Musically sound and fully annotated, this new reference work provides ready access to over 700 excerpts from 100 operas, by voice categories, and thus provides information on a wide variety of matters of interest to directors, teach­ers, and singers. A table of voice cate­gories, coded excerpts (including length and reference to accessible scores), char­acter descriptions (including estimations of degrees of difficulty of the music), summaries of the action of each excerpt, and indexes to titles, composers, and well-known arias and ensembles make this book an indispensable tool.