Books in the Cambridge Opera Handbooks series

Incorporating the findings of the most recent research, this compact and up-to-date guide to Verdi's Falstaff provides a reliable summary of what is currently known about the work. It includes a synopsis of the plot and an account both of Verdi's aims in composing the opera and of how he actually composed it.

In this text John Tyrrell brings together letters, early reviews and other documents on the composition of "Kat'a Kabanova" and its early performances. Key interpretations of the opera range from one by the opera's German translator to Janacek's first biographer Max Brod.

Bruce Alan Brown offers several paths towards a closer understanding of Cosi fan tutte.

This book is a study of Mozart's Don Giovanni, his second opera to a libretto by da Ponte. Although it is one of the handful of best-known and most often performed operas of the last two hundred years, Don Giovanni is seldom given in an authentic form and arguments persist as to its nature.

This handbook explores Bizet's famous opera in a number of contexts, from its origin in Merimee's short story to the film adaptations of the last thirty years.