Ocean State Libraries

Profiles the life and career of the eighteenth century priest turned composer.

This miniseries, filmed in Leningrad, London, Paris, and Verdi's home region of Italy's Po Valley, required more than 100 actors, 18,000 extras, and over 4000 costumes. The program gives a complete overview of Verdi's life and is filled with music from the composer's works sung in the original Italian and taken from past rare recordings featuring such opera artists as Renata Tebaldi, Maria Callas, Luchiano Pavarotti, and Birgit Nilsson.

"Examines the life of nineteenth-century Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi, discussing his childhood, musical training, family tragedies, and professional setbacks and successes. Includes twenty-one related activities."--

"Giuseppe Verdi remains the greatest operatic composer that Italy, the home of opera, has ever produced. Yet throughout his lifetime he claimed to detest composing and repeatedly rejected it. He was a landowner, a farmer, a politician and symbol of Italian independence; but his music tells a different story. An obsessive perfectionist, Verdi drove collaborators to despair but his works lauded from the start as dazzling feats of composition and characterization."...

Antonio Vivaldi's rediscovery after World War II quickly led him from obscurity to his present renown as one of the most popular 18th-century composers. Heller's biography presents the important facets of his life, his works, and his influence on music history. Karl Heller's biography of Antonio Vivaldi, originally published in Germany in 1991 in celebration of the 250th anniversary of the composer's death, presents the most important facets of Vivaldi's...