List of Illustrations

Preface to the Fourth Edition

Introduction

PART 1 Music and Drama to the End of the Sixteenth Century

1 The Lyric Theater of the Greeks

2 Medieval Dramatic Music

3 The Immediate Forerunners of Opera

PART 2 The Seventeenth Century

4 The Beginnings: Opera in Florence and Mantea

5 Other Early Seventeenth-Century Italian Court Operas, Including the First Comic Operas in Florence and Rome

6 Italian Opera in the Later Seventeenth Century in Italy

7 Seventeenth-Century Italian Opera in German-Speaking Lands

8 Early German Opera

9 Opera in France from Lully to Charpentier

10 Opera in England

PART 3 The Eighteenth Century

11 Masters of the Early Eighteenth Century

12 Opera Seria: General Characteristics

13 Opera Seria: The Composers

14 The Operas of Gluck

15 The Comic Opera of the Eighteenth Century

16 The Operas of Mozart and His Viennese Contemporaries

PART 4 The Nineteenth Century

17 The Turn of the Century

18 Grand Opera

19 Opéra Comique, Operetta, and Lyric Opera

20 Italian Opera of the Primo Ottocento: Rossini, Donizetti, Verdi, and Their Contemporaries

21 The Romantic Opera in Germany

22 The Operas of Wagner

23 The Later Nineteenth Century: France, Italy, Germany, and Austria

PART 5 Other National Traditions of Opera from the Seventeenth to the Early Twentieth Centuries

24 National Traditions of Opera

PART 6 The Twentieth Century

25 Introduction Opera in France and Italy

26 Opera in the German-Speaking Countries

27 National Opera in Russia and Neighboring Countries; Central and Eastern Europe; Greece and Turkey; the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland; Spain, Portugal, and Latin America

28 Opera in the British Isles, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand

29 Opera in the United States

Appendix: Chinese Opera (Xiqu)

List of Abbreviations

Bibliography

Sources and Translations of Musical Examples

Index