This aims to provide a panoramic survey of opera past and present and to explain the cultural phenomenon of opera. The author believes opera to be a vitally necessary art form that speaks to our primitive nature and expresses the whole drama of human existence. In such archetypal figures as Don Giovanni, Falstaff, Carmen, Salome and Tristan and Isolde, we see heroes and heroines who embody a freedom of action of which we overtly disapprove but secretly identify with and admire. The author teaches English at Christ Church, Oxford and has written other works of cultural analysis including Imagining America and The Everyman History of English Literature.