Amazon.com: Aida: Opera Guide and Libretto: Giuseppe Verdi, Eileen Bleiler: Books

Special Offers and Product Promotions

Interact With Your Music: Discover, listen to, and buy new music, all from the pages of SPIN's digital edition, free to Amazon customers.

Tag this product

Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items.

Help others find this product — tag it for Amazon search

No one has tagged this product for Amazon search yet. Why not be the first to suggest a search for which it should appear?

Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store

If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store. Learn more

Customer Reviews

1 Review

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

Average Customer Review

4.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)

Share your thoughts with other customers:

Create your own review

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not a fan of Opera, but this book conveys atmosphere, March 17, 2004

By	Nikephoros Phokas (Dover, NJ, USA) - See all my reviews

I am not a big of Opera, nor have I attended one, I read this book because an acquaintance loaned it to me. This book sketches a brief biography of Verdi's life, contains notes on early performances of Aida, a plot summary, a musical background with some muscial notation, and finally the actual libretto in Italian on the left side of each of page, with the English translation on the right. I did not enjoy the actual libretto, Opera is clearly meant to be performed and not read. For example on page 130 we have the following: ... "Amneris: My tears will now be avenged by heaven ... heaven ... will be avenged by heaven. My tears will now be avenged by heaven." ... This kind of repition makes it a chore to read, but performed and sung in the beautiful Italian language, perhaps it is more bearable. With my limited experience with opera I cannot fathom what opera was like when as in mentioned on page 51, Rossini grew tired of having the singers making his music unrecognizeable by adding their own vocal acrobatic whims to the opera, Rossini demanded that singers perform the opera exactly as he had written to remedy this. I thought modern opera was bad enough in this regard, I cannot imagine the chaos back when the performers were adding their own vocal gynmnastics to showcase their voices. This book also contains many pictures from performances of Aida(where you can see some of the beautiful women who have performed this opera over the years in photos), so while I disliked the actual libretto, I enjoyed the book for all it did to convey the atmosphere of attending an actual opera.