Charles Affron, Professor Emeritus of French Literature at New York University, and Mirella Jona Affron, Professor Emerita of Cinema Studies at The College of Staten Island/CUNY, are coauthors of Best Years: Going to the Movies, 1945 1946 and Sets in Motion: Art Direction and Film Narrative. Charles Affron is the author of Lillian Gish: Her Legend, Her Life; Cinema and Sentiment; and Star Acting: Gish, Garbo, Davis. Together with Robert Lyons, the authors are series editors of Rutgers Films in Print and Rutgers Depth of Field.
A welcome addition to the annals of opera history. Opera fans will feast on the facts and famous figures that fill these pages. Library Journal 20141001 A valuable and readable history of the Met. -- Joseph Horowitz Wall Street Journal 20140919 An entertaining and serious contextualization of the state of the Metropolitan Opera today, as well as an emotionally and intellectually satisfying read. -- Weston Williams Christian Science Monitor 20140922 This volume tells of a grand operatic melodrama, though played out as often by general managers and unions as by prima donnas. BEST BOOKS OF 2014 -- Richard Fairman Financial Times 20141128 Passionate opera fans Charles and Mirella Affron have created a comprehensive, decade-by-decade history of the Metropolitan Opera House and its changing repertoire, from the inaugural 1883 Faust to Marian Anderson's Civil Rights era debut to the age of 'Live in HD 'simulcast. If the Phoenicia Festival of the Voice whetted your operatic appetite, here is a splendid multicourse meal. -- Nina Shengold Chronogram 20141201 This new history is an epic treat for the Metophile ... an exhaustively researched, updated, thoughtful Met Opera history. The successive directors' flaws and achievements are described with equanimity. It compellingly conveys the problems and the progress, the failures and the glories of the Metropolitan Opera. -- Carol L. Anderson Wagner Notes 20150201