📚 Opera

Drama sung from Monteverdi on: the scores, the voices, the staging, and the business of keeping it all alive.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject operas in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	Richard Wagner über Tristan und Isolde	Richard Wagner	1800	165
	An English translation of Parsifal, the sacred festival drama by Richard Wagner	Richard Wagner	1879	143
	Beggar's opera	John Gay	1728	109
	Don Giovanni	Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart	1800	109
	Der Fliegende Holländer	Richard Wagner	1856	94
	Carmen	Georges Bizet	1800	92
	La traviata	Giuseppe Verdi	1800	82
	Lucia di Lammermoor	Gaetano Donizetti	1800	71
	Lucrezia Borgia	Gaetano Donizetti	1800	70
	Rigoletto	Giuseppe Verdi	1850	70
	Falstaff	Giuseppe Verdi	1893	70
	Nozze di Figaro	Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart	1807	64
	Aïda	Giuseppe Verdi	1800	64
	Faust	Charles Gounod	1800	63
	Mignon	Ambroise Thomas	1800	63
	The girl of the golden west	David Belasco	1910	60
	La favorita	Gaetano Donizetti	1800	58
	Macbeth, Cloth, It	Giuseppe Verdi	1847	58
	The Pirates of Penzance	Sir William Schwenck Gilbert	1879	56
	Fidelio	Ludwig van Beethoven	1800	51
	Tosca	Giacomo Puccini	1899	51
	Bohème	Giacomo Puccini	1896	46
	The complete operas of Gilbert and Sullivan	Sir William Schwenck Gilbert	1900	44
	Gondoliers	Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan	1800	43
	Cenerentola	Gioacchino Rossini	1800	42
	Pelléas et Mélisande	Claude Debussy	1902	37
	Pagliacci	Ruggiero Leoncavallo	1800	36
	Handbuch der Oper	Kloiber, Rudolf	1961	8
	Great operatic disasters	Hugh Vickers	1979	4
	The man who mistook his wife for a hat	Michael Nyman	1996	1

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 03 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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