This book has its origins in a series of four talks that I had the privilege of giving at the Université de Montréal in 2011 in the context of the annual Conférences de prestige organized at the Faculté de musique since 2008. Each year features a writer from a different branch of music research who discusses a broad area of inquiry within her or his specialty. The first title—proposed by Jean-Jacques Nattiez who founded the event and organized it until 2012—was nothing less ambitious than “How to Analyze Opera.” Because the field of opera is large and includes repertories that I do not necessarily know very well, I reduced the object of study to the analysis of Italian opera and then, for the book in the French language developed from the lectures (and published in 2017), further still to Verdi. Although many composers from the baroque to the twentieth century made an appearance during the talks, Verdi's name surfaced the most. From the perspective of the performance record, this may not seem surprising as his operas are performed internationally more than those of any other composer, 50 percent more than the works of his closest rivals Mozart and Puccini, year after year according to operabase.com. The extent of exposure recalls the omnipresence of Beethoven and Brahms in the symphonic repertory, or the importance of Bach and Handel in the baroque repertory.

For many years, however, ubiquity in performance was not reflected in international research and criticism, where Verdi had a limited place for reasons rooted in the discipline of musicology. In the flowering of the discipline after World War II, attention in most subdisciplines—from source studies to style studies—focused on certain consecrated eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury German and Austrian masters, and the major figures of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The legitimation of music scholarship within the academy occurred with a relatively narrow repertorial base. Then, as music departments became larger and researchers more numerous and as the range of acceptable research subjects became larger and the need for wider repertorial and cross-cultural scope more urgent, scholarly interest in nineteenthcentury Italian opera composers, colored by populism and market, flowered impressively. An explosion of research interest in Verdi in the 1970s included the work of Philip Gossett, Pierluigi Petrobelli, Julian Budden, David Rosen, Martin Chusid, Marcello Conati, Lorenzo Bianconi, and Anselm Gerhard, among many others.