The turning point of Madame Bovary, which Flaubert memorably set at the opera, is only the most famous example of a surprisingly long tradition, one common to a range of French literary styles and sub-genres. In the first book-length study of that tradition to appear in English, Cormac Newark examines representations of operatic performance from Balzac's La Comedie humaine to Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, by way of (among others) Dumas pere's Le Comte de Monte-Cristo and Leroux's Le Fantome de l'Opera. Attentive to textual and musical detail alike in the works, the study also delves deep into their reception contexts. The result is a compelling cultural-historical account: of changing ways of making sense of operatic experience from the 1820s to the 1920s, and of a perennial writerly fascination with the recording of that experience.

A new wave of scholarship inspired by the ways the writers and musicians of the long nineteenth century themselves approached the relationship between music and words. Words and Notes encourages a new wave of scholarship inspired by the ways writers and musicians of the long nineteenth century themselves approached the relationship between music and words. Contributors to the volume engage in two dialogues: with nineteenth-century conceptions of word-music relations, and with each other. Criss-crossing disciplinary boundaries, the authors of the book's eleven essays address new questions relating to listening, imagining and performing music, the act of critique, and music's links with philosophy and aesthetics. The many points of intersection are elucidated in an editorial introduction and via a reflective afterword. Fiction and poetry, musicography, philosophy, music theory, science and music analysis all feature, as do traditions within English, French and German studies. Wide-ranging material foregrounds musical memory, soundscape and evocation; performer dilemmas over the words in Satie's piano music; the musicality of fictional and non-fictional prose; text-setting and the rights of poet vs. composer; the rich novelistic and critical testimony of audience inattention at the opera;German philosophy's potential contribution to musical listening; and Hoffmann's send-ups of the serious music-lover. Throughout, music - its composition, performance and consumption - emerges as a profoundly physical and social force, even when it is presented as the opposite. PHYLLIS WELIVER is Associate Professor of English, Saint Louis University. KATHARINE ELLIS is Stanley Hugh Badock Professor of Music at the University of Bristol. Contributors: Helen Abbott, Noelle Chao, Delia da Sousa Correa, Peter Dayan, Katharine Ellis, David Evans, Annegret Fauser, Jon-Tomas Godin, Cormac Newark, Matthew Riley, Emma Sutton, Shafquat Towheed, Susan Youens, Phyllis Weliver

Opera has always been a vital and complex mixture of commercial and aesthetic concerns, of bourgeois politics and elite privilege. In its long heyday in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it came to occupy a special place not only among the arts but in urban planning, too - this is, perhaps surprisingly, often still the case. The Oxford Handbook of the Operatic Canon examines how opera has become the concrete edifice it was never meant to be, by tracing its evolution from a market entirely driven by novelty to one of the most canonic art forms still in existence. Throughout the book, a lively assembly of musicologists, historians, and industry professionals tackle key questions of opera's past, present, and future. Why did its canon evolve so differently from that of concert music? Why do its top ten titles, all more than a century old, now account for nearly a quarter of all performances worldwide? Why is this system of production becoming still more top-heavy, even while the repertory seemingly expands, notably to include early music? Topics range from the seventeenth century to the present day, from Russia to England and continental Europe to the Americas. To reflect the contested nature of many of them, each is addressed in paired chapters. These complement each other in different ways: by treating the same geographical location in different periods, by providing different national or regional perspectives on the same period, or by thinking through similar conceptual issues in contrasting or changing contexts. Posing its questions in fresh, provocative terms, The Oxford Handbook of the Operatic Canon challenges scholarly assumptions in music and cultural history, and reinvigorates the dialogue with an industry that is, despite everything, still growing.