"In times of delirious, madcap fun and political turmoil, opera fans have expressed their passion by dispatching records into the cosmos, building fairy-tale castles, and singing together through the arduous work of social justice. OPERA welcomes readers and listeners to a community full of friendship, passion, critique-and always, beautiful music"--

From its beginning, opera has been an impossible art. Its first practitioners, in seventeenth-century Florence, set themselves the unreachable goal of reproducing the wonders of ancient Greek drama, which no one can be sure was sung in the first place. Opera s greatest artists have striven to fuse multiple art forms -- music, drama, poetry, dance -- into a unified synesthetic experience. The composer Matthew Aucoin, a rising star of the opera world,...