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.

This volume is the summation of his life’s work. Written with unfailing clarity and waspish wit, it charts the musical problems, both theoretical and practical, presented by the autograph manuscripts, printed scores and performances of this great corpus. They turn out to be every bit as complex and frustrating as anything in the baroque or early music fields — a trail of contradictions, ambiguities and lacunae in the evidence along which Gossett proves the canniest of sleuths.