Dante and Mercadante

It’s a nice coincidence that Saverio Mercadante’s name ends in -dante, because it was the poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) who saved Mercadante’s opera heroine Francesca da Rimini from being totally forgotten. As the dramaturge Mareike Wink writes in the Frankfurt program booklet to Mercadante’s opera, “if Dante hadn’t immortalized her Read More …

Verdi and Monteverdi

Despite the similarity of their names (Verdi means greens and Monteverdi means green mountain), the opera composers Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) and Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) were not related to each other. Since Monteverdi was born 256 years earlier, he could have been Verdi’s great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, but he wasn’t. Geographically, however, they were Read More …