Western culture has produced nothing quite like opera among its privileged art forms. It uniquely combines theater, narrative, music, and the human voice in extravagant and paradoxical ways. Its plots are often absurd, and its texts often unintelligible when sung. Producing an opera can be cripplingly expensive. But for its devotees, opera provides an aesthetic and emotional experience unlike any other. It emerged from Baroque musical theater in the seventeenth century and grew in popularity in the eighteenth, when human capons, castrated as boys to preserve their angelic voices, became the pop stars of their time. Opera plots range across classical mythology and the historical past, both near and remote, as well as non-European cultures seen with European eyes. Stage machinery has been a major attraction from the beginning, with special effects that included erupting volcanoes (in Auber’s La Muette de Portici) and scenery that moved almost cinematically (during the transformation music of Bayreuth’s first Parsifal). This old tradition of thrilling invention continues today with the help of complex machines, computers, and digitalization. The controversial Ring cycle by Robert Lepage at the Metropolitan Opera is only the latest manifestation of this. The extravagance of opera is, at least for those who love it, magical, and the magic is arguably even more musical than scenic.

Yet the composers who have created this musical magic accomplish what they do by virtue of technical skills that they have acquired over a long period of apprenticeship. Even if an operatic text (the libretto) can survive on its literary merits, however absurd or banal the plot, there would be no opera without music, and music has to be learned, either quickly in the case of geniuses such as Mozart or Mendelssohn, or over time through study, experience, and experiment. Berlioz, whose instrument was the guitar, brilliantly re-invented himself as he became more sophisticated.

Western culture has produced nothing quite like opera among its privileged art forms.

Writing music that complements and illuminates a previously prepared text takes its inspiration from the plot, however dreary or inept, and the conjunction of plot, text, and music must inevitably lie at the core of any history of opera. Roger Parker and Carolyn Abbate, who are by no means the first to have undertaken such a history, come to the task with formidable credentials. Parker is a recognized authority on the operas of Verdi and has contributed a magisterial article on his work to The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. He is currently involved in new editions of the operas of Donizetti, in addition to a non-operatic project on music in nineteenth-century London. Carolyn Abbate is the author of Unsung Voices, one of the truly seminal books on opera in recent decades. Beginning with Edward Cone’s concept of the composer’s voice, this work attempted to distinguish the voices of singers from other voices of a more literary kind that emanate within an opera from the composer or the plot, much as we might speak of a poet’s voice. Abbate taught us to separate an operatic character into the character in the plot and the character who actually sings. She devised such terminology as the “plot-Brünnhilde” and the “voice-Brünnhilde,” and the recurrence of such terminology in this new history of opera is obviously indebted to Abbate but endorsed by Parker, whom she already thanked for his help in her book.

Parker and Abbate have written, as one would have expected of them, a highly idiosyncratic and personal history of opera. They claim to have collaborated so closely with one another as to construct a seamless whole for which both take responsibility. Although I imagine I can hear their separate “voices” from time to time, their book overall has a brio, insouciance, and even irreverence that are very much their own and distinguish it from all previous histories of the genre. The book is always lively and readable, full of opinionated but (except at the end) benevolent judgments, and equipped with three delightful gatherings of plates that display, along with a few movie stills and caricatures, some of the more memorable productions and artists of the past.

This is no solemn march through the centuries with dates, composers, librettists, premières, singers, and conductors put on show. The renunciation of conventional scholarly apparatus—and prose—in search of a broad audience has led the authors also to renounce musical examples. The complete absence of any musical illustrations is most unusual in a book that purports to be a history of a musical genre. The authors claim, perhaps a little defensively, that this was their idea, not the publisher’s. But a history of opera without musical examples is rather like a history of art without images. Even Kobbé’s guide to opera, on which generations of opera-lovers have depended, includes musical examples in the form of piano reductions, which could easily be picked out on a piano at home.