Alexandra Wilson is Senior Lecturer in Musicology at Oxford Brookes University. Passionate about bringing opera to a wider audience, she has presented numerous broadcasts for BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4, and given educational talks for the Royal Opera, Glyndebourne Touring Opera, and English National Opera. Geoff Ridden was born in England. He began his academic career as a lecturer at the University of Ghana in 1971, and subsequently thirty years at the University of Winchester, taking time out to lecture internationally, before finally settling as Professor at Southern Oregon University. Geoff has published widely on Shakespeare and on Renaissance literature, and also has credits as an actor in Africa, Europe and the USA.
In her admirably compact introduction to opera, Wilson outlines the history of this most ambitious of art forms, while going on to place opera in a broad social, political and cultural context... packed with richly resonant material. -- Daniel Snowman, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, and author of The Guilded Stage: A Social History of Opera Alexandra Wilson ... has packed a world of history, culture, and music into her new opera guide. While providing the reader with the expected information on operatic history and terminology, Wilson goes at least two steps further to explore issues that will be relevant to the modern reader, among them: politics, gender, race, media, and production. -- Helen Greenwald, New England Conservatory As useful to students of opera as to the curious amateur, Alex Wilson's `Beginner's Guide' makes a huge contribution to the popularisation of a `living art'. -- Clair Rowden, Lecturer, School of Music, Cardiff University