The Birth of an Opera offers illuminating insight into how operas are written and the personalities, incidents, and musical circumstances that have shaped their composition. The reader will find Mozart with a new and flamboyant librettist tackling the risky enterprise of Le Nozze di Figaro; Wagner confessing his hidden love for the woman who inspires him as he creates the passionate drama of Tristan und Isolde; Verdi deep in Shakespearian discussion with Boito as they remodel the tragedy of Othello; Debussy coming almost literally to blows with Maeterlinck over the soprano to take the leading role in Pelleas et Melisande. Throughout, Rose offers his readers the most direct possible link to events that have often become twisted or obscured by operatic myth, and in so doing captures the bizarre interactions of chance, genius, practical necessity and dogged determination that accompanied the making of some of opera´s most enduring masterpieces