The Complete Book of Light Opera (Classic Reprint)

Book excerpt: Excerpt from The Complete Book of Light Opera Lord Harewood's comments in his preface to The Complete Opera Boo/r on selectivity apply equally to The Complete Boo/c of Light Opera. It is obviously impossible, if the book is to be kept within manageable proportions, to include all opere-ttas that people might see or hear, indeed might have seen or heard, for some of the appeal of the present volume, to the older generation of theatre goers at any rate, will be bound up with nostalgia. My selection is limited to the lightest genre of Light Opera. I have deliberately excluded Ope'ra Comique (delibes, Adam, Auber), Singspiel (mozart, Lortzing, Nicolai) and such light Operas as Vaughan Williams' The Poisoned Kiss, Arthur Benjamin's The Prima Donna, Ethel Smyth's The Boatswain's Mate, and Ballad Opera. Nor does my American colleague, David Ewen, include such operas as Menotti's The Telephone and Amelia Goes to the Ball, or earlier operas by composers like Walter Damrosch, Charles Wakefield, Cadman and Deems Taylor. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.