The Standard Operaglass
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Music lovers with some English proficiency who want a systematic overview of Western operatic repertoire
- Classical music listeners who need quick access to plots and background before attending performances
- Students studying music who are interested in English-language opera guide literature
- Readers seeking free access to public-domain music reference books
Not a good fit for
- Beginners with limited English reading ability who need Chinese-language opera primers
- Professional researchers expecting the latest scholarship and information on contemporary productions
- General readers completely unfamiliar with Western opera and with no need to attend performances
Reading tips
- Read through the table of contents first, select operas you know or plan to see for close reading, and consult the rest as needed.
- While reading each entry, listen to relevant recorded excerpts to build a connection between text and sound.
- Make a glossary of English operatic terms as you go; accumulating them will make later entries smoother to read.
- Treat it as a reference book rather than a cover-to-cover read, keeping it at hand for consultation.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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FAQ
Is this book suitable for readers with zero background in opera?
Does the e-book include modern scholarly annotations?
Who is Charles Annesley, the author?
Comments
Find this book
This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.
About the author
Charles Annesley is a pseudonym, and public information about the author's real identity and life is very limited; details such as birth and death years and nationality are not reliably recorded. The library holds one work under this name, The Standard Operaglass. Judging from its title and subject, the book appears to be an introductory or companion guide to opera-going, likely covering plot summaries, characters, and notable excerpts from classic operas, with the aim of helping readers understand the works before or after a performance. Such guides are usually written in clear, practical expository prose that allows general audiences to find their way into the world of opera. Because the author used a pseudonym and historical sources are scarce, the writing background and the book's broader influence are difficult to establish with certainty; still, the single work in the library suggests that Annesley wrote for general readers, emphasizing popular knowledge and performance guidance rather than academic research.
