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VERDI'S SHAKESPEARE

Name: VERDI'S SHAKESPEARE
Author: Garry Wills
ISBN: 978-0-670-02304-2

MEN OF THE THEATER

by Garry Wills ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 17, 2011

While the book has an enormous amount to teach devotees of either Shakespeare or Verdi, opera fans in particular will enjoy...

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One genius interprets another: English to Italian, words to lyrics, immortal drama to overpowering opera.

In his latest, Wills (History/Northwestern Univ.; Outside Looking In: Adventures of an Observer, 2010, etc.) proves once again that he isn’t just a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, full-time public intellectual and Catholic apologist who is fluent in Greek and Latin. In examining how the Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901) turned three Shakespeare plays into classics of his own, the authors demonstrates how an adaptation can both analyze and interpret its source of inspiration. Wills finds that these two creative dynamos, separated by two centuries, had much in common; both were as productive as they were pragmatic, each tailoring their work to the actors or singers who were available. Although Verdi could not speak English, he perfectly grasped Shakespeare’s complexities. The duets of Macbeth underscore the intent of the devious and deviant Lord and Lady: “[Macbeth] and his wife talk past each other, not to each other, hiding from each other, and each hiding from him- or herself. It is all there in the music.” With Otello, Verdi and his librettist Arrigo Boito turned a fiercely pessimistic play into a nihilistic one, in which Iago sees himself as the devoted servant of a cruel God. With Falstaff, he created virtually a new play, piecing together the larger-than-life character from the Shakespeare’s history plays and his lesser comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor. Just as Verdi “gave cosmic reach to Otello’s music,” writes the author, “he turns Falstaff into a force of nature, an earth-daimon.” Wills isn’t afraid to plumb the subterranean depths and the delicate infrastructure of these works.

While the book has an enormous amount to teach devotees of either Shakespeare or Verdi, opera fans in particular will enjoy the author’s close and illuminating attention to backstage history, as well as words, music and phrasing.

Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-670-02304-2

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
WHAT THE QUR'AN MEANT
by Garry Wills

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FUTURE OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH WITH POPE FRANCIS
by Garry Wills

- BOOK REVIEW
WHY PRIESTS?
by Garry Wills

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THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE

50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

by William Strunk & E.B. White ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1972

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...

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Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").

Pub Date: May 15, 1972

ISBN: 0205632645

Page Count: 105

Publisher: Macmillan

Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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IN MY PLACE

by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992

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From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)