Departing wisely from the text

This enthralling and important book offers vital reading for anyone with a serious interest in opera. Its author Philip Gossett describes himself as ‘a fan, a musician and a scholar’; more specifically, he works from a base at the University of Chicago as one of the foremost authorities on the period broadly circumscribed by Rossini’s Tancredi (1813) and Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera (1859), supervising the ongoing complete editions of those two composers and counselling singers and conductors on productions and recordings.