Verdi's Dream [screenplay]
In 1873 Giuseppe Verdi is a prosperous and energetic sixty-year-old celebrated throughout Europe, a composer of grand and melodious operas, a free-thinking liberal and agnostic, who abruptly decides to set to music a traditional Catholic mass for the dead. Extraordinary! Verdi had not written an entire musical Requiem before. But saying he is moved by the passing of a respected Italian writer, he undertakes a solemn and monumental composition for orchestra, chorus, and soloists.
Ah, but more may be going on in this artist's soul than what appears, for the composing stirs memories and feelings still unresolved since the shocking deaths of his young wife and children more than 30 years earlier.
Verdi's Dream is a screenplay for a dramatic feature film, presenting an original portrait of the great opera composer at this pivotal moment in his life. Since music is integral to this screenplay as well as to Verdi's imagination, readers are directed to specific musical excerpts on a companion website [ ]. Illustrations, photographs, an Introduction, Afterword, and more than seventy historical notes complete this unique imaginative biography of Verdi.
Published in 2012: Text & Context (paperback)
Ah, but more may be going on in this artist's soul than what appears, for the composing stirs memories and feelings still unresolved since the shocking deaths of his young wife and children more than 30 years earlier.
Verdi's Dream is a screenplay for a dramatic feature film, presenting an original portrait of the great opera composer at this pivotal moment in his life. Since music is integral to this screenplay as well as to Verdi's imagination, readers are directed to specific musical excerpts on a companion website [ ]. Illustrations, photographs, an Introduction, Afterword, and more than seventy historical notes complete this unique imaginative biography of Verdi.
Published in 2012: Text & Context (paperback)
Margherita Barezzi, Verdi's wife who died in her twenties. This loss haunted the composer, affecting the works he chose to create, I believe.