Opera

War and Peace

Leo Tolstoy

The novel opens in a July evening of 1805, inside the drawing‑room of Anna Pávlovna Schérer, a well‑connected…

Carmen

Prosper Mérimée

Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen is a short‑fiction work that sketches 19th‑century Spanish social life through the…

The Turn of the Screw

Henry James

The opening places us in a cramped Victorian drawing‑room where a group of acquaintances huddle around a…

The Sorrows of Young Werther

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The work is an epistolary novel that opens with a series of letters from the sensitive young protagonist,…

The Phantom of the Opera

Gaston Leroux

The Phantom of the Opera is a Gothic melodrama that intertwines horror, musical intrigue, and Parisian…

Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories

The volume opens with a stark tableau from “The Torture” by Hope, in which the venerable Grand Inquisitor…

The Works of Lord Byron. Vol. 5 Poetry

George Gordon Byron

The volume presents a fragment of Byron’s late‑stage theatrical experiments, a sprawling scene that blends…

Macbeth

William Shakespeare

This work is a tragedy that opens on a bleak, storm‑tossed heath where three witches chant “Fair is foul, and…

Operas Every Child Should Know Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces

Mary Schell Hoke Bacon

Operas Every Child Should Know is a compact guide that pairs concise plot summaries with commentary on the…

Madame Flirt A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera'

Charles Edward Pearce

Madame Flirt is a sprawling, theatrical romance that plunges the reader into the raucous streets of…

La dame aux camélias

Alexandre Dumas

Ce roman s’ouvre sur le récit d’une visite d’une vente aux enchères d’un appartement parisien où, trois…

Riders to the Sea

J. M. Synge

J. M. Synge’s one‑act tragedy “Riders to the Sea” is set in a modest cottage on Inishmaan, one of the Aran…

Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] A Romance of Russian Life in Verse

Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin

Eugene Oneguine is presented here as the chief poetical work of Russia’s greatest poet, a novel in verse that…

Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded

Samuel Richardson

Woyzeck

Georg Büchner

The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan

Sullivan, Arthur; Gilbert, W. S.

The Robbers

Friedrich Schiller

The Beggar's Opera; to Which is Prefixed the Musick to Each Song

John Gay

The Song of the Lark

Willa Cather

The Standard Operas: Their Plots, Their Music, and Their Composers (12th edition)

George P. Upton

Mary Stuart: A Tragedy

Friedrich Schiller

Chapters of Opera Being historical and critical observations and records concerning the lyric drama in New York from its earliest days down to the present time

Henry Edward Krehbiel

Wilhelm Tell

Friedrich Schiller

A House of Pomegranates

Oscar Wilde