A Short History of Opera

Description

When first published in 1947, A Short History of Opera immediately achieved international status as a classic in the field. This thoroughly revised and expanded fourth edition examines not only the standard performance repertoire, but also works considered important for the genre's development, from its Greek forerunners to the present day. The section on twentieth-century opera has been reorganized around national operatic traditions including a chapter devoted solely to opera in the United States, which incorporates material on the American musical and ties between classical.;ILLUSTRATIONS; PREFACE TO THE 4TH EDITION; INTRODUCTION; PART 1: Music and Drama to the End of the Sixteenth Century; Chapter 1: The Lyric Theater of the Greeks; Chapter 2: Medieval Dramatic Music; Chapter 3: The Immediate Forerunners of Opera; PART 2: The Seventeenth Century; Chapter 4: The Beginnings: Opera in Florence and Mantua; Chapter 5: Other Early Seventeenth-Century Italian Court Operas, Including the First Comic Operas in Florence and Rome; Chapter 6: Italian Opera in the Later Seventeeth Century in Italy.