Philip Gossett

Philip Gossett (born New York, 27 September 1941) is an American musicologist and historian, and recently officially retired from the post of Robert W. Reneker Distinguished Service Professor of Music at the University of Chicago. His lifelong interest in 19th-century Italian opera, which began with listening to the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts in his youth, most recently led to the publication of a major book on the subject, Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera, which won the Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society as the best book on music of 2006.

Philip Gossett's contributions to opera scholarship and how they can influence operatic performance may best be summed up by Newsday's comment that "some encomiasts claim that soprano Maria Callas did as much for Italian opera as Arturo Toscanini or Verdi. Musicologist Philip Gossett arguably has done as much for Italian opera as any of those geniuses."

At the time he began graduate musical studies in the mid-1960s, the Italian composers such as Gioachino Rossini, Vincenzo Bellini, Gaetano Donizetti and Giuseppe Verdi had been given little serious academic study. As he noted: "If you were going to be a serious musicologist, you had to study Beethoven or Bach or Gregorian chants, but Rossini -- that was a pretty funny idea" However, he persisted and notes that "I went to Princeton University for graduate work in musicology (and) I fell more in love with the music and wrote my doctoral dissertation on the music of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi. Then I went to Paris on a Fulbright and studied Rossini's operas.".

Throughout his career, Gossett's work has frequently taken him to Italy, where he has advised on the presentations of productions at the Rossini Opera Festival in Rossini's hometown of Pesaro, and he has worked directly with the Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani (Institute of Verdi Studies) in Parma which was founded in 1960. Also, for the 2001 centenary of Verdi's death, he worked with the Teatro Regio di Parma on their programming.

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