Quarter Notes

In this issue of The Opera Quarterly we are delighted to be able to honor not one but two of the journal's previous editors not only by publishing their work but also by reporting some good news relating to their respective professional occupations.

In October 2002, just before our spring issue went to press, the Italian cities of Bergamo and Lucca fêted WILLIAM ASHBROOK on the occasion of his eightieth birthday at an international conference dedicated to the operas of Donizetti and Puccini. On the opening day of the conference, cosponsored by the Fondazione Gaetano Donizetti and the Centro studi Giacomo Puccini, officials from Bergamo presented Professor Ashbrook with their city's prestigious Donizetti Prize—the first time such an honor has been bestowed on a non-singer (previous recipients of the award have included Leyla Gencer, Renato Bruson, Joan Sutherland, and Alfredo Kraus). We offer warm congratulations to our colleague and friend on behalf of all our readers, who should be pleased to find in this issue's Recordings section a triple Donizetti CD review by our own "Professore di Bergamo" himself. That all three recordings under review are of utter rarities testifies to an undying curiosity about the composer's untapped oeuvre—a phenomenon that surely owes its strength and continuity to the solid groundwork established by Bill in his book Donizetti and His Operas (Cambridge University Press, 1982).

Many of our readers will recall the fascinating excerpt from BRUCE BURROUGHS's projected biography of Zinka Milanov ("Zinka Milanov at Forty-Five: Verdi 'Exquisitely Close to the Infinity'") that we presented in our autumn 2001 issue (vol. 17, no. 4). For those who since wrote in to express their desire to see the entire book in print, we have an encouraging development to announce: Northeastern University Press has committed itself to publishing the work, pending the author's ability to raise the daunting amount of subsidy that is now inevitably required for such large, "limited-interest" biographies. In the meantime, to satisfy those fans who can't wait for the finished product to appear in bookstores, in this issue we proudly offer the first installment of another major sampling from our editor emeritus's ongoing research on the life and career of the great Croatian soprano—not a self-contained chapter lifted from the still unpublished book but essentially a fresh article, prepared expressly for OQ, and comprehensively chronicling the singer's distinguished career-long association with the title role of Puccini's Tosca. (Part 2 of "Zinka Milanov and Floria Tosca: Art, Love, and Politics" is slated for OQ's autumn 2003 issue.)

In the third entry of his well-researched cycle "Verdi Onstage in the United States," Verdi expert george martin traces the American fortunes over the years of Nabucodonosor (better known as Nabucco), a work that recently returned to the repertory of the Metropolitan Opera after an absence of nearly four decades. (The first two articles of this informative series explored the performance histories of Oberto [OQ, vol. 18, no. 4] and Un giorno di regno [OQ, vol. 19, no. 1].)

A profile of another all-but-forgotten singer of the past is offered by JIM MCPHERSON, who this time focuses his eagle eye on the career of Italo Campanini, the Italian tenor who sang the title role in Gounod's Faust at the opening of the Metropolitan Opera House in 1883. If Campanini did anything else worthy of note in his career—and indeed he did—just leave it to our friend Jim to dig up the facts and recount them in prose that entertains as much as it informs.

[Late note: Just before this issue went to the press, we were deeply saddened to learn of Jim McPherson's death, at the age of sixty-four, following an extended illness. His many published contributions to The Opera Quarterly include portraits of opera singers Bessie Abott, Ester Ferrabini, Frances Peralta, and Italo Campanini, and of impresarios Cesare Sodero and Henry Savage, plus...