Opera is the fastest growing of all the performing arts, attracting audiences of all ages who are enthralled by the gorgeous music, vivid drama, and magnificent productions. If you've decided that the time has finally come to learn about opera and discover it for yourself, this is the book for you.

Opera 101 is recognized as the standard text in English for anyone who wants to become an opera lover. It is a clear, friendly, and truly

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"In times of delirious, madcap fun and political turmoil, opera fans have expressed their passion by dispatching records into the cosmos, building fairy-tale castles, and singing together through the arduous work of social justice. OPERA welcomes readers and listeners to a community full of friendship, passion, critique-and always, beautiful music"--

When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died in 1791 at the age of just 35, he nonetheless left behind the defining composition in every available musical genre of his time: symphony, chamber music, masses, and above all - opera. Opera was the prestige genre of the era, and the thought of it, Mozart wrote, made him "beside myself at once." It was a form he loved dearly, depending on it heavily for personal, professional, artistic, and financial reasons of

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The book introduces opera and analyzes eight masterpieces: "Don Giovanni" by Mozart, "Dido and Aeneas" by Purcell, "The Barber of Seville" by Rossini, "Rigoletto" by Verdi, "The mastersingers of Nuremberg" by Wagner, "Boris Godunov" by Mussorgsky, "Carmen" by Bizet, and "Tosca" by Puccini. The cd contains key songs from each opera that are broken into "timelines" in the text.

"User's guide to opera--Matthew Aucoin, "the most promising operatic talent in a generation" (New York Times Magazine), describes the creation of his groundbreaking new work, Eurydice, and shares his reflections on the past, present, and future of opera"-- "From its beginning, opera has been an impossible art. Its first practitioners, in seventeenth-century Florence, set themselves the unreachable goal of reproducing the wonders of ancient Greek...