Seven Verdi Librettos

by Giuseppe Verdi, William Weaver (Translator)

Verdi, like most great opera composers, attached supreme importance to the words he was setting to music. The listener, to understand the opera fully, should understand the situations, the shades of emotion, the nuances of characterization described in the music. William Weaver's translations of seven of the greatest Verdi operas are designed for maximum fidelity to the immediate word. Eschewing artistic renderings, Mr. Weaver offers, on facing pages, exact translations and the corresponding Italian text. The operas chosen for this edition represent Verdi's major achievements in each of the significant periods of his creative the first trio of masterpieces, Rigoletto , Il Trovatore , and La Traviata ; Un ballo in maschera and Aida from the middle period; Otello and Falstaff , the great late works. The music student as well as the opera buff will find this volume a very useful guide to Verdi's world.

533 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1975

About the author

Fullest artistic form of operas of Giuseppe Verdi, Italian composer, included La Traviata in 1853, Aïda in 1871, and Otello in 1887; people credit him with raising the genre.

Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi, mainly a Romantic, most influenced the 19th century. Houses frequently perform his works throughout the world, and some themes transcended the boundaries of the genre and long took root in popular culture:
* "La donna è mobile" from Rigoletto
* "Va, pensiero" (The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves) from Nabucco , and
* "Libiamo ne' lieti calici" (The Drinking Song).

Masterworks of Giuseppe Verdi used a generally diatonic rather than a chromatic musical idiom, and people sometimes criticized tendency toward melodrama, which dominates the standard repertoire a century and a half.