Deep Throat

The distinguished art book publisher Harry N. Abrams has brought out one of the most beautiful books about opera available today. With 300 pages of luscious reproductions of drawings and paintings, as well as exquisitely reproduced photographs of theaters, productions and artists both vintage and recent, this book does not seem overpriced.

“The Story of Opera” is neither a dry history nor a star compendium but a stunning tribute to those composers, performers, designers and theaters that contributed to making opera the apogee of the performing arts.

Richard Somerset-Ward, the former head of music and arts programming for BBC television and a historian from Cambridge University, has grounded a dramatic visual sense in a lively romp through history. He offers an informative and lively history of opera from its inception in Florence in 1589 to current popular forms of zarzuela and musical theater. He artfully juxtaposes drawings of original productions with modern stagings, paintings of the original artists in various roles with photographs of today’s interpreters and portraits of composers, engravings of theaters and reproductions of posters with early photos of divas and stagings. You don’t have to be an afficiando to like this book: It is so visually compelling that the novice will be as excited by it as the opera nut.

“The Chronicle of Opera” presents in chronological order a history of opera with both fact and anecdote. For nearly the same price as “The Story of Opera,” Thames and Hudson has brought out a slightly shorter and far less sumptuous book. The photos and illustrations are much smaller and the text more prominent. Had Michael Raeburn written this book in any other year, it might have been considered a find, but this holiday season it seems, alas, more academic and less seductive than “The Story of Opera.”

“The Art of Making Opera” is a welcome effort to capture the otherwise invisible world backstage in the weeks of rehearsal before the curtain is raised and the audience is able to view the finished performance. M.L. Hart was given unlimited access to the San Diego Opera for two years, and this book is her testament to that exciting world. With hundreds of unposed photos of the rehearsal process, this book shows the everyday goings-on in an opera company. One charming display is of tenor Richard Leech, gazing into a mirror; on one page he is applying makeup, and on the other he has become Don Jose.

It is a lovely testimonial to the explosive interest in opera. Nationally, opera attendance climbed to about 7.5 million in the 1996-97 season, up an astonishing 34% from 1980, according to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal. The boom in opera is, evidently, far from over.