Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A systematic survey, presenting the essential points in the history of opera clearly and in the proper proportion, with musical examples throughout.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• List of Illustrations
• Preface to the Fourth Edition
• Introduction
• Part 1 Music and Drama to the End of the Sixteenth Century
• 1 The Lyric Theater of the Greeks
• 2 Medieval Dramatic Music
• 3 The Immediate Forerunners of Opera
• Part 2 The Seventeenth Century
• 4 The Beginnings: Opera in Florence and Mantua
• 5 Other Early Seventeenth-Century Italian Court Operas, Including the First Comic Operas in Florence and Rome
• 6 Italian Opera in the Later Seventeenth Century in Italy
• 7 Seventeenth-Century Italian Opera in German-Speaking Lands
• 8 Early German Opera
• 9 Opera in France from Lully to Charpentier
• 10 Opera in England
• Part 3 The Eighteenth Century
• 11 Masters of the Early Eighteenth Century
• 12 Opera Seria: General Characteristics
• 13 Opera Seria: The Composers
• 14 The Operas of Gluck
• 15 The Comic Opera of the Eighteenth Century
• 16 The Operas of Mozart and His Viennese Contemporaries
• Part 4 The Nineteenth Century
• 17 The Turn of the Century
• 18 Grand Opera
• 19 Opera Comique, Operetta, and Lyric Opera
• 20 Italian Opera of the Primo Ottocento: Rossini, DOnizetti, Verdi, and Their Contemporaries
• 21 The Romantic Opera in Germany
• 22 The Operas of Wagner
• 23 The Later Nineteenth Century: France, Italy, Germany, and Austria
• Part 5 Other National Traditions of Opera from the Seventeenth to the Early Twentieth Centuries
• 24 National Traditions of Opera
• Part 6 The Twentieth Century
• 25 Introduction/Opera in France and Italy
• 26 Opera in the German-Speaking Countries
• 27 National Opera in Russia and Neighboring COuntries; Central and Eastern Europe; Greece and Turkey; the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Finland; Spain, Portugal, and Latin America
• 28 Opera in the British Isles, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand
• 29 Opera in the United States
• Appendix: Chinese Opera (Xiqu)
• List of Abbreviations
• Bibliography
• Sources and Translations of Musical Examples
• Index