Volume 29, Number 3 · March 4, 1982
Verdi's Hit Parade
By Joseph Kerman
The Operas of Verdi, Vol. 3: From Don Carlos to Falstaff
by Julian Budden
Oxford University Press, 546 pp., $39.95
This third volume of Julian Budden's monumental work will present no surprises to those who, knowing the earlier volumes, have already recognized The Operas of Verdi as the major scholarly and critical study written to date on this composer. The operas covered in the latest book 'offer no special problems of treatment which have not already been touched upon in the Preface to Volume 2.' What this means is that the basic organization of the first volume—chapters on each of the operas in chronological order discussing their genesis and early stage history, their musical and dramatic content scene by scene and number by number, and (more briefly) their reception by critics and public—has been kept and expanded to reflect the much more copious documentation available for the later works and, of course, their much greater artistic density. Volume 1 covers the seventeen earliest Verdi operas, devoting an average of twenty-five pages to each. Volume 2 gets through only seven, requiring an average of seventy pages for the six important ones from Il Trovatore to La Forza del destino. Volume 3 contains four essays of from 100 to 150 pages long, on Don Carlos, Aïda, Otello, and Falstaff.
Review, 3818 words
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