April 2015
The Oxford Handbook of Opera offers a series of trenchant essays on the most important and compelling issues confronting those who think and write about opera. The handbook emphasizes not only operas themselves, but such broad concerns of the discipline as genre, voice, national style, performance, censorship, staging, film, editions, and aesthetics. In doing so, the volume captures the breadth, direction, and tone of opera studies, and most especially its methodologies. The handbook organizes fifty contributions into eight large divisions: Foundations, The Libretto, Production, Performance, Opera and Society, Criticizing Opera, Transmission and Reception, and a postlude about contemporary opera and the future of opera. Each section is designed to reflect the systematic and humanistic concerns of scholars as they juxtapose historical and critical approaches to the issues. The postlude is concerned with the multiplicity of ideas about opera in the culture of atonality and technology, opera absent what the Italians call vocalità, opera in an age that wants to remake the repertoire in its own image, and the opera of the future. The Oxford Handbook of Opera emphasizes criticism and analysis, but also the complex relationship between scholarship and performance as well as the emotionally-charged dynamic between opera and its audience.
