Overture Publishing imprint: 4 books

La traviata was Giuseppe Verdi’s eighteenth opera and shows him at the height of his middle-period powers. Adapted from La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils, it portrays the love between the courtesan Violetta Valéry and the young Alfredo Germont in fashionable Parisian society, with its...

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is the only comedy among Richard Wagner’s mature works. Unusually for Wagner, it is set in a historically specific time and place, sixteenthcentury Nuremberg, and tells of a song contest among the town’s guildsmen. It nevertheless explores the same themes of renewal,...

Carmen is one of the most enduringly popular of all operas and the most successful of Georges Bizet’s works. Following its premiere at the Opéra- Comique in Paris in 1875, it went on to be performed at all the major opera houses in the world. With its searing depictions of passion, obsession and jealousy,...

Le nozze di Figaro is one of Mozart’s best-loved and most enduring works. The first of the three operas he wrote with Lorenzo da Ponte and based on Beaumarchais’s play, it established the thirty-year-old Mozart as an opera composer of the very first rank. Its combination of wit, acute psychological...