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Faculty of Music

 

Roles

Associate Professor in the History of Music
Fellow, St John's College

Biography

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 recently began to contribute to the training of singers in contexts such as 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).

Research

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century opera. Musical dramaturgy. Theory and practice of textual criticism (critical editions). Genre. 

Publications

Key publications: 

Books

Sentimental Opera: Questions of Genre in the Age of Bourgeois Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)

Abramo Basevi, The Operas of Giuseppe Verdi [1859], ed. Stefano Castelvecchi, trans. Edward Schneider with Stefano Castelvecchi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Gioachino Rossini, Tre cantate napoletane, vol. II/4 of Edizione critica delle opere di Gioachino Rossini (Pesaro: Fondazione Rossini, 1999), ed. Marco Beghelli, Stefano Castelvecchi, Ilaria Narici

Giuseppe Verdi, Alzira, vol. I/8 of The Works of / Le Opere di Giuseppe Verdi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Milan: Ricordi, 1994), ed. Stefano Castelvecchi with the collaboration of Jonathan Cheskin

Conoscere la musica: Linguaggi grammatiche strutture (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1988), with Elisabetta Stazi

 

Articles and Shorter Publications

‘Le Rossiniane di Mauro Giuliani’, Bollettino del Centro rossiniano di studi, 1986, pp. 33–72

‘Alcune considerazioni sulla struttura drammaturgico-musicale della farsa’, in I vicini di Mozart.  II. La farsa musicale veneziana (1750–1810), ed. David Bryant (Florence: Olschki, 1989), pp. 625–31 

‘Walter Scott, Rossini e la couleur ossianique: Il contesto culturale della Donna del lago’, Bollettino del Centro rossiniano di studi, 1993, pp. 57–71  

‘Sullo statuto del testo verbale nell’opera’, in Gioachino Rossini 1792–1992: Il testo e la scena, ed. Paolo Fabbri (Pesaro: Fondazione Rossini, 1994), pp. 309–14

‘From Nina to Nina: Psychodrama, Absorption and Sentiment in the 1780s’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 8/2 (July 1996), pp. 91–112

--> reprinted in Essays on Opera: 1750–1800, ed. John A. Rice (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010);

--> reprinted in a later version in Italian as ‘Eloquenza della psiche nell’opera sentimentale del tardo Settecento’, in Le passioni in scena: Corpi eloquenti e segni dell’anima nel teatro del XVII e XVIII secolo, ed. Silvia Carandini (Rome: Bulzoni, 2009)

‘L’opera come drame: Il disertore’, in Giovanni Simone Mayr: L’opera teatrale e la musica sacra, ed. Francesco Bellotto (Bergamo: Comune, 1997), pp. 37–49

‘Sentimental and Anti-Sentimental in Le nozze di Figaro’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 53/1 (Spring 2000), pp. 1–24

--> reprinted in Mozart, ed. Simon P. Keefe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015)

‘Directions in Musicology: Statement’ and ‘Closing Remarks’, in Musicology and Sister Disciplines: Past, Present, Future, ed. David Greer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 185–90, 228–9

‘The “Textualization” of Opera’, in Verdi in Performance, ed. Alison Latham and Roger Parker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 157–9

‘Verdi per la storia d’Italia’, in Verdi 2001, ed. Fabrizio Della Seta et al. (Florence: Olschki, 2003), pp. 217–21

--> reprinted in Giuseppe Verdi, Attila (Venice: Edizioni del Teatro la Fenice, 2004)

‘Commentary: Was Verdi a “Revolutionary”?’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 36/4 (Spring 2006), pp. 615–20

‘Le due musicologie’, Il saggiatore musicale, 13/2 (2006), pp. 331–5

‘La furia e il perdono: Sul Furioso di Donizetti’, Quaderni della Fondazione Donizetti, 37 (2013), pp. 15–29   

entries ‘Alzira’ and ‘Voltaire’, in The Cambridge Verdi Encyclopedia, ed. Roberta Montemorra Marvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 15–20, 480

‘Opera and Italian Identity: The Long View’, Studia UBB Musica, 58/2 (2013), pp. 29–47

‘Donizetti e il mito romantico di Torquato Tasso’, Quaderni della Fondazione Donizetti, 42 (2014), pp. 15–29  

'Commedia e morte nel Don Giovanni di Da Ponte e Mozart', in Giampaolo Zagonel, ed., Da Ponte a Mozart (Vittorio Veneto: De Bastiani, 2019)

'On "Diegesis" and "Diegetic": Words and Concepts', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 73/1 (Spring 2020), pp. 149–171