Simon Banks investigates how the past has been presented in European opera, revealing intriguing insights into the development of the modern world.

The way a civilisation views its past shapes the way it acts in the present. Over the 400-year history of opera, opera plots have re-told, re-invented and re-evaluated stories from the 3,000-year history of western civilisation. By exploring some of the changing ways in which the past has been recreated in four centuries of European music drama, it is possible to track shifting answers to timeless questions. What does it mean to have a home? How can humanity contact God? What is a valid justification for war? What are the consequences of conquest and colonialism? The operatic repertoire lives on as an astonishingly eloquent record of how the modern West changed its mind on political, religious and social issues such as these...