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The Opera Lover's Companion: Charles Osborne

Dr Johnson, in the eighteenth century, took the idiosyncratic view that opera was an `exotic and irrational entertainment'. Opera was certainly that at its inception more than a hundred yeras before Samuel Johnson's birth, when a group of noblemen in Florence, intent on reviving the drama of ancient Greece, encouraged into existence a new theatrical art form which combined words and music. In the very first opera, Dafne, composed by Jacopo Peri in 1597, although the entire text was sung and the words took precedence over the music, not by intention but because the music for the most part followed the inflections of speech, only occasionally broadening into something approaching melody.

With the stage works of Claudio Monteverdi, the first great composer of opera, the division between this heightened speech (recitative) and the quasi-melodi sections of the drama (arioso) have become more pronouced. Italian opera developed quickly and was soon being staged by the imperial court in Vienna as well as at smaller princely courts throughout the German-speaking countries. In due course it spread ot France and eventually, after the Restoration, to London, where the first real English opera, purcell's Dido and Aeneas, was staged in 1689. Early in the eighteenth century, Italian opera established itself in London, and what had begun as an entertainment for aristocratic intellectuals gradually became popular with a wide public.

In Italy opera soon became the most popular form of theatre, remaining so throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. In other European countries, especially Germany and Austria, it often shared the stages of civic theatres with straight plays. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there are in the United States of America and Canada more than 140 professional companies staging regular (although, outside the principal cities, not necessarily lengthy) annual seasons of opera, while in Britain there are several well established companies, ranging from the Royal Opera, English National Opera, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Opera North, Scottish Opera and Welsh National Opera to such smaller-scale companies as English Touring Opera, City of Birmingham Touring Opera and British Youth Opera.

The staples of the operatic diet today are the major works of five great composers - Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Puccini and Strauss (and one could add Beethoven here for his only opera, Fidelio, a masterpiece that I consider hors concours) - as well as operas by Handel, Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, Bizet, Bassenet, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky and Briten, and selected works of a large number of other composers, among them Berlioz, Gluck, Gounod, Humperdinck, Janacek, Leoncavallo, Mascagni, Offenbach, Saint-Saens, Smetana and Weber (in tactful alphabetical order).

I have included nearly two hundred operas in this guide - all of thise that are regularly performed today, as well as a good many that one encounters in the opera house less frequently. I have placed each opera in context in its composer's development, and have also discussed the circumstances surrounding its composition and first production. I have followed this with a brief synopsis of the plot, and also my personal assessment of the music, paying particular attention to the most important and significant arias, duets and ensembles.

Review

'A loving and expert guide to the great operas in the repertoire, written from many years of experience. A must for all opera lovers young and old. I love it.' Dame Joan Sutherland 'An erudite, instructive and unpretentious guide.' Michael Kennedy, The Sunday Telegraph 'This book is exactly what the title claims: an opera lover's companion. Reading it is like going to the opera with a knowledgeable friend who tells you enough to make you want to see the piece but not so much you're drowned in superfluous detail.'

--Richard Fawkes, Opera Now

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