Metropolitan Opera Stories of the Great Operas

“Explores a large area of repertory that lies beyond the basic, with considerable attention paid to American opera, but includes also the less familiar operas of Rossini, Verdi, Massenet, and Wagner. Freeman has organized his material in fastidious though not excessive detail and presents it in a down-to-earth, conversational manner. His highly informative essays on the composers are particularly valuable.” ―George Jellinek

The opera-goer's indispensable guide. About to see Rossini’s William Tell, Verdi’s I Lombardi, Gluck’s Alceste, Philzner’s Palestrina, Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream? The stories of these operas and 120 others are told, clearly and concisely, in this companion volume to the highly successful Metropolitan Open Stories of the Great Operas. Opera News associate editor John W. Freeman untangles and summarizes the often complicated plots and provides, in addition, an informative biographical sketch of each composer, world and U.S. premiere dates, lists of characters, and other background information. The works included here are selected from the repertory of European and American opera companies. They span more than three and one-half centuries, from Monteverdi’s Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria (1640) to Philip Glass’s The Voyage (1992), and are set in venues as diverse as the legendary Palace of Time (Lully’s Atys) and twentieth-century Manhattan (Anthony Davis’s X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X). The operas are arranged alphabetically by composer and indexed by all the usual versions of the title (e.g., Der Zigeunerbaron, The Gypsy Baron). Published jointly by the Metropolitan Opera Guild and W. W. Norton, the book is not only a most valuable resource but also, as Beverly Sills notes in her foreword, immense fun just to read.

Beverly Sills (b. 1929 – d. 2007) was an American opera singer, general manager of the New York City Opera, Chairman of Lincoln Center, and Chairman of the Metropolitan Opera.