From the Coalface: Mike Ashman finds plenty of Wagnerian enlightenment in a general operatic volume drawing on the latest scholarship

Review of Helen M. Greenwald, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Opera (Oxford University Press, 2014).

July 2016, Volume 10, Number 2, 88–92.

Rather than by composer, chronology or nationality, the six parts and fifty chapters of the Oxford Handbook of Opera’s 1,177 pages are designated according to themes and concepts – ‘The Language of National Style’, ‘Musical Dramaturgy’, ‘Production Aesthetics and Materials’, ‘Politics’ etc., cross-referenced to each other by ‘See also’ notes at the end of each chapter. Readers tracing Wagner through such headings should not avoid willing and informative distraction: for example, by Patricia Brauner (‘Editing Opera’) on how to assemble an authentic Il barbiere di Siviglia; by Philip Gossett (‘Writing the History of Opera’) on how necessary it is to take all stages of a work from first drafts to final revisions into consideration; or by Charles S. Brauner’s ‘Reconstructions’, a tight eighteen pages to bring one up to speed on the much told (but here adeptly summarised) posthumous completions of Poppaea, Il viaggio a Reims, Les contes d’Hoffmann and Turandot.