The Complete Opera Book / The Stories of the Operas, together with 400 of the Leading Airs and Motives in Musical Notation

Opening of the book

Transcriber's Notes
The Complete Opera Book has been an important
opera reference work since its first publication
in 1919. It has been revised and updated a
number
of
times,
most
famously
by
George
Lascelles, 7th Earl of Harewood, and most
recently in 1997.
This e-book was prepared from the 1919 first
edition. Gustav Kobbé was killed in a sailing
accident in 1918 and apparently did not have the
opportunity to make corrections before the book
was published. There are consequently numerous
typographical, spelling, and formatting errors
and inconsistencies in the first edition, the
most obvious of which have been corrected
without note in this e-book. Ambiguous errors
are marked with red dotted underlining in the
HTML
version;
hover
the
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over
the
underlined text to see a pop-up Transcriber's
Note. A Transcriber's Errata List of these notes
is also provided at the end of this file. The
author's
deliberate
interchanges
of
foreign
words or names and their equivalents in English
or other languages have been preserved as they
appear in the original. Misplaced Table of
Contents and index entries have been moved to
their proper places.
Photograph illustrations have been moved so as
not to break up the flow of the text and may not
appear on the page indicated in the List of
Illustrations, which in this e-book contains
links to the illustrations themselves, rather
than to the pages.
Click on the [Listen] link to download and hear
a midi file (or MP3 file, where noted) of the
music. Obvious errors in the music notation have
been corrected in the sound files, and the
corrections are noted in the titles of the
corresponding music images. If you are reading
this e-book in any format other than HTML, you

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