A comprehensive guide to opera for both beginners and connoisseurs. This book is a comprehensive guide to operas. Whether you are a novice or an experienced musician, Fellner’s book serves as an indispensable resource. Basic musical and dramatic materials accompany vocal scores of operas from the repertoire of great opera houses. With rich summaries, Fellner gives readers a rich overview of the world of Opera.

An illustrated retelling of the plots of fifteen well-known operas.

First Published in 1990. Information about individual operas and other types of musical theater is scattered throughout the enormous literature of music. This book is an effort to bring that data together by comprehensively indexing plots and descriptions of individual operatic background, criticism and analysis, musical themes and bibliographical references. The principal audience for this general reference guide will be for the non-specialist, but its hoped that persons specialising in opera would also find it useful.

"Oh no!" . . . you might say: "Not another book on Opera!" To be sure, there are certainly quite a few (and many quite excellent) books about Opera, which supply staggeringly thorough (and often overwhelming) plot summaries, which hardly anybody can keep straight. But this book is different - a real time-saver! For THIS modest little guide gives you SHORT, easy-to-read summaries of each Opera's plot, complete with the latest learning aid - Plot-O-Grams! So, whether you're en route to a live performance or sitting down at home to enjoy a CD or DVD recording - this guide will quickly get the least important bit (the plot) into your head - and out of the way. Then you can really enjoy the show!

The story of a man named Erik, an eccentric, physically deformed genius who terrorizes the Opera Garnier in Paris. He builds his home beneath it and takes the love of his life, a beautiful soprano, under his wing.