The pathos of this heart-rending story about a sweet-natured Japanese girl and the caddish American naval lieutenant who marries then deserts her has seldom been conveyed with such emotional directness. In his sumptuous filming of Puccini's opera, director Jean-Pierre Ponnelle uses an array of cinematic effects to evoke the protagonists' irreconcilably separate lives and worlds. As Butterfly, Mirella Freni is unbearably moving in one of the finest...

The Metropolitan has stood among the grandest of opera companies since its birth in 1883. Tracing the offstage/onstage workings of this famed New York institution, Charles Affron and Mirella Jona Affron tell how the Met became and remains a powerful actor on the global cultural scene. In this first new history of the company in thirty years, each of the chronologically sequenced chapters surveys a composer or a slice of the repertoire and brings to...

A young woman in flight from her past, and an old woman whose secrets are contained in the grave ... With this configuration Kathryn Davis, the acclaimed author of Labrador, begins a novel of true bravura - about opera, Denmark, adultery, and murder. In upstate New York, Frances Thorn waits tables in a diner, despite her privileged, educated background, and raises her twin daughters without the presence or even a memory of their father. But these...

Deep in the passageways below the Paris Opera lives a lonely, talented, horribly disfigured man who revels in terrorizing the theater's employees as THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA. But when the masked Phantom sees young Christine Daaé, his heart melts. He secretly trains her, transforms her into a star ... and loves her. But when she cannot return his affection, as her heart already belongs to another, all the pain that the Phantom has held within is revealed...