"In this elegantly constructed study of the early decades of public opera, the conflicts and cooperation of poets, composers, managers, designers, and singers�

Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) was the first important composer of opera. This innovative study by one of the foremost experts on Monteverdi and seventeenth-cen

Opera developed during a time when the position of women—their rights and freedoms, their virtues and vices, and even the most basic substance of their sexual

Inventing the Business of Opera explores public opera in its infancy, bringing to life the men and women who successfully established the new genre on the stage