The Oxford Handbook of Opera

[I]f one wishes to engage broadly and in-depth with this infuriating but addictive art form...[t]here are many hours of fascinating reading therein. * Australian Book Review *
Greenwald and her large cast are to be congratulated on having produced a major contribution to opera scholarship. No single theme or thesis is propounded; rather, the book covers an exceptionally wide range of issues intelligently investigated. * Opera *
The best writers here are erudite,witty, thoughtful, a little weird. They can analyse and explain but they are are still prepared to surrender to the impact of a greedy, usually overtly emotional art form. * The Times Literary Supplement *
I don't know any other book quite like this...Drawing upon the enormously varied ways the performing arts are experienced, this handbook shows how modern scholarship commands the routes into thinking and writing about the constantly evolving genre of opera. The range of subject matter is remarkable. After an exhilarating plunge into the possible responses to the question posed in Tim Carter's sparkling essay, "What is Opera," the book settles into a more sober assessment of the basics of genre, form, and style, plots and the words they are told in, and some of the controversies and curiosities embedded in this multi-dimensional medium. It is an inviting approach: the structure is clear and...the language is accessible...Some chapters seem destined to become classics...This impressive handbook...deserves to be in frequent use... * The Musical Times *
It's good, and rightly contemporary, to see some 250 pages, more than a fifth of the text, given up to "Performance and Production," a subject now recognized as integral to assessing opera in print...Because it is new and has contributions from a large number of scholars working at the coalface of their subjects...the Handbook's strength is its close contact with a wide range of current opera scholarship...It is also readable in a way that might have been considered suspect a few decades ago...[I]t looks handsome and has been well printed, the illustrations included. * The Wagner Journal *
[The Oxford Handbook of Opera] offers us an unprecedentedly thorough cross-examination of the many positions and approaches now taken within what might be called 'opera studies.'...A wealth of intriguing material is presented in these essays...It is nonetheless the three chapters that explicitly address editorial practice that are most thought-provoking in the context of [The Oxford Handbook of Opera] as a whole. Taken together, these contributions...will offer many readers a rare insight into the processes, decisions, and difficulties that surround and inform one of the discipline's more mysterious portals to contemporary operatic culture. * Music and Letters *