Music: Styles & Genres

'One of the most sought-after tenors with the stamina and heft for Wagner and the ardent warmth for Italian opera'New York TimesJonas Kaufmann is a...

The Gilded Stage is a comprehensive tour of the world of opera. From its origins in the courts of northern Italy, to its internationally recognise...

Tosca, one of Puccinis greatest and most popular operas, is a supreme example of musics power to enthral the audience. In his introductory essay to...

Verdis War and Peace, writes Peter Conrad of this epic opera composed in 1862. It encompasses the extremes of a religious and secular existence th...

A lyric comedy unlike any other, wrote Verdi about his last opera. That the last work of a composer who was almost notorious for his preference for...

The history of women in the opera is a grand story. Women were singers and patrons, of course, but from opera's beginnings in Renaissance Italy,...

Rigoletto was first produced at the Teatro La Fenice, Venice, in 1851, and is generally seen as marking the beginning of Giuseppe Verdis extraordin...

Winton Dean relates how Otello came into being as much because of the persistence of Verdis publisher as of the composers lifelong passion for Shak...

These Opera Guides are ideal com-panions to the opera. They provide stimulating introductory articles together with the complete text of each opera...

These Opera Guides are ideal companions to the opera. They provide stimulating introductory articles together with the complete text of each opera ...

Wagner wanted Siegfried, the third music drama in The Ring of the Nibelung, to be the most popular of the cycle. Despite its many beautiful and dra...

A Turandot filtered through a modern brain, wrote Puccini, describing his plans to rework the eighteenth-century fable by Carlo Gozzi. According to...

With his last opera Mozart created a piece of theatre which defies categorization. In theory it is a Singspiel, a mixture of songs and dialogue, in...

Richard Wagners fifteen-hour operatic cycle The Ring of the Nibelung ends with this great music drama. Michael Tanners essay tackles the scale and ...

Pick A Chord follows the ethos of Weedon's hugely influential Play In A Day book and DVD, giving guitarists the tools needed to start playing from ...