The Opera Guide

THE OPERA GUIDE – 100 POPULAR COMPOSERS surveys the world’s greatest opera composers and their most popular works. Beginning with Monteverdi, who wrote the first important operas, they range through the repertory up to today’s ground-breaking works by Philip Glass, George Benjamin and other living composers. 


As David Pountney explains in his foreword, opera has steadily grown over the last 400 years and is now more popular and more diverse than ever before. This unique guide offers you information written by experts on all the important works, so whether you are going out or staying in for an opera, whether you are a novice or a confirmed aficionado, amateur or professional, this book provides what you need. A few minutes reading will enhance your experience of any of the 250 works covered in this book. 


Amanda Holden began working on the Opera Guides in the 1980s. They were published in four editions by Penguin/Viking and internationally acclaimed. Each composer article includes biographical detail in an operatic context before examining their most popular operatic works in detail, with background, synopsis and musical insights. The material has all been revised and expanded for this eBook edition, making it the most up-to-date source of operatic information available.