The Giuseppe Verdi: The Pursuit of Success & The Burden of Success

Mark Elder, longtime music director of the English National Opera, hosts the documentary Giuseppe Verdi: The Pursuit of Success and the Burden of Success. The program - one of the first feature length English-language documentaries to explore Verdi's life and career - couples on-location footage of the milieux that Verdi frequented with reflections from the composer's memoirs and excerpts from Verdi's Italian-language operas. The extracts in question were culled from productions mounted for this film by David Alden and starring such luminaries as Willard White and Josephine Barstow; they feature musical accompaniment by the Chorus and Symphony of the English National Opera.