Volume 25, Number 1 · February 9, 1978
Reading Opera
By Joseph Kerman
Romantic Opera and Literary Form
by Peter Conrad
University of California Press, 185 pp., $10.00
Literature as Opera
by Gary Schmidgall
Oxford University Press, 431 pp., $15.95
Mozart and Beethoven: The Concept of Love in Their Operas
by Irving Singer
Johns Hopkins University Press, 155 pp., $10.00
Romantic Opera and Literary Form is the most provocative (and provoking) book on opera to appear in a long time. One is first struck by its brilliance and then astonished that such a sophisticated critical structure can rest on such simplistic foundations. The polemical thesis which runs through the chapters is that opera is not a form of drama, as Wagner and others have maintained, but a form of the novel.
Review, 3764 words
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