BIOGRAPHY

Francesco Izzo is a musicologist and pianist specialising in 19th-century opera and vocal music.  He is Professor of Music at the University of Southampton, where he teaches courses and supervises research projects in opera, vocal performance practice, and textual criticism.  He is the author of the monograph Laughter between Two Revolutions: Opera buffa in Italy, 1831-1848 (University of Rochester Press) and serves as General Editor of the critical edition The Works of Giuseppe Verdi (University of Chicago Press and Casa Ricordi), for which he has edited Un giorno di regno.

Francesco has held visiting professorships at the University of Chicago, New York University, the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and the University of Venice "Ca' Foscari."  Prior to joining the Department of Music at Southampton, he taught at East Carolina University and held fellowships at New York University (where he earned his Ph.D.) and Princeton University.

As a specialist of vocal performance practices of the 19th century, over the years Francesco has accompanied performances by Barry Banks, Rockwell Blake, Kevin Short, and Giuseppe Taddei, and has coached and consulted for many more.  Recently he has accompanied performances by Leo Nucci and Juan Jesús Rodriguez in Bilbao, soprano Anna Pirozzi and basses Michele Pertusi and Riccardo Zanellato in Parma, and tenor Antonio Poli in New York City.  His acclaimed 2021 recital with soprano Lisette Oropesa at Parma's Teatro Regio caused a sensation and went viral when a voice student from China famously joined in spontaneously from the audience during an encore performance of "Sempre libera" from Verdi's La traviata.

Francesco is keen on forging bridges between performance and scholarship. He has been scholar-in-residence at Sarasota Opera, and since 2017 he has served as the principal scholarly advisor of Festival Verdi Parma, which in the first year of his scholarly leadership achieved the prestigious award for best festival at the International Opera Awards.  He has collaborated closely with Roberto Abbado during his tenure as the Festival's Music Director, and has consulted among others for conductors Daniele Callegari, Michele Mariotti, Francesco Pasqualetti, and Sebastiano Rolli, stage directors Hugo de Ana, Leo Muscato, and Graham Vick, as well as Anna Maria Chiuri, Annick Massis, Michele Pertusi, Piero Pretti, Ramon Vargas, Franco Vassallo, Riccardo Zanellato, and many other renowned singers.  He has lectured and contributed printed and media content  for many of the world’s leading opera companies and festivals, including the Salzburg Festival, the Glyndebourne Festival, the Donizetti Festival, the Royal Opera House, the Welsh National Opera, the Teatro La Fenice, and the opera companies of Bilbao, Madrid, Munich, Naples, Palermo, and Rome.

Francesco is frequently invited to deliver lectures, workshops, and masterclasses—including recent visits to the Juilliard School, Princeton University, Conservatorium Maastricht, and the Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana.  During the Covid pandemic he remained committed to teaching and public engagement, leading online talks and activities for a variety of institutions and contributing as guest lecturer to Lisette Oropesa’s popular online masterclasses. In 2021 he was scholarly consultant at the Teatro real in Madrid for the premiere modern performance of Valentín de Zubiaurre’s Don Fernando el Emplazado, of which he has prepared the critical edition for the Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales.  In 2022 and 2025 he worked alongside conductor Sebastiano Rolli in productions of Giuseppe Verdi's I lombardi alla prima crociata and Attila at Venice's Teatro La Fenice.

In recognition of his record in research and education in vocal performance practice, in 2023 Francesco was appointed program director of the Accademia Verdiana, the young artists' program of the Teatro Regio in Parma, for which he had been delivering guest lectures since 2018.  In the same year he becane the first academic director of the Córdoba International Ópera Studio, where in three consecutive years he has led the training of young artists informing the performance practices of productions of Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore, Mozart's Don GIovanni, and Verdi's Rigoletto.  In 2025 he has presented masterclasses for Accademia Monte Verità in Xi'an, where he also served on the jury of the Second China Verdi Competition, and has participated in the young artist training programme of Accademia Monte Verità at the Norwegian National Opera in Oslo.

Francesco's plans for 2025-26 include teaching courses in opera and music history,  supervision of PhD students, and development of opera-related training and performance activities at his home institution, the University of Southampton, a new opera studio in Córdoba, and concerts at Parma's Teatro Regio, the Barco Teatro in Padua,  and the Real Círculo de la Amistad in Córdoba.