The Metropolitan Opera (e-book) (used book) | John Freeman | bookbook.eu

Description

For anyone who has tried to unscramble the plot of Mozart's The Magic Flute by skimming through an illegible synopsis in a rapidly darkening hall, this compact, well-written, well-designed collection of stories of the great operas will be a boon. The book, published jointly by the Metropolitan Opera Guild and W. W. Norton, contains the plots of 150 of the world's most popular operas; there are also short, informative biographies of each of the 72 composers represented, and historical background material pertinent to each work.

The operas included do not reflect an exclusively Metropolitan Opera House repertory, but are truly international. The list, ranging from Argento to Weill, from Adriana Lecouvreur to Werther, is representative of opera composers and their works from sixteenth-century Italy to twentieth-century America. They are drawn not only from the literature in the three major operatic languages--Italian, German, and French--but from the Russian, English, Czech, Hungarian, and Spanish. The operas are arranged alphabetically under the composer's name. An additional index listing all the usual versions of a title (i.e. The Magic Flute, Die Zauberflöte, La Flûte Enchantée) makes access to the material even easier.