Every discipline of learning has a textbook that is essential for acquiring a certain skill. This hallmark tool is used so widely throughout a field of study that it becomes a joke. It can even be a subject of dread among students past and present. For young opera students, the overused and under-liked volume is “Twenty-Four Italian Songs and Arias of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries” (“24 Italian Songs and Arias”).
Anyone who has seriously studied classical singing at a university or even at a high school level is doubtless familiar with the recognizable yellow G. Shirmer volume. It includes a collection of simple two- or three-page songs with Italian words and comically inaccurate “singable” English translations.
