Seven Verdi Librettos

Verdi, like most great opera composers, attached supreme importance to the words he was setting to music. The listener, to understand the opera fully, should understand the situations, the shades of emotion, the nuances of characterization described in the music. William Weaver's translations of seven of the greatest Verdi operas are designed for maximum fidelity to the immediate word. Eschewing artistic renderings, Mr. Weaver offers, on facing pages, exact translations and the correspondin...