Dr Stefano Castelvecchi

Stefano Castelvecchi is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Music, and a Fellow of St John’s College.

He is the author of the book Sentimental Opera: Questions of Genre in the Age of Bourgeois Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and the editor and co-translator of Abramo Basevi’s The Operas of Giuseppe Verdi of 1859 (University of Chicago Press, 2013). He has published critical editions of works by Rossini and Verdi, and a number of articles on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century opera, and on musical dramaturgy more generally.

He has held visiting professorships at Vassar College (NY), the University of Chicago, and the University of Pavia-Cremona.

Dr Castelvecchi has frequently engaged with the broader, non-academic public through talks and programme essays for such institutions as the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Teatro alla Scala (Milan), Teatro La Fenice (Venice), Teatro Real (Madrid), Glyndebourne Festival, the Royal Festival Hall at the South Bank, the Rossini Opera Festival (Pesaro), BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4 (and their Italian equivalent, RAI Radio 3) and the British Library, and liner notes for record companies such as Deutsche Grammophon and Stradivari. He contributes to the training of opera singers at the Accademia Verdiana of the Teatro Regio in Parma (Italy) and at the International Opera Studio in Córdoba (Spain). 

He studied composition at the Conservatorio Santa Cecilia (Rome), holds a laurea in humanities from the University of Rome I – La sapienza (where the supervisor of his music-history dissertation was Pierluigi Petrobelli), and a Ph.D. in Music from the University of Chicago (supervised by Philip Gossett).