The St. James Opera Encyclopedia: A Guide to People and Works

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Summary: A treasury of opera information
Review: For the beginner or intermediate opera lover, this book is a great resource. Although you may not always agree with the reviewers' perceptions of an artist's strengths and weaknesses, reading and then listening will greatly enhance your ear over a period of time. In addition, composers and individual operas are covered. There is something here for everyone. Most operatic artists are covered, but not all. This is one of the best opera books for its price, and unfortunatley is getting difficult to find. I can highly recommend it and have gone back to it constantly. I love referring to it when listening to Doug Fox's program on Tuesday evenings- that's on WMNR from Connecticut- you can hear it on the net if you can't get it in the NY area (88.1FM). I have been waiting several weeks to have a copy sent to a friend as a gift. I hope it's still available!

Rating:
Summary: Very nice, a lot of useful information.
Review: Nice book, a lot of useful facts, stories, biographies, comments, actors, performers, theatres and etc.
I like it.

Rating:
Summary: A useful but often irritatingly biased opera compendium
Review: The St. James Opera Encyclopedia offers many mid-sized essays on important operas, composers, singers and terms: it offers a fascinating read for opera fans who wish to find out more information handily about any of these subjects. Opera fans, unfortunately, are sometimes so highly partisan and rabid in their opinions that some of the essays are not as unbiased as one would like, and if you don't know much about the person or work being discussed the entries in the St. James guide can steer you in pretty strange directions. For example, one writer's extreme dislike of Kiri Te Kanawa's abilities and performances, in his entry on her would lead you to be convinced, had you never heard her before, that she were the absolute dregs of the operatic profession--you would come away from this having absolutely no idea why she was one of the preeminent international sopranos of the 1980s.