11. VERDI’S GRIP
189
“Nobody comes to Verdi”:
Mark Lamos, quoted in Matthew Gurewitsch, “Poking Holes in Verdi to Let Audiences In,”
The New York Times,
March 4, 2001.
190
“What if it is entirely
your
fault”:
E.TA. Hoffmann, “Beethoven’s Instrumental Music,” in
E. T A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings: “Kreisleriana,” “The Poet and the Composer,” Music Criticism,
ed. David Charlton, trans. Martyn Clarke (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 98.
190
“The box office is the proper”:
John Rosselli,
The Life of Verdi
(Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 2.
190
“You have to be wall-eyed”:
Giuseppe Verdi and Arrigo Boito,
The Verdi-Boito Correspondence,
ed. Marcello Conati and Mario Medici, trans. William Weaver (University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. xxi.
190
“in your work you think”
: Robert Spaethling, trans. and ed.,
Mozart’s Letters, Mozart’s Life
:
Selected Letters
(Norton, 2000), p. 221.
191
As Mary Jane Phillips-Matz recounts
: Mary Jane Phillips-Matz,
Verdi: A Biography
(Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 54-73.
191
“The dominant mood”:
Rosselli,
The Life of Verdi,
p. 41.
192
he was, in fact, criticized
: Roger Parker,
Leonora’s Last Act
:
Essays in Verdian Discourse
(Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 35-36.
193
“that cheap, low, sentimental melodrama”:
Leonard Bernstein,
The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard
(Harvard University Press, 1976), pp. 411—17.
194
“A fine civilization we have
”: Marcello Conati, ed.,
Encounters with Verdi,
trans. Richard Stokes (Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 351.
195
“USE FEW WORDS”:
Phillips-Matz,
Verdi,
p. 195.
195
vocal babbling:
Julian Budden,
The Operas of Verdi,
vol. 2,
From “Il trovatore” to “La forza del destino,”
rev. ed. (Clarendon, 1992), p. 147.
195
“Tadolini is a fine figure”:
Rosselli,
The Life of Verdi,
p. 51.
197
“a dark-haired, impeccably gowned”
: Peter G. Davis, “Brangelina Sings!”
New York,
March 6, 2006, p. 70.
198
“If I have to think” and other quotations:
Gurewitsch, “Poking Holes in Verdi to Let Audiences In.”
199
A 2008 staging in Erfurt
: Harry de Quetteville, “German Staging of Verdi’s A Masked Ball on 9/11 with Naked Cast in Mickey Mouse Masks,”
The Daily Telegraph,
April 11, 2008.
200
as the staging manual explains:
David Rosen, “On Staging That Matters,” in
Verdi in Performance,
ed. Alison Latham and Roger Parker (Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 30–31.
200
Philip Gossett … notes:
Philip Gossett,
Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera
(University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 477—79.
200
“Copying the truth”
: Rosselli,
The Life of Verdi,
p. 6.
200
Gossett further points out:
Gossett
, Divas and Scholars,
pp. 473—74.
202
“one needs to be totally pragmatic”
: Andrew Porter, “In Praise of the Pragmatic,” in Latham and Parker,
Verdi in Performance,
p. 26.
203
the scholar Roger Parker has found
: Roger Parker,
“Arpa d’or dei fatidici vati”: The Verdian Patriotic Chorus in the 1840s
(Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani, 1997), esp. pp. 83–84.
203
“inappropriate reaction”:
Philip Gossett, “Becoming a Citizen: The Chorus in Risorgimento Opera,”
Cambridge Opera Journal
2:1 (1990), p. 55. See also Gossett, “‘Edizioni distrutte’ and the Significance of Operatic Choruses During the Risorgimento,” in
Opera and Society in Italy and France from Monteverdi to Bourdieu,
ed. Victoria Johnson, Jane F. Fulcher, and Thomas Ertman (Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 181–242.
203
The greatness of Verdi is a simple thing
: The final paragraph of this article was written on Sept. 12, 2001. When I wrote of “the spiritual magnificence of a dying man,” I had in mind Father Mychal Judge, the chaplain of the New York City Fire Department, who died during the destruction of the World Trade Center the previous day I once heard him speak, and I think of him often.