Francesco Izzo

Francesco IzzoLecturer in Music

Location: Building 2, room 2027

Telephone: +44 (0)23 8059 3558 (internal ex. 23558)

Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 3197

Email: Mail Francesco Izzo


Summary biography

Francesco Izzo earned undergraduate degrees in piano and music history in Italy, and went on to receive the M.A. and Ph.D. in historical musicology at New York University. Before coming to Southampton, he held a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Italian Opera Studies at NYU (2003-2005), and taught at East Carolina University (2005-2007).

Francesco’s research focuses on opera and song in nineteenth-century Italy, France, and North America, addressing issues that range from music and politics to genre and conventions, vocal performance practice, cultural transfer, and textual criticism. His current projects include a critical edition of Verdi's Un giorno di regno for the Works of Giuseppe Verdi (to be published by the University of Chicago Press and Ricordi), a book titled Laughter and Revolutions, which explores opera buffa in Italy during the 1830s and 40s, and a study of the transfer of French opéra comique to the Italian stage.

His articles appear in Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of Musicology, Acta Musicologica, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, Studi Musicali, and in several dictionaries and collections of essays. He has received grants from the American Musicological Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the British Academy. As a pianist, Francesco has performed extensively as a soloist, with orchestra, and as a vocal accompanist. He is particularly interested in the study and performance of neglected drawing-room songs from Risorgimento Italy and Victorian England.

Francesco joined the University of Southampton in 2007 as Lecturer in Music. He teaches undergraduate courses in music theory, Italian opera, music and society, and the musical expression of meaning and feeling, and supervises postgraduate research projects on various aspects of nineteenth-century music and opera. Being away from the classroom and from his laptop computer causes him considerable anxiety, which he fights with such palliatives as cooking, scuba diving, and copious quantities of chocolate.