Transcriber's Notes

The Complete Opera Book has been an importantopera reference work since its first publication in 1919. It has beenrevised and updated a number of times, most famously by George Lascelles, 7thEarl of Harewood, and most recently in 1997.

This e-book was prepared from the 1919 first edition. Gustav Kobbé waskilled in a sailing accident in 1918 and apparently did not have theopportunity to make corrections before the book was published. Thereare consequently numerous typographical, spelling, and formatting errors andinconsistencies in the first edition, the most obvious of which have beencorrected without note in this e-book. Ambiguous errors are marked with red dottedunderlining in the HTML version; hover the mouse over the underlined text to see a pop-upTranscriber's Note.A Transcriber's Errata List of thesenotes is also provided at the end of this file. Theauthor's deliberate interchanges of foreign words or names and theirequivalents in English or other languages have been preserved as theyappear in the original. Misplaced Table of Contents andindex entries have been moved to their proper places.

Photograph illustrations have been moved so as not to break up theflow of the text and may not appear on the page indicated in the Listof Illustrations, which in this e-book contains links to theillustrations themselves, rather than to the pages.

Click on the [Listen] link to download and hear a midi file (or MP3file, where noted) of the music. Obvious errors in the music notation havebeen corrected in the sound files, and the corrections are noted in thetitles of the corresponding music images. If you are reading this e-book inany format other than HTML, you will not be able to hear the music.