The Complete Calder Opera Guides Collection

£480.00 £240.00

A very special collection: the entire Calder Opera Guides series – all 48 books – for only £250 (RRP £480). Includes all of the original texts:

Rigoletto

By Giuseppe Verdi

£12.00 £9.60

Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto was first produced at La Fenice, Venice, in 1851 and is generally seen as marking the beginning of his middle period; it was followed in quick succession by Il trovatore and La traviata. The opera is based on Victor Hugo’s play, Le Roi s’amuse, and like its source it faced…

Tosca

By Giacomo Puccini

£12.00 £9.60

Tosca, one of Puccini’s greatest and most popular operas, is a supreme example of music’s power to enthral the audience. In his introductory essay to this guide, Bernard Williams discusses the enduring quality of its appeal. Bernard Keeffe, in his article, analyses different aspects of the score, no…

Parsifal

By Richard Wagner

£12.00 £9.60

From its conception in 1857 to its first performances in 1882, Parsifal represented the culmination of the themes that preoccupied Wagner during the latter part of his life. This guide includes a series of articles on Wagner’s profound and complex opera, which the composer preferred to call a Bu¨hne…

Otello (Othello)

By Giuseppe Verdi

£12.00 £9.60

Otello, Verdi’s penultimate opera, was composed more than a dozen years after Aida, which he had intended to be his last work for the stage. He was persuaded by his publisher Giulio Ricordi to work with the librettist Arrigo Boito on an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello; the resulting work is one…

Norma

By Vincenzo Bellini

£12.00 £9.60

Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma, first produced at La Scala, Milan, in 1831, is widely regarded as the greatest achievement of the bel canto era. Its title role, sung at the premiere by Giuditta Pasta, has been undertaken in more recent times by Maria Callas, Joan Sutherland and Monserrat Caballé and remai…

Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro)

By Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

£12.00 £9.60

Le nozze di Figaro is one of Mozart’s best-loved and most enduring works. The first of the three operas he wrote with Lorenzo da Ponte and based on Beaumarchais’s play, it established the thirty-year-old Mozart as an opera composer of the very first rank. Its combination of wit, acute psychological…

La traviata

By Giuseppe Verdi

£12.00 £9.60

La traviata was Giuseppe Verdi’s eighteenth opera and shows him at the height of his middle-period powers. Adapted from La Dame aux camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils, it portrays the love between the courtesan Violetta Valéry and the young Alfredo Germont in fashionable Parisian society, with its ine…

La bohème

By Giacomo Puccini

£12.00 £9.60

Puccini’s La bohème is one of the most beloved and enduring operas of all time. In this guide, William Ashbrook evaluates the opera’s initial reception, the reasons for its wide appeal and Verdi’s influence on the composition. Nicholas John discusses the tortuous evolution of the libretto over the c…

Idomeneo

By Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

£12.00 £9.60

Mozart wrote Idomeneo when he was twenty-four years old, and the opera was described by Albert Einstein as ‘one of those works that even a genius like Mozart could write only once in his life’. It is one of most astonishing achievements of an altogether astonishing career. In this newly commissioned…

Eugene Onegin

By Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

£12.00 £9.60

Eugene Onegin is the most popular of Tchaikovsky’s operas. Entitled ‘Lyrical Scenes after Pushkin’ by the composer, the work takes as its basis the poem of the same name by the great Russian writer Alexander Pushkin. Its story of the unrequited love of Tatyana for the world-weary Onegin has exerted…

Don Giovanni

By Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

£12.00 £9.60

Don Giovanni is one of Mozart’s most popular and enduringly fascinating works. E.T.A Hoffmann described it as the ‘opera of all operas’. This edition begins with a discussion of its comic elements by Michael F. Robinson. An overall view of the score is given by David Wyn Jones. showing how Mozart ma…

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers of Nuremberg)

By Richard Wagner

£12.00 £9.60

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is the only comedy among Richard Wagner’s mature works. Unusually for Wagner, it is set in a historically specific time and place, sixteenthcentury Nuremberg, and tells of a song contest among the town’s guildsmen. It nevertheless explores the same themes of renewal, r…

Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman)

By Richard Wagner

£12.00 £9.60

Der fliegende Holländer is the first of Wagner’s operas that the author considered to be representative of his mature style. The Dutchman embodies one of the major themes that recur throughout Wagner’s work: that of a central character seeking redemption from a loving woman. Originally taken from a…

Così fan tutte

By Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

£12.00 £9.60

Following the great successes of Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte was the last of the three operas that Mozart wrote with the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. Although well received at its premiere in Vienna in 1790, it was then largely neglected until the mid-twentieth century. Its c…

Carmen

By Georges Bizet

£12.00 £9.60

Carmen is one of the most enduringly popular of all operas, and the most successful of Georges Bizet’s works. Following its premiere at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in 1875, it has gone on to be performed at all the major opera houses of the world. With its searing depiction of passion, obsession and…

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

By Benjamin Britten

£12.00 £9.60

A Midsummer Night’s Dream was Benjamin Britten’s seventh major opera and had its premiere at Aldeburgh in 1960. Britten and his partner Peter Pears prepared a condensed version of Shakespeare’s much-loved comedy for the libretto, using (with the exception of a single line) only the original text. In…