Philip Gossett (born New York, 27 September 1941) is an American musicologist and historian, and recently officially retired from the post of Robert W. Reneker Distinguished Service Professor of Music at the University of Chicago. His lifelong interest in 19th-century Italian opera, which began with listening to the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts in his youth, most recently led to the publication of a major book on the subject, Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera, which won the Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society as the best book on music of 2006.Philip Gossett's contributions to opera scholarship and how they can influence operatic performance may best be summed up by Newsday's comment that "some encomiasts claim that soprano Maria Callas did as much for Italian opera as Arturo Toscanini or Verdi. Musicologist Philip Gossett arguably has done as much for Italian opera as any of those geniuses."
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