Music Professor David Rosen, a noted Giuseppe Verdi expert who retires from Cornell at the end of this semester, will be honored by former students and past and current colleagues at an all-day symposium. The event, "The Unexpected and the Inevitable: Italian Opera's Long Nineteenth Century," will begin at 9:30 a.m. Saturday, April 29, in B21 Lincoln Hall and is free and open to the public.

Rosen's research has centered on 19th-century and early 20th-century Italian music, primarily Verdi and Puccini, and he has also written about opera theory and Mozart piano concertos. He edited Verdi's "Messa da Requiem" in "The Works of Giuseppe Verdi" and is the author of the Cambridge Music Handbook on that work. He has long been interested in staging manuals and other sources that help reconstruct the visual aspects of 19th-century opera, and he co-authored a volume dedicated to the staging of Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera. A recurring theme in his work is compositional decision-making.

Rosen's teaching has ranged from graduate seminars to courses for undergraduate non-music majors. He recently served as the Department of Music's director of graduate studies for three years. He is a former editor and now serves on the editorial board of the Verdi Forum, the publication of the American Institute for Verdi Studies. He also sits on the advisory board of the Fondo Leoncavallo (in Locarno, Switzerland) and of the Centro studi Giacomo Puccini (in Lucca, Italy) and has served the American Musicological Society on the national and chapter levels.