In a famous Parisian chess café, a down-and-out, HIM, accosts a former acquaintance, ME, who has made good, more or less. They talk about chess, about genius, about good and evil, about music, they gossip about the society in which they move, one of extreme inequality, of corruption, of envy, and about the circle of hangers-on in which the down-and-out abides. The down-and-out from time to time is possessed with movements almost like spasms, in which he imitates, he gestures, he rants. And...

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...

Few musical works loom as large in Western culture as Richard Wagner's four-part Ring of the Nibelung. In Finding an Ending, two eminent philosophers, Philip Kitcher and Richard Schacht, offer an illuminating look at this greatest of Wagner's achievements, focusing on its far-reaching and subtle exploration of problems of meanings and endings in this life and world. Kitcher and Schacht plunge the reader into the heart of Wagner's Ring, drawing out the philosophic...

Giuseppe Verdi remains the greatest operatic composer that Italy, the home of opera, has ever produced. Yet throughout his lifetime he claimed to detest composing and repeatedly rejected it. He was a landowner, a farmer, a politician and symbol of Italian independence; but his music tells a different story.An obsessive perfectionist, Verdi drove collaborators to despair but his works lauded from the start as dazzling feats of composition and characterization. From Rigoletto to Otello, La T...

Major composers including Mozart, Wagner, Verdi, Puccini, and Strauss * Legendary singers from the great divas to the Three Tenors * What to look for and listen to at the opera * The history of opera and why it endures * Stylistic variations and basic theoretical underpinnings * Appreciating the art form * Biographies of the opera's greatest artists * A survey of classic operas

Britten's opera Peter Grimes is based on George Crabbe's horrifying poem The Borough about early 19th century Aldeburgh, a North Sea fishing town in East Anglia. Its premiere at Sadlers Wells in 1945, shortly after VE Day, was a landmark moment in British operatic history. Britten's partner Peter Pears – like Britten a pacifist and conscientious objector – was in the title role. Britten and Pears, together with Montagu Slater, a communist journalist, created the libretto.Grimes, a fisherma...

Even Salieri, the notorious villain of Peter Shaffer's drama Amadeus, admired Mozart's comic opera Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), which was premièred in Vienna a few weeks before Mozart's death in December 1791. Though sometimes enjoyed as a children's opera, this is not a pantomime: rooted in Freemasonry, the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason, it promotes the ideals of progress, virtue, self-betterment, truth and justice. Tamino, an Egyptian Prince, has a magic flute to take him and...

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...

Butterfly is a delicate and impressionable geisha who thinks she has married Pinkerton, a US naval officer briefly stationed in Japan. Naive and loving as she is, she does not realise that for him the marriage is a sham, an extended 'date'. It's not long before he goes away, leaving her pregnant. Still, she trusts that he will return one fine day (Un bel dì). He does, but it is not the homecoming of which Madame Butterfly dreamed: she is devastated to discover that the callous Pinkerton is...

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...

The Modern Castrato: Gaetano Guadagni and the Coming of a New Operatic Age chronicles the career of the most significant castrato of the second half of the eighteenth-century. Through a coincidence of time and place, Gaetano Guadagni was on the forefront of the heroic opera reform, and many forward-thinking composers of the age created roles for him. Author Patricia Howard reveals that Guadagni may have been the only singer of the time fully able to understand the demands and oppo...