They form a critique of a musical culture which is over-saturated in its past...by dissection, analysis, parody, and by self-dramatised intent."
XXVI of the complete sequence), he has written I... generally increas[ed] the harmonic ambiguity, eliding the original phrases, re-voicing Verdi's (orchestral) texture, creating a kind of production of the scene in my imagination... like a film in which the actor has been entirely subsumed into the soundtrack, and the visible transcended.
Book II, which is dedicated to Stephen Pruslin, begins with another Attila transcription and covers the operas to Rigoletto, (1851).
Book III, dedicated to Marilyn Nonken, ranges from a second Rigoletto transcription to Macbeth, (1865 version).
Michael Oliver, in International Record Review (April 2002), wrote that the composer matches "Verdian imagery with pianistic and fundamentally modern ones: a limpid glitter evokes the Venetian lagoon of I due Foscari but tempests follow, and lightning staccato clusters, and sepulchral rumblings like a Kraken stirring beneath the Adriatic.
Grace notes in an aria from Giovanna d’Arco prompt poised and ornate lines of Finnissy’s own"; Oliver calls the Don Carlos transcription "both a highly original response to Verdi and a magnificently pianistic sound."