A musically illustrated talk in which Roger Parker presents 'A History of Opera', the definitive modern work on opera's history and its meaning across the generations, written with Carolyn Abbate.
The book discusses leading composers, but also explores the social conditions in which opera was produced and consumed; Roger will argue that after 400 years of extraordinary creativity, the composing of new operas thatenter the general culture may now be coming to an end, and that ours is the first generation that looks entirely backwards to the glory days rather than to what is being composed in our own time.