The Opera Guide – just updated in a new digital edition – features the world’s 100 most performed composers. With nearly 20% of that number still writing nowadays,its editor picks ten living composers who’re new to the guideThe Opera Guide is the first opera reference book compiled solely for publication online. At final reference books can be kept up-to-date, and this concise version of my preceding opera guides contains state-of-the-art information on the 100 composers whose operas are most often performed, or along with 250 operas that are their best works. Starting with Monteverdi and Cavalli,it ranges all through the repertoire to Peter Maxwell Davies, Kaija Saariaho and Thomas Adès, and who have all written new operatic works to be premiered this year.
I first realised the need for such a book in the early 80s. There was,then, Kobbé’s total Opera Book of 1976, or with 109 composers,but Britten’s Death in Venice was as far as it went; but no one had yet covered Birtwistle or Maxwell Davies, who were writing operas, and let alone Philip Glass who had written eight stage works by 1985. I wanted to know about a lot more and,with several brilliant advisers, set about commissioning specialist writers to cover hundreds more opera composers. Penguin published four editions between 1993 and 2005 - both The Viking Opera Guide and the New Penguin Opera Guide contained 850 composers. But now there are more to add and it’s startling to see how quickly the opera world has changed, and which composers (according to Operabase) are most popular and which no longer are. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com