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Unfinished at Puccini's death in 1924, Turandot was not only his most ambitious work, but it became the last Italian opera to enter the international repertory. In this colorful study two renowned music scholars demonstrate that this work, despite the modern climate in which it was written, was a fitting finale for the centuries-old Great Tradition of Italian opera. Here they provide concrete instances of how a listener might encounter the dramatic and musical structures of Turandot in light of the Italian melodramma, and firmly establish Puccini's last work within the tradition of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi. In a summary of the sounds, sights, and symbolism of Turandot, the authors touch on earlier treatments of the subject, outline the conception, birth, and reception of the work, and analyze its coordinated dramatic and musical design. Showing how the evolution of the libretto documents Puccini's reversion to large musical forms typical of the Great Tradition in the late nineteenth century, they give particular attention to his use of contrasting Romantic, modernist, and two kinds of orientalist coloration in the general musical structure. They suggest that Puccini's inability to complete the opera resulted mainly from inadequate dramatic buildup for Turandot's last-minute change of heart combined with an overly successful treatment of the secondary character.

In these essays, Roger Parker brings a series of valuable insights to bear on Verdian analysis and criticism, and does so in a way that responds both to an opera-goer's love of musical drama and to a scholar's concern for recent critical trends. As he writes at one point: \"opera challenges us by means of its brash impurity, its loose ends and excess of meaning, its superfluity of narrative secrets.\" Verdi's works, many of which underwent drastic revisions over the years and which sometimes bore marks of an unusual collaboration between composer and librettist, illustrate in particular why it can sometimes be misleading to assign fixed meanings to an opera. Parker instead explores works likeRigoletto, Il trovatore, La forza del destino, andFalstafffrom a variety of angles, and addresses such contentious topics as the composer's involvement with Italian politics, the possibilities of an \"authentic\" staging of his work, and the advantages and pitfalls of analyzing his operas according to terms that his contemporaries might have understood. Parker takes into account many of the interdisciplinary influences currently engaging musicologists, in particular narrative and feminist theory. But he also demonstrates that close attention to the documentary evidence--especially that offered by autograph scores--can stimulate equal interpretive activity. This book serves as a model of research and critical thinking about opera, while nevertheless retaining a deep respect for opera's continuing power to touch generations of listeners.

Who \"speaks\" to us inThe Sorcerer's Apprentice,in Wagner's operas, in a Mahler symphony? In asking this question, Carolyn Abbate opens nineteenth-century operas and instrumental works to new interpretations as she explores the voices projected by music. The nineteenth-century metaphor of music that \"sings\" is thus reanimated in a new context, and Abbate proposes interpretive strategies that \"de-center\" music criticism, that seek the polyphony and dialogism of music, and that celebrate musical gestures often marginalized by conventional music analysis.

CHICAGO _ The University of Chicago received 56 entries when it decided to pick a new school song. And the winner is ... drumroll please ... the old one. \"We didn't see any song entries that _ well, how can I put it?\" said Philip Gossett, dean of humanities. \"None of them shouted `alma mater.\"' The best 11 songs will be included in a special book for the university's centennial celebration this fall, Gossett said. The prize money will be divided among the writers of those songs, with each getting $227.27.

The University of Chicago received 56 entries when it decided to pick a new school song. And the winner is - drumroll, please - the old one.

Giuseppe Verdi and his operas are so beloved and familiar that many musicians call him \"Papa Verdi.\" He died almost within living memory, in 1901, and we have film of his funeral, with teeming crowds in attendance. \"Tosca's Kiss,\" Daniel Schmid's endearing new documentary, shows that Verdi remains a vivid presence at the Milan rest home for musicians that he founded and considered his \"most beautiful work.\" Even in New York, Verdi is part of our everyday landscape, towering in marble and limestone over Verdi Square north of Lincoln Center. Still, to filch a phrase from another legendary musician, Papa's got a brand new bag. Last weekend, the Caramoor Festival presented \"La Traviata,\" one of Verdi's most familiar operas, in a strikingly unfamiliar guise: uncut and with the rarely performed second verses of many arias dripping with flourishes, in accordance with mid-19th century performance practice. It was part of an entire day devoted to lesser-known aspects of Verdi, and part of larger trends in the musical world that have brought about dramatic changes in how Verdi's music is perceived and performed. As Crutchfield noted, even with this documentary evidence, many degrees of separation remain between Verdi and us. The composer disliked some of the singers, while others were recorded decades after they sang with him. Still, what a revelation to hear basses Edouard de Reszke and Francesco Navarini spinning luscious trills, or to bask in what Crutchfield called the \"affectionate, nuanced, charming\" phrasing of Adelina Patti - an artist for whom the persnickety composer had boundless esteem, but whose singing departs radically from the vigorous, muscular vocalism now thought of as \"Verdi style.\"