Transcriber's Notes

The Complete Opera Book has been an important opera reference work since its first publication in 1919. It has been revised and updated a number of times, most famously by George Lascelles, 7th Earl of Harewood, and most recently in 1997.

This e-book was prepared from the 1919 first edition. Gustav Kobbé was killed in a sailing accident in 1918 and apparently did not have the opportunity to make corrections before the book was published. There are consequently numerous typographical, spelling, and formatting errors and inconsistencies in the first edition, the most obvious of which have been corrected without note in this e-book. Ambiguous errors are marked with red dotted underlining in the HTML version; hover the mouse over the underlined text to see a pop-up Transcriber's Note. A Transcriber's Errata List of these notes is also provided at the end of this file. The author's deliberate interchanges of foreign words or names and their equivalents in English or other languages have been preserved as they appear in the original. Misplaced Table of Contents and index entries have been moved to their proper places.

Photograph illustrations have been moved so as not to break up the flow of the text and may not appear on the page indicated in the List of Illustrations, which in this e-book contains links to the illustrations themselves, rather than to the pages.

Click on the [Listen] link to download and hear a midi file (or MP3 file, where noted) of the music. Obvious errors in the music notation have been corrected in the sound files, and the corrections are noted in the titles of the corresponding music images. If you are reading this e-book in any format other than HTML, you will not be able to hear the music.

The
Complete Opera Book

The Stories of the Operas, together with
400 of the Leading Airs and Motives
in Musical Notation

By
Gustav Kobbé

Author of “Wagner’s Music-Dramas Analysed,”
“All-of-a-Sudden Carmen,” etc.

Illustrated with One Hundred Portraits in Costume and
Scenes from Opera

G.P. Putnam’s Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1919

Copyright, 1919
BY
GUSTAV KOBBÉ

The Knickerbocker Press, New York