Introduction, Bibliography, and Essays Translations

Titled simply 'GIGLI', the new book is not a biography in the traditional sense, but rather an anthology of articles, most of which have never appeared in print in English, which have been compiled and edited by Leonardo Ciampa, the author of THE TWILIGHT OF BELCANTO and numerous other publications….Ciampa has amassed a formidable list of contributors – thirty-two in all, comprising such legendary singers as Magda Olivero, Giorgio Tozzi, José Carreras and Virginia Zeani, along with well-known operatic authors and researchers such as Andrew Farkas, Harald Henrysson and the late Thomas G. Kaufman…to his new Gigli anthology. The resulting edition is the first book written in English about the legendary tenor since 1957, when Gigli’s memoirs were published in an English translation by the late Darina Silone….Farkas also addresses Gigli’s overt involvement with Mussolini and the Fascisti, and, by extension, Hitler and the Nazis…..One of the most perceptive of the forty-plus articles in the new book is a chronological analysis of ten of Gigli’s recordings by the great soprano Virginia Zeani, who had first heard the great tenor’s disks as a youth in her native Bucharest, and who eventually sang with him….The resulting book, to borrow a phrase from Virginia Zeani, is not just ‘a book about Gigli’, but about ‘the maximum of love that people have for music’. Review by James A. Drake, Ph.D.