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Michael William Balfe: His Life and His English Operas.

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Michael William Balfe: His Life and His English Operas. By William Tyldesley. (Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain.) Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003. [xix, 243 p. ISBN 0-7546-0558-2. $84.95.] Music examples, bibliography, index.

Michael William Balfe (1808-1870), a popular and influential British composer, helped lay the foundation for British opera of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Active during a period when ballad operas and foreign works dominated the stage in Britain, Balfe composed operas in English for British audiences. Few scholarly publications on Balfe or his work exist. Tyldesley's book, part of Ashgate's Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain series, addresses a large and much neglected lacuna in music scholarship and is the first recent book devoted entirely to Balfe and his music. (George Biddlecome's English Opera from 1834 to 1864 with Particular Reference to the Works of Michael Balfe [New York: Routledge, 1994] also discusses Balfe and other composers of his time.)

With this work, Tyldesley has attempted to create a resource that records "the details of the major works of Michael William Balfe (his English operas)," (p. xx), serves as an initial reference source on Balfe and his music, updates Balfe scholarship, and conveys a general sense of opera in London during the nineteenth century. The author notes that he does not try to...

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