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Opera Production
A Handbook
Quaintance Eaton
University of Minnesota Press, 1961

Opera Production was first published in 1961. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Designed particularly as a reference work for opera producers, students, performers, and writers, this book provides basic production information about more than 500 operas. Anyone planning to produce an opera will find here the essential information he needs in order to judge whether a given opera is appropriate to his resources for production.

Information for individual operas is given concerning the number and importance of settings; size of orchestra, chorus, and ballet; number of singers, their relative importance and individual requirements; sources for obtaining musical materials' previous performances in America; and the opera story, its period, and composer.

Extensive information about 150 full-length operas and 109 short operas is provided, with supplementary information about more than 260 other operas. The operas are alphabetized by title for easy reference. In order to condense the information as much as possible, codes and abbreviations are used, with keys and indexes at the back of the book.

This book will be invaluable to those working in either amateur or professional companies, in opera workshops, in school, college, or civic opera groups. Those whose interest in opera is confined to the other side of the footlights will find the book absorbing, too, just as a glimpse backstage would be.

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front cover of Opera Production and Its Resources
Opera Production and Its Resources
Edited by Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Standing at the forefront of historiographical research, The History of Italian Opera marks the first time a multidisciplinary team of scholars has worked together to investigate the entire Italian operatic tradition, rather than limiting the focus to major composers and their masterworks. Including both musicologists and historians of other arts, the contributors approach opera not only as a distinctive musical genre but also as a form of extravagant theater and a complex social phenomenon.

Opera Production and Its Resources traces the social, economic, and artistic history of the production of opera from its origins around 1600 to contemporary stagings. From the very beginning, opera has been a chronically deficit-producing enterprise. Yet it maintained unchallenged preeminence in the culture of all Italians for centuries. The first half explores the central role of theater impresarios in putting on these complex productions and in increasing the output of librettos and scores. The second half considers the roles of the three key figures in the creation of any opera: the librettist, the composer, and the singer.
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