Product Description: The Rough Guide to Opera is a unique handbook on the most thrilling of art forms, spanning four hundred years of music drama. The title features lively biographical sketches of some 150 composers from Claudio Monteverdi to Poul Ruders, animating the main events of their careers and revealing their social and musical context...read more

Product Description: Spanning a thousand years of music from Gregorian chant to works by contemporary composers such as Judith Weir and Wolfgang Rihm, The Rough Guide to Classical Music forms an indispensable guide to composers and key-recordings. The book combines informative summaries of the major compositions in all genres, with incisive reviews of hundreds of CDs, selecting the best of the latest recordings and the pick of the re-issues...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: As we move into the 21st century, opera is enjoying a popular revival. Since its birth in the late 1500s, opera has generally suffered from the misconception that only the privileged few, educated in the language and musical traditions of an elitist art form, could enjoy the genre...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Covers nearly four centuries of opera, with biographical sketches, reviews, and synopses of operas.

Lists and describes one hundred of the best opera compact discs, from Puccini's 'Madama Butterfly' to Verdi's 'Aida'

Product Description: One of Germany's most successful and popular composers, Richard Strauss (1864-1949) enjoyed huge celebrity, vast wealth, and unequaled adulation during his lifetime. His masterful tone poems and operas, including Der Rosenkavalier, Salome, and Elektra, form a musical legacy that endures today...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Sketches of opera composers, opera synopsises, and CD reviews. (view table of contents)

Lists more than 400 composers, providing a biographical profile, a discussion of selected works, and a recommendation of recordings