The Wordsworth Book of Opera

This concise and comprehensive guide is designed to meet the needs of today’s opera- lover. It contains synopses of eighty-three major operas by forty-one composers from Monteverdi and Purcell, through Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Debussy and Janácek, to Alban Berg, Tippett and Britten.

As the authors remark in the introduction, opera is a strange, complex and fascinating art, and its increasing popularity means that more and more people are exploring its subtleties and beauty. In The Wordsworth Book of Opera, the lively accounts of the plots and the characters, together with the musical examples, make it the ideal hand-book for the newcomer to opera and to the enthusiast alike.