Twenty years (1880-1900) of indispensable letters between Italy's greatest opera composer and his last, most accomplished librettist. In a lengthy, fully annotated, and excellent introduction to this first English edition of the correspondence between the internationally celebrated Verdi and his much younger collaborator Arrigo Boito (himself a composer of note), Conati, an Italian Verdi scholar, lays out the peculiar geography of their professional relationship and ultimate friendship. The meeting of two fiercely independent spirits began badly in 1863, when Verdi took offense at remarks Boito and his friends had aimed at the ``old guard,'' of whom Verdi was the most prominent figure. Fortunately for the world's music lovers, things went uphill from there, helped along by the publisher Giulio Ricordi, who knew a match made in heaven when he saw it. Verdi, who had previously considered librettists good only for translating into verse dramatic outlines he had already created, learned to work with an equal; Boito was a superb poet, passionately devoted to the renewal of the musical theater, who had to be treated as a peer, not a subordinate. The letters, stuffed with fascinating detail, catch the two titans in the process of creating the revised Simon Boccanegra, then Otello and Falstaff; sections of text, structural and musical ideas, even production concepts fly back and forth between Milan and Sant'Agata. Before the premiere of Falstaff, Boito writes, ``In the costumes of our characters we must avoid the too beautiful, because too beautiful is so rarely associated with the picturesque.'' Verdi, who knew that his wordsmith was a real man of letters rather than a hack, shows warmth and respect; Boito's tone increasingly approaches veneration mixed with delight. The letters are linked by editorial passages to create an intelligible historical narrative. A must-have for every music lover's shelf.
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-226-85304-7
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1994
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
