Puccini and His Operas
Edited by Stanley Sadie
London, Macmillan Reference Limited
New York, St. Martin's Press, Inc.
2000
185 pages
This volume is one of a series drawn from The New Grove Dictionary of Opera (1992). It consists of material from that reference work. The title Puccini and His Operas is somewhat misleading, since one might well expect a full-length biography of the composer. The biography of Puccini actually runs to eleven pages. After that come summaries of the plots of his operas, and a little background material on the compositon and first performances of each. What one gets is similar to what one would find in the booklet accompanying an opera recording. The book also contains brief biographical sketches of some of the Italian opera composers who were contemporaries of Puccini, as well as summaries of the plots of some of their operas.
At a length of 184 pages of fairly large print and a certain amount of blank space on some pages, the book is not a very good value at US$24.95. The book also has eight black-and-white plates so uninteresting that I wonder why anyone bothered to include them. The volume might be a worthwhile addition to a public library, but I would not recommend buying it for reading at home.