Looking at operatic history from new and unexpected angles, this book examines the ways the operatic canon has been reshaped at key moments in the history of the form.

Opera in History examines the achievements of composers such as Monteverdi, Handel, and Rossini, whose operas were long neglected because of changes in performance practices, audience tastes, and musical aesthetics. It also looks at such well-established works as Wagner's Ring and Verdi's Aida in unconventional ways. Thus, the Ring emerges as a product of nineteenth-century philology, Aida, as an embodiment of the new science of archaeology.

At a time when opera's popularity is fast increasing, this book examines some crucial issues that run through its entire history: its uneasy statue as a form of high art and popular culture, the ways operas are embedded in history yet help give retrospective shape to that history, and the reinterpretation of the operatic past by composers and stage directors to legitimate the concerns of the present.

The book's finale is a quietly hilarious chapter categorizing today's operagoers according to five types: the Avid, the Passive, the Conscientious, the Faultfinding, and the Uncompromised.