The Great Lablache: Nineteenth Century Operatic Superstar: His Life and His Times

During the Golden Age of Italian opera, Luigi Lablache triumphed as one of the most admired and accomplished international superstars. Born in Naples in 1795, his unprecedented forty-five year singing career dominated the glorious bel canto period when opera flourished as the principal form of entertainment. Now his direct descendant, Clarissa Lablache Cheer, puts forth this remarkable and long overdue biography of Lablache €“ the first ever to be written in English. Page by page, Lablache€™s extraordinary story unfolds as the author guides the reader through the hectic and glamorous era of Italian opera and European high society. We follow Lablache as he conquers the dazzling nineteenth century opera world, singing Rossini roles from Napoleon€™s time, through the Romantic Age, to become the special favorite of the Victorians in hundreds of Donizetti and Bellini€™s bel canto productions. A vocal Hercules, everything about him is larger-than-life: his huge size, powerful

The author and artist Cerita Stanley-Little, was born as Cerita Ida Claire Brown in 1906, in Bournemouth, a fashionable seaside resort town in the south of England. There she pursued a fine art education, and traveled widely before her marriage. Settling down in neighboring Southampton, she raised two children. During World War.II, she returned to Bournemouth and lived in Liliput. There in spite of being severely limited by chronic asthma, she continued her artistic life, creating drawings, paintings and writing romantic novels, poems and articles. Her articles were published in various magazines and newspapers. Her delightful children's stories were read on radio BBC. She died in Lymington Hampshire in 1978.