With a phrase left half finished, a subject without a predicate, this book closes: ‘The soprano aria “Me pellegrina ed orfana” …’. These are the final words Gabriele Baldini put down on paper, and the page remained in his typewriter on 15 June 1969 when, three days before his death, he was taken to the clinic.

He began continuous, systematic work on the book in the summer of 1967, though several important sections had been completed some time before. For example, the greater part of the Ernani chapter – one of the book's most important – had been published in 1962 in the Parmesan journal Palatina (nos. 21–2) under the title ‘I “verdi anni” di Verdi’, and included the following annotation: ‘This essay is part of a larger study of the composer at present in progress.’ In the spring of 1967, I was involved in the preparation of programmes for Rome's Teatro dell'Opera, and published a large extract from the article. Baldini revised it for that occasion, and almost all his corrections remain in the final text. But with Baldini the idea of ‘continuous’ work needs qualification: the variety of his interests, together with his inherent dislike of thinking, judging or remembering anything without committing it to paper, stimulated him to immense creative energy. The English scholar en titre was for decades also a diarist, arts reviewer, music, cinema, television and theatre critic, record reviewer, and so on ad infinitum. We should not imagine that in his last two years this Verdi project, however elaborate, constituted the only, or even the primary task of his working life.