The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera

This new edition of leading opera critic Rupert Christiansen's perennially popular Pocket Guide has between extensively revised, and incorporates many more operas from all periods, including recent works by Philip Glass, Mark Anthony Turnage, Thomas Adès and George Benjamin. Whether you are a first-timer at La Boheme or a seasoned Wagnerian, every opera-goer can benefit from a little background information, and this book aims to provide just that. Accessible and easy-to-use, it contains entries for over a hundred works, both familiar and unfamiliar.

Rupert Christiansen is The Spectator's dance critic. He was previously dance critic for The Mail on Sunday from 1995-2020, and has written on dance-focused subjects for many publications in the UK and USA, including Vogue, Vanity Fair,Harper's and Queen, The Observer,Daily Telegraph, The Literary Review, Dance Now and Dance Theatre Journal. He was opera critic and arts correspondent for the Daily Telegraph from 1996-2020, and is the author of a dozen non-fiction books, including the Pocket Guide to Opera and The Complete Book of Aunts (both published by Faber). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1997 and lives in London.