden, one of the world's foremost scholars of Italian opera and author of a monumental three-volume study of Verdi's works, now offers music lovers a major new biography of one of the giants of Italian opera, Giacomo Puccini.
Blending astute musical analysis with a colorful account of Puccini's life, here is an illuminating look at some of the most popular operas in the repertoire, including Manon Lescaut, La Boheme, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, and Turandot. Budden provides an illuminating look at the process of putting an opera together, the cut-and-slash of nineteenth-century Italian opera--the struggle to find the right performers for the debut of La Boheme, Puccini's anxiety about completing Turandot (he in fact died of cancer before he did so), his animosity toward his rival Leoncavallo (whom he called Leonasino or "lion-ass"). Budden provides an informative analysis of the operas themselves, examining the music act by act. He highlights, among other things, the influence of Wagner on Puccini--alone among his Italian contemporaries, Puccini followed Wagner's example in bringing the motif into the forefront of his narrative, sometimes voicing the singer's unexpressed thoughts, sometimes sending out a signal to the audience of which the character is unaware. And Budden also paints an intriguing portrait of Puccini the man--talented but modest, a man who had friends from every walk of life: shopkeepers, priests, wealthy landowners, fellow artists. Affable, well mannered, gifted with a broad sense of fun, he rarely failed to charm all who met him.
A new volume in the esteemed Master Musicians series, Puccini offers a masterful portrait of this beloved Italian composer.

This is a revised and updated edition of Julian Budden's monumental survey of the operas of Giuseppe Verdi. Hailed on publication for its extraordinary comprehensibility, it examines each of the operas in detail, giving a full account of its dramatic and historical origins and a critical evaluation. The text is supported by a wealth of musical illustrations.

Volume 2 covers those works written during the decadence of the post-Rossini period. During this time, Verdi, having exhausted the vein of simple lyricism to be found in Il Trovatore and La Traviata, achieved self-renewal in direct confrontation with the masters of the Paris Opera with his Les Vêpres Siciliennes. A new scale and variety of musical thought can be sensed in the Italian operas that follow, culminating in La Forza del Destino.

This is the third volume of Julian Budden's monumental three-volume survey of the operas of Verdi. Hailed on publication for its extraordinary comprehensibility, the set has become the classic reference work on its subject. For this new edition the author has made a host of corrections throughout, and updated the text in the light of recent scholarship. Volume 3 covers roughly a quarter of a century, a period which saw grand opera on the Parisian model established throughout Italy, the reform of the Conservatories, and the spread of cosmopolitan influences to an extent that convinced many that Italian music was losing its identity. Verdi produced his four last and greatest operas - Don Carlos, Aida, Otello, and Falstaff - in this period, which ended with the advent of `verisimo', in which a new, recognizably Italian idiom was inaugurated. This volume also includes a new and substantial bibliography by Roger Parker.