Synopses & Reviews
Garry Wills's Venice: Lion City is a tour de force -- a rich, colorful, and provocative history of the world's most fascinating city in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when it was at the peak of its glory. This was not the city of decadence, carnival, and nostalgia familiar to us from later centuries. It was a ruthless imperial city, with a shrewd commercial base, like ancient Athens, which it resembles in its combination of art and sea empire. The structure of Venetian society was based on its distinctive practice of religion: Venice elected its priests, defied the authority of papal Rome, and organized its liturgy around a lay leader (the doge).
Venice: Lion City presents a new way of relating the history of the city through its art and, in turn, illuminates the art through the city's history. In their culture, their governing structures, and their social life, the Venetians themselves speak to us with extraordinary immediacy, whether at work, warfare, prayer, or acting out their victories, celebrations, and petitions in the colorful festivals that punctuated the year.
Venice: Lion City is illustrated with more than 130 works of art, 30 in full color. Garry Wills gives us a unique view of Venice's rulers, merchants, clerics, and laborers, its Jews, and its women as they created a city that is the greatest art museum in the world, a city that continues to lure an endless stream of visitors.
Like Simon Schama's The Embarrassment of Riches, on the Dutch culture in the Golden Age, Venice: Lion City will take its place as a classic work of history and criticism.
Review
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“Wonderfully illuminating. This book is the product of a lifetime of listening and watching….No lover of Verdi—or Shakespeare, for that matter—will want to miss it.”
—Opera News
“Riveting…a double-barreled salvo that hits two bulls-eyes. Shakespeare scholarship is one of the worlds thriving industries, with no factories but worldwide workshops. While you are reading this, there must be hundreds (thousands?) of worthies turning out articles and books from pole to pole. But Garry Wills has upped the ante. There is a fair, but not daunting, amount of musical analysis, as well as much acknowledged borrowing and quoting from other relevant writers. This only makes the book more useful, what with burrowings (rather than borrowings) a worm would be proud of, and a panorama worthy of a flys multifaceted eye. “Nomen est omen” goes a Latin adage: the name is a signifier. So the noun “Wills” suggests manifold motivation, multiple resolve. Whatever Garry undertakes, trust Wills to get done.”
—John Simon, The New York Times
“Willss joyously engaged, scholarly yet personable essay is not just a treat but also a banquet succulent enough to make Shakespeareans and Verdians of all who partake of it.”
—Booklist, starred review
“Opera aficionados will delight in Willss thoughtful, deeply rehearsed essays. . . . [His] detailed depictions of the operas subtleties, sublimely rendered for opera fans, endlessly elucidate the work of these ‘creative volcanoes.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Wills brilliantly explores the evolution, development, and performance histories of the three plays (actually, four, counting both Henry IV and Merry Wives of Windsor as inspirations for Falstaff), the three operas, and the connections among them. As essential purchase. ”
—Library Journal, starred review
“Willss insights into both Verdis acute understanding of Shakespeare and his ingenious methods of conveying it are thrilling—particularly his account of how, when composing “Otello,” Verdi encapsulated the six hundred and eighty-six lines of the plays first act within a few minutes of music.”
—The New Yorker
“Fascinating.”
—Commonweal Magazine
“One genius interprets another: English to Italian, words to lyrics, immortal drama to overpowering opera. . . . While the book has an enormous amount to teach devotees of either Shakespeare or Verdi, opera fans in particular will enjoy the authors close and illuminating attention to backstage history, as well as words, music and phrasing.”
—Kirkus
“A labor of love.”
—HistoryWire.com
“Despite the novelty of the subject in VERDI'S SHAKESPEARE, Willss writing is characteristically clear and marked with literate ping. . . . Throughout, he demonstrates an innate understanding of drama and music and how they can work together. His analysis of melody, harmony and orchestration are as solid as his examination of theatrical practice and technique. And his research is thorough. He draws on the considerable store of data unearthed by others, citing in his more than one hundred footnotes a veritable Whos Who of opera and theater scholars.”
—The Washington Independent Review of Books
Synopsis
"Riveting . . . a double-barreled salvo that hits two bull's-eyes." —The New York Times Book Review
This dazzling study of the three operas that Giuseppe Verdi adapted from Shakespeare's plays takes readers on a wonderfully engaging journey through opera, music, literature, history, and the nature of genius. Verdi's Shakespeare explores the writing and staging of Macbetto (Macbeth), Otello (Othello), and Falstaff, operas by Verdi, an Italian composer who could not read a word of English but who adored Shakespeare. Delving into the fast-paced worlds of these men and the hands-on life of the stage that at once challenged them and gave flight to their brilliance, Wills, in his inimitable way, illuminates the birth of artistic creation.
About the Author
Garry Wills is the author of twenty-one books, including the bestseller Lincoln at Gettysburg (winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award), John Wayne's America, Certain Trumpets, Under God, and A Necessary Evil. A frequent contributor to many national publications, including The New York Times Magazine and The New York Review of Books, he is also an adjunct professor of history at Northwestern University and lives in Evanston, Illinois.
Table of Contents
Contents KEY TO BRIEF CITATIONS
INTRODUCTION Athens of the Renaissance
PART ONE: Imperial Disciplines
CHAPTER ONE Contract with Mark
CHAPTER TWO Declarations of Independence
CHAPTER THREE The Lion's Wings
CHAPTER FOUR The Lion's Tread
CHAPTER FIVE Disciplines of Time
CHAPTER SIX Disciplines of Work
PART TWO: Imperial Personnel
CHAPTER SEVEN Doge
CHAPTER EIGHT Patricians (Nobili)
CHAPTER NINE Notables (Cittadini)
CHAPTER TEN Golden Youth
CHAPTER ELEVEN Commoners (Popolani)
CHAPTER TWELVE Women
CHAPTER THIRTEEN Artists
CHAPTER FOURTEEN Outsiders
PART THREE: Imperial Piety
CHAPTER FIFTEEN Christ's Blood
CHAPTER SIXTEEN Christ's Cross
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Venetian Annunciations
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN The Vulnerable Mary
CHAPTER NINETEEN Mark: The Relic
CHAPTER TWENTY Mark: The Life
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE War Saints: George and Theodore
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Plague Saints
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE The Other Lion: Jerome's
PART FOUR: Imperial Learning
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Franciscan Learning
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Dominican Learning
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Book Learning
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN Learned Architecture: Codussi
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT Learned Architecture: Sansovino, Palladio
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE Learned Sculpture
CHAPTER THIRTY Learned Politics
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE Learned History
EPILOGUE A Farewell to Empire
NOTES
SOME LEADING DATES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX
PHOTO CREDITS