Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi was an Italian composer best known for his operas. He was born near Busseto to a provincial family of moderate means, receiving a musical education with the help of a local patron, Antonio Barezzi. Verdi came to dominate the Italian opera scene after the era of Gioachino Rossini, Vincenzo Bellini, and Gaetano Donizetti, whose works significantly influenced him.
Falstaff is a comic opera in three acts by the Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi. The Italian-language libretto was adapted by Arrigo Boito from the play The Merry Wives of Windsor and scenes from Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2, by William Shakespeare. The work premiered on 9 February 1893 at La Scala, Milan.
La Scala is a historic opera house in Milan, Italy. The theatre was inaugurated on 3 August 1778 and was originally known as il Nuovo Regio Ducale Teatro alla Scala. The premiere performance was Antonio Salieri's Europa riconosciuta.
Otello is an opera in four acts by Giuseppe Verdi to an Italian libretto by Arrigo Boito, based on Shakespeare's play Othello. It was Verdi's penultimate opera, first performed at the Teatro alla Scala, Milan, on 5 February 1887.
Arrigo Boito was an Italian librettist, composer, poet and critic whose only completed opera was Mefistofele. Among the operas for which he wrote the libretti are Giuseppe Verdi's monumental last two operas Otello and Falstaff as well as Amilcare Ponchielli's La Gioconda.
Simon Boccanegra is an opera with a prologue and three acts by Giuseppe Verdi to an Italian libretto by Francesco Maria Piave, based on the play Simón Bocanegra (1843) by Antonio García Gutiérrez, whose play El trovador had been the basis for Verdi's 1853 opera, Il trovatore.
Clelia Maria Giuseppa (Giuseppina) Strepponi was a nineteenth-century Italian operatic soprano of great renown and the second wife of composer Giuseppe Verdi.
Giulio Ricordi was an Italian editor and musician who joined the family firm, the Casa Ricordi music publishing house, in 1863, then run by his father, Tito, the son of the company's founder Giovanni Ricordi. Upon his father's death in 1888, Giulio became the head of the company until his death.
Francesco (Franco) Antonio Faccio was an Italian composer and conductor. Born in Verona, he studied music at the Milan Conservatory from 1855 where he was a pupil of Stefano Ronchetti-Monteviti and, as scholar William Ashbrook notes, "where he struck up a lifelong friendship with Arrigo Boito, two years his junior" and with whom he was to collaborate in many ways.
Daniela Dessì was an Italian operatic soprano.
Amleto is an Italian opera in four acts by Franco Faccio set to a libretto by Arrigo Boito, based on Shakespeare's play Hamlet. It premiered on 30 May 1865 at the Teatro Carlo Felice in Genoa and was revised for a La Scala production given on 12 February 1871.
Herva Nelli was an Italian and American operatic soprano.
Romilda Pantaleoni was an Italian dramatic soprano who had a prolific opera career in Italy during the 1870s and 1880s. She sang a wide repertoire that encompassed bel canto roles, Italian and French grand opera, verismo operas, and the German operas of Richard Wagner. She became particularly associated with the roles of Margherita in Boito's Mefistofele and the title role in Ponchielli's La Gioconda; two roles which she performed in opera houses throughout Italy. She is best remembered today for originating the roles of Desdemona in Giuseppe Verdi's Otello (1887) and Tigrana in Giacomo Puccini's Edgar (1889). Universally admired for her acting skills as well as her singing abilities, Pantaleoni was compared by several critics to the great Italian stage actress Eleonora Duse.
Teresa Stolz was a Czech spinto soprano, for long a resident in Italy, who was associated with significant performances of the works of Giuseppe Verdi, some with his supervision including Aida in the first performance in Italy, and the soprano part in his Requiem. She was his companion from 1897.
The Casa di Riposo per Musicisti is a home for retired opera singers and musicians in Milan, northern Italy, founded by the Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi in 1896. The building was designed in the neo-Gothic style by Italian architect, Camillo Boito. Both Verdi and his wife, Giuseppina Strepponi are buried there. A documentary film about life in the Casa di Riposo, Il Bacio di Tosca, was made in 1984 by the Swiss director Daniel Schmid.
Iva Pacetti was an Italian operatic dramatic soprano who had an active international career from 1920 to 1947. Trained in Florence and Milan, she made her professional opera debut in her native city at the age of 21 as the title heroine in Giuseppe Verdi's Aida at the Teatro Metastasio. She reprised the role the following year at Loew's Lexington Theatre in New York City. In 1922 she had a triumphant success at the Teatro Carlo Felice as Elena in Arrigo Boito's Mefistofele. Engagements with other important opera houses soon followed, including La Scala, the Teatro Costanzi, the Teatro di San Carlo, the Opéra de Monte-Carlo, the Chicago Civic Opera, the Teatro Colón, the Teatro Municipal in Rio de Janeiro, and the Theatro Municipal in São Paulo. From 1930 to 1933 she was committed to the Royal Opera House in London, portraying such roles as Desdemona in Otello, Leonora in La forza del destino, and the title role in Tosca. The latter years of her career were spent performing primarily at La Scala where she was a frequent partner of Beniamino Gigli. She retired from the stage in 1947, after which she was active as a voice teacher in Milan.
Frances Ginsberg was an American opera singer. Opera News magazine described her as "a lirico-spinto soprano of striking temperament whose vivid style made her an audience favorite at New York City Opera and other U.S. companies in the 1980s and 1990s."
The Life of Verdi is a 1982 Italian-language biographical television miniseries directed by Renato Castellani dramatizing the life of Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi. Castellani also co-wrote the original script with Leonardo Benvenuti and Piero De Bernardi. The English version was written by Gene Luotto and narrated by Burt Lancaster. The miniseries first aired in 1982, and was made available on DVD in 2003.
Inno delle nazioni, a cantata in a single movement, is one of only two secular choral works composed by Giuseppe Verdi. This Hymn incorporates "God Save the King", "La Marseillaise", and "Il Canto degli Italiani". It was the first collaboration between the composer and Arrigo Boito, who, much later, would revise the libretto of Simon Boccanegra and write the original libretti of Otello and Falstaff.
Carmen Bonaplata-Bau (1871–1911) was a Spanish operatic soprano who made her début at the Teatro Dal Verme in Milan in 1886 in the title role of Verdi's Aida. From 1892, she appeared on several occasions at La Scala but also sang in New York (1896), Buenos Aires (1897) and in her native Barcelona (1902). She frequently performed the role of Aida until her retirement from the stage in 1904.
