Quick Take
- Narration: Robert Powell’s voice carries the gravitas and warmth the subject requires, polished delivery that handles both the scholarly passages and the illustrated musical examples with equal ease
- Themes: Opera as cultural provocation, the temperaments behind great art, the improbable survival of an extravagant form
- Mood: Engaging and illuminating, with a gentle wit running underneath
- Verdict: An ideal entry point for the opera-curious, concise, musically illustrated, and narrated with genuine authority.
I came to opera sideways, through a friend who took me to see La Traviata on a rainy Thursday evening when the original plan fell through, and I spent the first twenty minutes convinced I was in the wrong place. By the time Violetta reached the third act, I was not entirely sure I was in the wrong place anymore. By the end, I had no idea what had happened to me. That experience of opera arriving without warning is, I suspect, what most converts report, and it is also the implicit premise behind The History of Opera, a compact five-hour survey that treats the form’s improbable survival as the central puzzle of its story.
Richard Fawkes opens with the Molière line that opera is the most expensive noise known to man, which sets the tone: this is a history that takes its subject seriously while remaining pleasantly unsentimental about its absurdities. The program runs from opera’s origins in sixteenth-century Florence, those early Florentine Camerata experiments in recreating Greek drama with music, through to the present day, covering the form’s censorship, its banning, the riots it provoked, and the remarkable moment when the Belgian independence movement in 1830 was effectively sparked by a performance of Auber’s La Muette de Portici. Fawkes delivers this history with the pleasure of someone who finds the material genuinely entertaining rather than merely instructive.
More Than One Hundred Musical Examples
The production includes over one hundred musical illustrations drawn from Naxos recordings alongside archival material featuring some of the greatest singers of the twentieth century, Enrico Caruso and Fyodor Chaliapin among them. This is not an incidental detail. The History of Opera is produced by a label that specializes in classical recordings, and the integration of musical examples into the historical narrative is the product of genuine curation rather than the token gesture that some companion audio programs make. When Fawkes discusses the evolution of the bel canto style, you hear it. When he traces the differences between Verdi’s dramatic use of the voice and Wagner’s orchestral conception of opera, the contrast is audible.
Reviewer patricia bought three copies and describes it as essential for long drives, which captures something real about the book’s accessibility. The musical illustrations break up the narration at regular intervals, giving the program a texture that is more varied and less relentless than a straight lecture format would produce. For listeners who may feel intimidated by opera’s reputation for demanding prior knowledge, these breaks are genuinely reassuring: you do not need to know what bel canto means before you listen, because you are about to hear it explained and demonstrated simultaneously.
What Fawkes Gets Right About the Form’s Survival
One of the more interesting arguments running through The History of Opera is implicit rather than stated: that opera’s survival as an art form has always depended on exactly the qualities that make it scandalous. The form was censored because its plots were dangerous. It was banned because its staging was too expensive, too sensual, or too politically inconvenient. It excited riots because it touched nerves that other art forms had learned to avoid. A reviewer notes the appeal of learning about obscure operas which left us with so many one aria treasures, which is another way of saying that the form’s vast, mostly unperformed catalog carries within it a record of artistic ambition that history has filtered rather than erased.
Fawkes is honest about the form’s difficulties as well as its glories. The temperamental composers and even more temperamental singers of his subtitle appear throughout as both the engine of the form’s greatness and the source of its recurring institutional crises. The prima donna problem, the composer-impresario conflict, the fundamental tension between the demands of dramatic truth and the demands of vocal display, these are recurring structural features of opera’s history, and Fawkes traces them with a dry wit that makes the human drama almost as entertaining as the music.
Robert Powell and the Weight of Five Hours
At five hours and seventeen minutes, The History of Opera is the most compact entry available in this format, and Robert Powell’s narration matches the concision of the project. Powell is a British actor whose career has encompassed decades of stage and screen work alongside substantial audiobook narration, and his voice carries the confident authority of someone who has been speaking to large rooms for years without losing the ability to address an individual listener. He handles the historical passages with easy fluency and the musical examples with the same quality of attention, never letting the narration feel like it is marking time between recordings.
Five hours is brief for a subject that spans four centuries, and Fawkes makes explicit choices about compression. Major figures like Monteverdi, Lully, Handel, Gluck, Mozart, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, Puccini, and Wagner receive appropriate treatment; the twentieth century is condensed. These are the inevitable trade-offs of a survey format, and Fawkes makes them clearly rather than pretending completeness he cannot deliver.
Who Should Listen / Who Should Skip
Listen if you have ever been curious about opera but do not know where to begin, if you want a historically grounded context for recordings or performances you already enjoy, or if you have a long drive and want to arrive somewhere knowing significantly more than when you left. The musical illustrations make this genuinely educational rather than merely informative.
Skip if you want deep analytical treatment of specific composers or works. The History of Opera is horizontal rather than vertical, breadth over depth, and specialists will find it too compressed to add to what they already know.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does The History of Opera require prior knowledge of classical music or opera to appreciate?
No. The program is explicitly designed as an accessible entry point, with musical examples illustrating the concepts being discussed. The archival recordings of figures like Caruso and Chaliapin do the pedagogical work that descriptions alone cannot.
Which composers and periods receive the most coverage in this five-hour survey?
The major figures of the Italian and German traditions, Monteverdi, Handel, Mozart, Rossini, Verdi, Puccini, Wagner, receive the core treatment. The twentieth century is more compressed, and non-Western operatic traditions are largely outside the book’s scope.
Are the Naxos musical recordings integrated smoothly into the narration, or do they feel like interruptions?
Based on listener accounts, the integration is handled well. The program was produced by a label specializing in classical recordings, and the curation of examples is a genuine editorial choice rather than an afterthought. Reviewer accounts describe the musical illustrations as one of the program’s primary selling points.
Is there any discussion of opera’s political history, censorship, banning, the riot at La Muette de Portici?
Yes. The history of opera’s political controversies is one of the more entertaining threads in Fawkes’s account. He documents how the form was banned, censored, and associated with political agitation throughout its history, including the 1830 Belgian revolution incident, with obvious enjoyment of the material.
