"Alzira" is the seventh work and the sixth opera to be published in the critical edition of "The Works of Giuseppe Verdi." Composed during the middle of the very productive period of Verdi's first large-scale successes, "Alzira" premiered at Naples on August 12, 1845. Cammarano's libretto is based on a play of Voltaire, who used a real incident in sixteenth-century Peru during the Spanish conquest to shape a critique of the morality of the noble savage as against Christian values. The inherent conflicts and exotic setting appealed to Verdi's dramatic sense, and in its best moments the music...

Abramo Basevi published his study of Verdi's operas in Florence in 1859, in the middle of the composer's career. The first thorough, systematic examination of Verdi's operas, it covered the twenty works produced between 1842 and 1857--from Nabucco and Macbeth to Il trovatore, La traviata, and Aroldo. But while Basevi's work is still widely cited and discussed--and nowhere more so than in the English-speaking world--no translation of the entire volume has previously been available. The Operas of Giuseppe Verdi fills this gap, at the same time providing...