Purcell's Dido and Aeneas stands as the greatest operatic achievement of seventeenth-century England. Ellen Harris's comprehensive study examines the work in its historical and cultural context, with detailed coverage of contemporary performance practice and of the work's performance history and cri[...]

Handel wrote over 100 cantatas, compositions for voice and instruments that describe the joy and pain of love. In "Handel as Orpheus," the first comprehensive study of the cantatas, Ellen Harris investigates their place in Handel's life as well as their extraordinary beauty. The cantatas were writt[...]