Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface to the Fourth Edition

Introduction

PART 1  Music and Drama to the End of the Sixteenth Century

  1  The Lyric Theater of the Greeks

  2  Medieval Dramatic Music

  3  The Immediate Forerunners of Opera

PART 2  The Seventeenth Century

  4  The Beginnings: Opera in Florence and Mantua

  5  Other Early Seventeenth-Century Italian Court Operas, Including the First Comic Operas in Florence and Rome

  6  Italian Opera in the Later Seventeenth Century in Italy

  7  Seventeenth-Century Italian Opera in German-Speaking Lands

  8  Early German Opera

  9  Opera in France from Lully to Charpentier

10  Opera in England

PART 3  The Eighteenth Century

11  Masters of the Early Eighteenth Century

12  Opera Seria: General Characteristics

13  Opera Seria: The Composers

14  The Operas of Gluck

15  The Comic Opera of the Eighteenth Century

16  The Operas of Mozart and His Viennese Contemporaries

PART 4  The Nineteenth Century

17  The Turn of the Century

18  Grand Opera

19  Opéra Comique, Operetta, and Lyric Opera

20  Italian Opera of the Primo Ottocento: Rossini, Donizetti, Verdi, and Their Contemporaries

21  The Romantic Opera in Germany

22  The Operas of Wagner

23  The Later Nineteenth Century: France, Italy, Germany, and Austria

PART 5  Other National Traditions of Opera from the Seventeenth to the Early Twentieth Centuries

24  National Traditions of Opera

PART 6 The Twentieth Century

25  Introduction / Opera in France and Italy

26  Opera in the German-Speaking Countries

27  National Opera in Russia and Neighboring Countries; Central and Eastern Europe; Greece and Turkey; the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland; Spain, Portugal, and Latin America

28  Opera in the British Isles, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand

29  Opera in the United States

Appendix: Chinese Opera (Xiqu)

List of Abbreviations

Bibliography

Sources and Translations of Musical Examples

Index