"Marking the 150th anniversary of his birth, this is the first critical biography of Italo Montemezzi (1875-1952), an important composer seventeen years younger than Puccini, who became internationally famous with L'amore dei tre re (1913). From 1905, when he was signed up by Puccini's publisher, Casa Ricordi, Montemezzi was often seen as Puccini's successor, or heir apparent. Inspired most of all by late Verdi, and by Wagner's works, Montemezzi sought to create a distinctively new kind of Italian opera that was, in his own words, "different from anything that had been done before-a real Italian music drama, with dynamism, drama, poetry-all of it bathed in an atmosphere of musical rapture." To numerous critics, especially in America, Montemezzi achieved his lofty goal with music of intense lyricism and power. Yet after La nave (1918), the opera Montemezzi himself considered his masterpiece, his career faltered; his marriage to a New York heiress in 1921 removed any financial incentive to compose, and he found himself increasingly out of sympathy with musical developments in Fascist Italy"--