The Musical Language of Italian Opera, 1813-1859

The Musical Language of Italian Opera, 1813-1859 examines operatic music by five Italian composers--Rossini, Bellini, Mercadante, Donizetti, and Verdi--and one non-Italian, Meyerbeer, showing how certain recurring principles define a distinctively Italian practice that left its mark on the German repertoire more familiar to music theorists.

William Rothstein is Professor of Music Theory at Queens College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He previously taught at Amherst College, Oberlin College, and the University of Michigan. He is author of Phrase Rhythm in Tonal Music and co-author (with Charles Burkhart) of Anthology for Musical Analysis. He has written and lectured extensively on music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with special emphasis on musical rhythm, Schenkerian theory and analysis, and nineteenth-century Italian opera.

- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: What is there to analyze?
- Part One: La Via Italiana
- Chapter 1. The Anvil Chorus
- Chapter 2. Theoretical contexts I: Nineteenth-century theory
- Chapter 3. Theoretical contexts II: Schenker and Riemann
- Chapter 4. Rhythm and meter
- Chapter 5. Musical form
- Part Two: Rossini
- Chapter 6. Rossini's mediants
- Chapter 7. Tonal coherence in Rossini's Italian operas
- Chapter 8. Guillaume Tell
- Part Three: Between Rossini and Verdi
- Chapter 9. Bellini and the new diatonicism
- Chapter 10. Meyerbeer and the new chromaticism
- Chapter 11. Around 1840: Mercadante and Donizetti
- Part Four: Verdi's Sedici Anni
- Chapter 12. Ernani to Attila (1844-1846)
- Chapter 13. Rigoletto and Il trovatore (1851-1853)
- Chapter 14. Les vêpres siciliennes to Un ballo in maschera (1854-1859)
- Afterword: Verdi and His Predecessors
- Selected bibliography
- Index