Operas Every Child Should Know / Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces

E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Linda Cantoni, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
Transcriber's Notes:
Obvious typographical and musical errors have been corrected.
The cover image was scanned from the 1914 edition published by Doubleday, Page & Company.
The original frontispiece is a poor-quality reproduction of a detail from Arthur Rackham's 1910 painting of Brünnhilde. A better-quality reproduction has been used in in its place.
Brünnhilde the Valkyrie
NEW YORK GROSSET & DUNLAP Publishers
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N.Y.

In selecting a few of the operas every child should know, the editor's greatest difficulty is in determining what to leave out. The wish to include L'Africaine, Othello, Lucia, Don Pasquale, Mignon, Nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, Rienzi, Tannhäuser, Romeo and Juliet, Parsifal, Freischütz, and a hundred others makes one impatient of limitations.