Passionate, witty, and brilliant, Opera as Drama has been lauded as one of the most controversial, thought-provoking, and entertaining works of operatic criticism ever written. First published in 1956 and revised in 1988, Opera as Drama continues to be indispensable reading for all students and lovers of opera.

Everything you could possibly know about Verdi and his operas, from the brilliant and humorous author of Wagner Without Fear.If you want to know why La traviata was actually a flop at its premiere in 1853, it's in here. If you want to know why claiming to have heard Bjorling's Chicago performance of Il trovatore is the classic opera fan faux pas, it's in here. Even if you just want to know how to pronounce Aida, or what the plot o...

With a wealth of famous tunes and meticulous characterisation, Don Giovanni is an undisputed masterpiece created by Mozart out of a thread-bare fairground gig. The Don – for whom both sexes have a sneaking admiration – gatecrashes proceedings, serenading and seducing as he goes. As wily as he is insatiable, he outclasses all who are out to get him, including a jealous bumpkin and the down-at-heel Elvira. But a stone statue seals his doom and drags him down into hellfire. From the Champagne...

The Real Traviata is the rags-to-riches story of a tragic young woman whose life inspired one of the most famous operas of all time, Verdi's masterpiece La traviata, as well as one of the most scandalous and successful French novels of the nineteenth century, La Dame aux Camélias, by Alexandre Dumas fils. The woman at the centre of the story, Marie Duplessis, escaped from her life as an abused teenage girl in provincial Normandy, rising in an amazingly s...

Puccini's obsession with detail ensured the success of La Bohème, his opera about the impoverished 'artistes' in Paris in the 1830s. Soon after its première, people started calling their baby daughters Mimi. The story of this seamstress, her hectic but fraught love affair with the poet Rodolfo and her tragic death from consumption (tuberculosis), never fail to touch the audience. Che gelida manina, Mi chiamano Mimì …, and O soave fanciulla have become some of the most popular operatic exce...

In the late 1960s, a new movement emerged championing historically informed 'authentic' approaches to performance. Heard today in concert halls across the world and in a library's worth of recordings, it has completely transformed the way in which we listen to 'old' music, while revolutionizing the classical music profession in the process. Yet the rise of Early Music has been anything but uncontroversial. Historically informed performance (HIP) has provoked heated debate amongst musicolog...

A tale of forbidden love and inevitable death, the medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde recounts the story of two lovers unknowingly drinking a magic potion and ultimately dying in one another's arms. While critics have lauded Wagner's Tristan and Isolde for the originality and subtlety of the music, they have denounced the drama as a "mere trifle"--a rendering of Wagner's forbidden love for Matilde Wesendonck, the wife of a banker who supported him during his exile in Switzerlan...

Rossini's La Cenerentola (or Cinderella) is one of the most popular comic operas in the classical repertoire – the timeless fairy tale about the triumph of virtue over snobbery. Its first performance at Rome's Teatro Valle in January 1817 – when the composer was not yet 25 – was the customary fiasco. More recently, audiences have laughed at Rossini's wit, gasped at the momentum of his crescendos and marvelled at dazzling coloratura from great sopranos such as Cecilia Bartoli. The opera mov...

This 2004 Companion is a collection of specially commissioned essays on one of the most influential opera composers in the repertoire. The volume is divided into four parts, each exploring an important element of Rossini's life, his world, and his works: biography and reception; words and music; representative operas; and performance. Within these sections accessible chapters, written by a team of specialists, examine Rossini's life and career; the reception of his music in the nineteenth ...

A half century after his death in 1960, Swedish tenor Jussi Björling remains one of the most beloved singers in the world. He spent forty-five of his forty-nine years performing in public, rapidly conquering opera-house and concert stages on both sides of the Atlantic. Along the way, he left a vast recorded legacy that continues to enchant lovers of vocal music and inspire young singers. In this ground-breaking book, Stephen Hastings analyzes more than four hundred of the great tenor's rec...

Musical Symbolism in the Operas of Debussy and Bartók explores the means by which two early 20th century operas - Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) and Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle (1911) - transformed the harmonic structures of the traditional major/minor scale system into a new musical language. It also looks at how this language reflects the psychodramatic symbolism of the Franco-Belgian poet, Maurice Maeterlinck, and his Hungarian disciple, Béla Baláz...

Mozart's greatest works were written in Vienna in the decade before his death (1781–1791). This biography focuses on Mozart's dual roles as a performer and composer and reveals how his compositional processes are affected by performance-related concerns. It traces consistencies and changes in Mozart's professional persona and his modus operandi and sheds light on other prominent musicians, audience expectations, publishing, and concert and dramatic practices and traditions. Giving particul...