The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera

Now that the works represented in this volume are adequately available to the public in performance, recordings and scores, this is a timely critical reassessment of an immensely influential musical corpus – the opera produced in France in the middle third of the nineteenth century. Grand opera has traditionally been seen as the antithesis of Wagner and German romantic opera, following the lead of Wagner himself, but this wide‐ranging reappraisal explores the contradictions in this approach as well as the general complexities of defining a genre.

The era of the 1820s onwards was, in addition to being increasingly technological, both...