Opera is in many ways the most extraordinary artistic medium of the last four hundred years. Prohibitively expensive and patently unrealistic, it can nevertheless paint the human passions with astonishing power and drama. This book, the first full-length, single-volume history of opera for more than a generation, provides in-depth discussions of many works by the greatest opera composers, from Monteverdi, Handel and Mozart, to Verdi and Wagner, to Strauss, Puccini, Berg and Britten. There are lively discussions of opera"s social, political and literary backgrounds, its economic circumstances and the almost continual polemics that have accompanied its development through the centuries. Central to the book is an exploration of the tensions - between words and music, character and singer - that have always sustained and enlivened opera. In a polemical final chapter, Abbate and Parker examine the problems that opera has faced in the last half century, when new works - which were...