A Pocket Guide to Opera - Softcover

Rupert Christiansen is the opera critic for the London Daily Telegraph and a member of the editorial board of Opera magazine. He has contributed to many newspapers and magazines, including The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. He lives in England.

London-based critic Christiansen enters the crowded field of opera guides with this informative and engaging traversal of the form's history and key works from Monteverdi to John Adams. Grouping the operas by period (baroque and classical) or geography (Italian, Slavic), with a chapter on operetta, he provides short synopses, historical context, some musical details, comments on various producers' and directors' stagings, and suggested audio and video recordings. Though Christiansen includes all the major operas one would expect (e.g., Mozart's Don Giovanni, Puccini's La Boheme, Verdi's Aida, and Wagner's Tristan and Isolde), some of his choices reveal a slightly British bias and result in odd imbalances. He treats almost the entirety of Benjamin Britten's oeuvre other than church parables, while he is much more parsimonious with American titles, referring only fleetingly to such composers as Philip Glass, who have made significant contributions to the genre. Also, Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore would probably be a more familiar title worldwide than Iolanthe. Fortunately, Christiansen confesses that he is not able to do as much justice to certain aspects of the topic as he would like in his chosen pocket format. Despite some disconcertingly snide remarks and a few errors of fact, this title is recommended as a reasonably priced companion to M. Owen Lee's The Operagoer's Guide, which covers much of the same repertoire from a more direct North American viewpoint. Barry Zaslow, Miami Univ. Libs., Oxford, OH
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