Giuseppe Verdi

Verdi wrote for the voice above everything else, and his catalogue is dominated by opera — twenty-eight of them, plus the Requiem, which is an opera in all but name and staging.

Singers meet him through the aria anthologies rather than the full scores, and that is the right way in: a vocal score of Rigoletto is several hundred pages of which you may want four. The standard collections are published by voice type, and Verdi is unusually demanding about which — a role written for a spinto soprano does not suit a light lyric voice, whatever the notes look like on the page.

For everyone else there are the choruses, which choirs sing constantly and which are published as individual octavos. The one from Nabucco is effectively Italy's second national anthem and is available in more arrangements than any other chorus in the repertoire.