Charles Annesley

Charming, outdated, and still useful.

Before the days of LPs and the internet, one can only see/hear an opera either by attending it in an opera house, playing it at home with the score, or listening on the burgeoning wireless to live performances. Either way, it helped to have a summary of what was happening. Books like this were cherished by generations, beloved household items alongside "stories from the ballet" and "Stories from Shakespeare".

In many ways, this book is of course outdated, as it's now much easier to find out this information and of course operas come with surtitles in the theatre, subtitles at home, and so on. Additionally this is not one of the supreme examples of this kind of book, as most of the summaries are fairly short and do not include musical examples. Nevertheless it's valuable for its insight into the period between its first publication (~1896) and its revised publication (1921) for the many operas that fell off the stage sometime before 1950. There are countless works here that one will never see performed, outside of perhaps a regional European house. It gives me hope that there are still great works out there waiting to be rediscovered when the right conductor and vocalists come along.… (mehr)