The Operagoer's Guide: One Hundred Stories and Commentaries

In this volume, Father M. Owen Lee writes for the 21st-century operagoer, briskly and stylishly telling the stories of 100 of the world's greatest music dramas – from Aïda to Die Zauberflöte. The stories told in music by Mozart, Wagner, Verdi, Puccini and Strauss are brought to life here with wit, insight and boundless enthusiasm. When compiling and composing this pocket-sized handbook, Fr. Lee considered the unique needs of the modern operagoer. Contemporary text-translating services have made pure synopses somewhat redundant. Fr. Lee, therefore, has focused his commentaries less on the comings and goings of plot than on subtext, motivation and background information. He also suggests his single favorite recording for each of the 100 operas discussed. In all, he has written a guide that will prove invaluable to the opera novice and useful even for the aficionado.

M. Owen Lee, a member of the Basilian Fathers, is Emeritus Professor of Classics at the University of Toronto, where he recently received an Outstanding Teacher Award and an honorary Doctor of Laws degree. Author of books of Virgil's Aeneid and Horace's Odes, he is best-known for his books on opera: First Intermissions, Wagner's Ring, A Season of Opera, and The Operagoer's Guide. Father Owen Lee is to opera what Chesterton's Father Brown was to crime detection. For 20 years Father Lee has been a beloved presence on the Metropolitan Opera's Saturday afternoon Chevron-Texaco broadcasts as an always knowledgeable guest on Opera Quiz and as an ever-insightful commentator on operatic stories, music, and themes. A classics professor in his "day job," Father Lee is the author of 14 books, mostly on opera. A Book of Hours is a departure for Father Lee: a personal memoir, cast in the form of a secular breviary, that recreates a year Father Lee spent teaching at an American college campus in Rome over a quarter century ago. The book draws together in an intricate web of refracting relationships the three great loves of Father Lee's life: opera, literature, and his life and work as a priest. A Eurail pass allowed him to visit all the great opera houses of Europe, which in turn reflected on his teaching in the classroom during the week: Homer and Virgil, Whitman and Rilke. And all of this is set in the context of a personal crisis-impending hearing loss, theological doubts, and the celibate's inevitable regret, at age forty, that he cannot share his remaining years with children of his own. In this inspiring and beautifully crafted book, Father Lee shows us how religious faith and a deeply humanistic culture need never be enemies, but rather can be a source of mutual enrichment.