Great Operas: A Guide to Twenty-Five of the World's Finest Musical Experiences

From Great Composers author Michael Steen, a unique multi-platform project offering a royal box view into one of mankind’s greatest art forms. From the soaring heights of Wagner’s epic Ring cycle to the tear-jerking emotion of Mozart’s breathtakingly beautiful Don Giovanni, opera is one of the most powerful artistic forms mankind has ever created. It should also be the most enjoyable! Michael Steen’s The Lives and Times of the Great Composers was described as ‘hugely informative and deliciously gossipy’ by the Spectator. Great Operas is his accessible and entertaining user’s manual to making the best of an opera – whether at home or at a live performance, interspersing the key facts with erudite commentary from a man for whom opera is a lifetime’s passion. Great Operas will be published initially as short eBooks focusing on individual operas – see examples, left - and then published as a physical compendium in November, covering twenty five stand-out operatic masterpieces. Great Operas will cover: Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, Cosi fan tutte and The Magic Flute; Rossini’s The Barber of Seville and La Cenerentola; Verdi’s La Traviata, Rigoletto, Il Trovatore and Aida; Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor and L’Elisir d’amore; Bizet’s Carmen; Wagner’s Tannhauser and Tristan; Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, La Boheme, Tosca and Turandot; Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin; Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana; Leoncavallo’ Pagliacci; Gounod’s Faust; Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus; Handel’s Giulio Cesare and Britten’s Peter Grimes. Many more Short Guides to a Great Opera are scheduled to follow as ebooks in 2013 and beyond.