Volume 30, Number 5 · March 31, 1983
Making a Comeback
By Philip Gossett
Donizetti and His Operas
by William Ashbrook
Cambridge University Press, 744 pp., $37.50
Nineteenth-century Italian opera was long considered intellectually disreputable. Melodramatic plots, banal tunes over oom-pah-pah accompaniments, sopranos warbling in thirds with a flute, tenors bellowing high C's: all show and no substance. Several works by Verdi remained in the repertory, but cognoscenti admired unequivocally his last two operas alone, Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893). Joseph Kerman's influential book of the 1950s reflecting these attitudes bore the Wagnerian title: Opera as Drama.[1]
Review, 5090 words
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