Tracing the rise of modern music drama from its nineteenth century Wagnerian peak, the author shows how modern opera has evolved along two revolutionary lines of development: first, the increasing importance of the poetry in relation to the music; and second, the blending of the traditional themes of classical opera with the contemporary emergence of surrealism and vernacular comedy. As the author writes, 'The art of modern opera is a syzygy of the sacred and the profane--more exactly a profaning of the sacred--a development that can be traced directly from the textual clarity of Pelle?as et Me?lisande through the neoclassified romanticism of Wozzeck and the contraposition of Jonny Spielt Auf to the right-angled intermezzo of The Bassarids. What in Richard Strauss's day could be broken up into words and music for the purposes of disputation has become, for the first time in opera's history, a synaptic organism, one in which the musical entity of romantic opera and its pull to fantasy is recycled against a simultaneous diagram of comic commentary--the horizontal extensions of song tempered by the vertical analyses of the Word.' Within this analytical framework the author examines the significant works of Puccini, Strauss, Debussy, Poulenc, Britten, and Henze as well as the twelve tone experiments of Schoenberg, Berg, and their disciples, treating both the celebrated and the arcane, from mythic ritual to absurdity. The book also treats opera as an emerging national phenomenon in Germany, Italy, France, England, and the United States along with the lesser known contributions of eastern Europe. 'What is more invigorating,' the author discovers, '... is to learn how each nationality of musicians and librettists deals with each continental development in art, for by the mid-1900s, the accumulated trial and error appears to arrive at some few plateaus in the operatic aesthetic...' Here then is opera on its modern voyage, from Tosca to War and Peace to Elephant Steps, from Louise to Die Dreigroschenoper to Death in Venice--from musical myth to verbal satire, and finally to a collision of the two. --Dust jacket.