People | Faculty | Philip Gossett

Philip Gossett

Appointments:

Robert W. Reneker Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Music, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, and the College

Education:

Ph.D. (1970), Princeton University

Contact:

Office: Wieboldt 402
Phone: (773) 834-4181
Email: phgs@uchicago.edu

Photo: Dan Dry

Philip Gossett, Robert W. Reneker Distinguished Service Professor of Music, is a music historian with special interests in 19th-century Italian opera, sketch studies, aesthetics, textual criticism, and performance practice. He is author of two books on Donizetti and of Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera (2006, Chicago), which won the Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society as the best book on music of the year. He serves as General Editor of The Works of Giuseppe Verdi (The University of Chicago Press and Casa Ricordi of Milan) and of Works of Gioachino Rossini (Baerenreiter-Verlag, Kassel). One of the world's foremost experts on Italian opera, Gossett is the first musicologist to be awarded the Mellon Distingushed Achievement Award; he also holds the Cavaliere di Gran Croce, the Italian government's highest civilian honor. Professor Gossett has served as President of the American Musicological Society and of the Society for Textual Scholarship, as Dean of Humanities at Chicago, and as lecturer and consultant at opera houses and festivals in America and Italy. He was the musicological consultant to the Verdi Festival in Parma during the Verdi centennial year (2001). at Chicago since 1968.

Recent Courses Taught

  • MUSI 10100. Introduction To Western Music. Autumn, 2004.
  • MUSI 22600/30904. Beethoven. Autumn, 2006
  • "Studies in Verdi's Middle Period (from Simon Bocanegra through La forza del destino)" (2008)
  • Shakespeare at the Opera (2009)

Selected Works

Critical Editions

  • Semiramide by Gioachino Rossini, edited by Philip Gossett and Alberto Zedda, Series I, Vol. 23 of the Edizione critica delle opere di Gioachino Rossini (Pesaro, Fondazione Rossini, 2001). First performed at Metropolitan Opera House, New York, November 1990.
  • La gazzetta by Gioachino Rossini, edited by Philip Gossett and Fabrizio Scipioni, Series I, Vol. 18 of the Edizione critica delle opere di Gioachino Rossini (Pesaro, Fondazione Rossini, 2002). First performed at Garsington Opera (Oxford) and the Rossini Opera Festival (Pesaro) during the summer of 2001.
  • Critical edition of Verdi’s La forza del destino, to be published in The Works of Giuseppe Verdi (the 1869 version performed at San Francisco Opera in November, 2005; the 1862 version performed at the Stadttheater, Bern in April, 2006, together with my reconstructions of numbers from the 1861 version).

Books

  • Anna Bolena and the Maturity of Gaetano Donizetti (Oxford University Press, 1985).
  • Facsimile edition of the autograph manuscript of Don Pasquale, with an introduction (Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Rome, 2000).
  • Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera (Chicago, 2006).