Marcello Conati is one of the world's leading Verdi scholars. Mario Medici was founder and first director of the Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani in Parma. William Weaver (1923-2013) was the award-winning translator of Pirandello, Calvino, and Eco. In addition to translations of Verdi librettos, he published Verdi: A Documentary Study and coedited The Verdi Companion.

"Verdi, who had previously considered librettists good only for translating into verse dramatic outlines he had already created, learned to work with an equal; Boito was a superb poet, passionately devoted to the renewal of the musical theater, who had to be treated as a peer, not a subordinate. The letters, stuffed with fascinating detail, catch the two titans in the process of creating the revised Simon Boccanegra, then Otello and Falstaff; sections of text, structural and musical ideas, even production concepts fly back and forth between Milan and Sant'Agata.... A must-have for every music lover's shelf." (Kirkus) "Opera lovers will be pleased." (Publishers Weekly)