IN SEARCH OF OPERA

the Wagner problem, coloratura, virtuosity, and their critics, the implications of disembodied voice in opera and film, mechanical music, the mortality of musical sound, and opera s predilection for scenes positing mysterious unheard music. An intersection between transcendence and intense physical grounding, she asserts, is a quintessential element of the genre, one source of the rapture that operas and their singers can engender in listeners. In Search of Opera mediates between an experience of opera that can be passionate and intuitive, and an intellectual engagement with opera as a complicated aesthetic phenomenon. Marrying philosophical speculation to historical detail, Abbate contemplates a central dilemma