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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.

Giuseppe Verdi's \"Stiffelio,\" which was presented by Washington Concert Opera at the Kennedy Center on Tuesday night, has an unusual history. A gloomy meditation on sex, adultery and moral confusion, \"Stiffelio\" was immediately censored at the time of its premiere in 1850. The composer protested the suppression for a while and then, nothing if not pragmatic, he incorporated part of the score into his opera \"Aroldo,\" shelved the rest, and did his best to destroy all copies of the original manuscript. It wasn't until 1960 that a complete score of \"Stiffelio\" was discovered, and the opera received its modern premiere eight years later; in 1993 it entered the repertory of the Metropolitan Opera with tenor Placido Domingo in the title role. To this taste, \"Stiffelio\" represents a sort of Verdi-in- chrysalis. Much of the music is strong and stirring, and the libretto is no more implausible than those that support the action of \"Rigoletto,\" \"Il Trovatore\" and \"La Traviata,\" masterpieces all. Throughout, one finds suggestions of that mixture of formal proportion, dramatic vector and melodic richness that made Verdi the most successful composer of Italian opera in the second half of the 19th century (indeed, the soprano aria that begins Act II has some of the excruciating vulnerability that Verdi would explore with such unprecedented tenderness in the character of Desdemona more than 35 years later).

Performed in a critical edition that incorporated newly discovered parts of the autograph manuscript, \"Stiffelio\" was revealed as a realistic human drama about an evangelical minister in mid-19th-century Austria, facing a spiritual crisis after his wife's infidelity. First performed in 1857, that opera, \"Aroldo,\" was not much more successful.