Verdi

Welcome to The Independent''s new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.Extracted from Michael Steen''s book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent''s editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.With Verdi, Italian opera reached its zenith, where music and drama are fused into an indissoluble whole. Although he wrote 28 operas, less than half remain regularly performed. Yet those which are remain a gold standard of characterisation, stagecraft and musical vocabulary. Rigoletto, La Traviata, Un Ballo in Maschera, Aïda – the roll call is long, but it is especially with his final two operas, Otello and Falstaff, that he becomes the