Reinhard Strohm examines the relationship between Handel's great operas and the earlier European Baroque tradition.

30 essays on opera, written between 1952 and 1985, are collected and arranged by topic.

Thomas McGeary's book explores the relationship between Italian opera and British partisan politics in the era of George Frideric Handel.

This essay on opera by Francesco Algarotti is an important, but neglected treatise of eighteenth century musical aesthetics. It belongs to that movement in the arts that rejected the artificiality and formality of Baroque style and moved towards the naturalness of expression characteristic of the painting, literature, drama, fashion, and gardening of the latter part of that century.

This volume of eleven essays, compiled as a tribute to Winton Dean on his seventieth birthday, focuses on that area which has absorbed Winton Dean's interest throughout his distinguished career: opera and other theatre music. The first half of the book covers the period from the late seventeenth century to the mid-eighteenth. The second half of the book ranges over later opera: operacomique; Mendelssohn's operas; the influence of Wagner; the finales of Janácek's operas; and Britten's first two major operas, Peter Grimes and The Rape of Lucretia.

"A Poetics of Handel's Operas investigates the rich representational fabric of Handel's stories, drawing upon musicology, narratology, drama, and film in offering a study with appeal to scholars, producers and performers, opera afficionados, and anyone fascinated by storytelling. In most storytelling genres, we often distinguish between the story, on the one hand, and the way that story is represented, on the other, without a second thought. We know that a character in a film hears neither her own voice-over nor the ambient music that accompanies it, and that she does not really build a house from the ground up in the three minutes spanned by the cinematic montage that depict its construction. In opera, however, many commentators to this day characterize the medium as "unrealistic," since we know, for example, that people in the real world do not sing to each other, nor does orchestral music accompany their utterances. This said, the vocal and orchestral music, while not literally present in the world of the story surely have a great deal to tell us about the opera's story and its characters, and if we distinguish the performance we see and hear on the stage and in the orchestra pit from the story represented, we enable ourselves to construct stories that are no less coherent than those conveyed by other media. By avoiding conflation of the story and its representation, we enable ourselves to engage more meaningfully with the significance of these and many other unique aspects of operatic storytelling"--