Viking Opera Guide

The Viking Opera Guide has been shrunk from a 1,305 page hardback containing entries for over 1,500 operas to a single disc resembling a CD. The resemblance is only superficial - this disc is designed to be used in a PC with a sound card and a specially-designed derivative of the CD player called a CD-ROM drive. Many new computers sold today have such facilities built into them, and retro-fitting these facilities to an existing machine costs less than £250. The new Viking guide is just one of thousands of discs now available for these players.

Given the expense involved, why buy this CD-ROM instead of the book? The biggest added feature is more than three hours of music that augments the text. This consists of more than one hundred excerpts, which are drawn, where possible, from Alan Blyth's recommendations. Since they must be compressed to fit on a single disc alongside text and more than 300 pictures, they aren't high fidelity, but they suffice to give an taste of a composer's music. In addition to the music, an abridged version of the book's introduction is read by its author, Nicholas Kenyon, and the names of foreign composers and operas can be spoken by recorded voices as a guide to pronunciation.

This alone might not be sufficient reason to buy the disc - the £39 price difference between the book and the CD-ROM could, after all, buy more than three hours of full-quality CD listening. Because the text is computerised, every word is indexed. The search mechanism is not a very good example of its kind, but is nonetheless valuable, and better than any book can provide. If you want to find 20th Century composers who were influenced in some way by Sullivan, a shortlist of seven is at your fingertips in a minute or so.

Other 'bonus features' of rather less utility include a timeline, which places the life-span of the composer of your choice against a selection of his best-known contemporaries, and a map, which indicates where composers were born, where they died and where opera premieres took place.

As an educational tool, the CD-ROM version of the Viking Opera Guide is much more appealing than the book would be by itself, and opera researchers or anyone with a computer and an interest in opera should at least consider it.