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Franco Alfano: Transcending Turandot. By Konrad Dryden. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2010. [xvii, 201 p. ISBN 9780810869707 (hardcover), $65; ISBN 9780810869776 (paperback), $40.] Illustrations, work list, bibliography, name index.
Until recently, the lives and works of finde- siècle Italian composers have garnered little scholarly attention. The enduring historical narrative of late-nineteenth-century Italian musical decline, the lapsing of most works from the repertory, and the destruction of primary source material during World War II have all helped to discourage musicologists from undertaking study of these composers in the most comprehensive of academic forms, the monograph. Even Puccini, the most enduringly successful of his generation, has received this honor only in the last twenty years, with the volumes of Michele Girardi (Giacomo Puccini. L'arte internazionale di un musicista italiano [Venice: Marsilio, 1995]), Julian Budden (Puccini: His Life and Works [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002]), and Alexandra Wilson (The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism, and Modernity [Cam - bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007]), providing stimulating models for approaching Italian fin-de-siècle repertory from analytical, biographical, and cultural perspectives.
A welcome exception to this rule is found in the work of author Konrad Dryden, who during the last decade has produced monographs on the late-nineteenth-century Italian opera composers Riccardo Zandonai (Riccardo Zandonai: A Biography [New York: Peter Lang, 1999]) and Ruggero Leoncavallo (Leoncavallo: Life and Works [Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007]), and who now offers a third: a study of Franco Alfano, nowadays best known for his completion of Puccini's Turandot. In this "first fully-documented monograph" (p. xv) of Alfano's life and work, Dryden promises a study that will shift attention from the completion of Turandot (the composer's "least interesting effort," p. xvi) onto the composer's other works and activities. As Dryden points out in his introduction, Alfano not only wrote a substantial body of operas, but was "a superb crafter of finely wrought art songs ... a gifted concert pianist, and the director of a string of Italian music conservatories (Bologna, Turin, and Pesaro), when not serving as artistic director of Palermo's Teatro Massimo or doubling as stage director" (p. xiii). The titles of Dryden's fifteen chapters, furthermore, remind us that Alfano lived and worked through radical changes in Italian cultural life (chapters include "Mussolini and Balzac (1927)," "Metro -...