This volume of eleven essays, compiled as a tribute to Winton Dean on his seventieth birthday, focuses on that area which has absorbed Winton Dean's interest throughout his distinguished career: opera and other theatre music. The first half of the book covers the period from the late seventeenth century to the mid-eighteenth. The second half of the book ranges over later opera: operacomique; Mendelssohn's operas; the influence of Wagner; the finales of Janacek's operas; and Britten's first two major operas, Peter Grimes and The Rape of Lucretia.

This book is not meant to be a comprehensive account of Monteverdi's life and works. What it sets out to do is to study certain aspects of his music and environment which have been insufficiently stressed in most of the existing books about him and to offer fresh views about some of his more familiar works. In "The Man as seen through his Letters," Denis Arnold and Nigel Fortune provide translations of some forty letters, linked by interpretive commentary, in which the composer's ideas, methods, and approach to composition and other musical matters are clearly revealed. Two chapters on "The Musical Environment" discuss Monteverdi in relation to his teachers, colleagues, and pupils. Monteverdi as thinker and musician is discussed in chapters on the Artusi-Monteverdi controversy, the prima prattica and the seconda prattica, and the madrigal guerrieri, et amorosi. Two further chapters treat Monteverdi as operatic composer, dealing with his first opera and the opera orchestra of his time. The book has a comprehensive bibliography, including a guide to the available editions of the music.