A History of Opera

Oct 5, 2024 5:53 PM

Author:Roger Parker,Carolyn Abbate

A History of Opera

Opera is in many ways the most extraordinary artistic medium of the last four hundred years. Prohibitively expensive and patently unrealistic, it can nevertheless paint the human passions with astonishing power and drama. This book, the first new, full-length, single-volume history of opera for more than a generation provokes in-depth discussions of many works by the greatest opera composers, from Monteverdi, Handel and Mozart, to Verdi and Wagner, to Strauss, Puccini, Berg, and Britten. There are lively discussions of opera's social, political and literary background, its economic cicumstances and the almost continual polemics that have accompanied its development through the centuries. Central to the book is an exploration of the tensions that have always sustained and enlivened opera. Abbate and Parker examine the problems that opera has faced in the last half century, when new works - which were once opera's life-blood - have shrunk to a tiny minority, have largely failed to find a permanent place in the repertoire.

Yet the book's final message is one of celebration. Even if the majority of opera's most popular and enduring works were written in what is now a remote European past, in circumstances very different from our own, and the viability of contemporary opera is ever more in question, opera as an art form remains extraordinarily buoyant and challenging. It continues to transform people physically, emotionally, and intellectually, and to articulate human experience in ways no other art form can match.

Reviews

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A superb achievement

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The perfect gift for any Morrissey fan

—— Daily Telegraph

A witty, well-informed collection of fact and anecdote, full of fascinating bits and pieces

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Goddard widens his previous book's mixture of detail and passionate celebration to Morrissey's entire aesthetic universe

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Superb

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In Rod Stewart’s raucous, laddish autobiography….his attitude towards women in his life is frequently indefensible but otherwise it’s often laugh-out-load funny

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[Rod] has warm good humour and a nice line in self-deprecation...He wears it well—and tells it even better.

—— Daily Mail

By some distance the most entertaining of last year’s...rock star memoirs.

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This book takes readers on an adventure, that is at times deeply moving, through the life of one of the UK's greatest singers.

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Ruthlessly entertaining

—— telegraph.co.uk

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