About OperaPedia
A free, editorially curated encyclopedia of canonical opera works · Baroque through early twentieth century · for the curious listener and the working musician.
OperaPedia exists for one reason: anyone who falls in love with a great opera should be able to find, in one place, the work's synopsis, the composer's life, the libretto's origins, the premiere's date and venue, the great arias to listen for, and the broader production history. Until now, that information has been scattered across reference shelves, programme notes, scholarly journals, and the deeper layers of online encyclopedias. We are gathering it.
We focus on the canonical literature · the operas that the major houses still mount, the works that singers still study in conservatories, and the historically important pieces that explain how the form arrived where it is. Our coverage runs from the Baroque foundations of Monteverdi and Cavalli, through the Classical clarity of Gluck and Mozart, into the Romantic century dominated by Verdi, Wagner, and the bel canto masters, and onward into the early twentieth century with Strauss, Puccini, Debussy, and Janáček.
How OperaPedia Is Built
Every entry on this site is generated from a single, regularly refreshed editorial database. Page templates render that data at request time using plain server-side PHP · there is no client-side application, no framework, no build step. The result is a website that loads quickly, archives cleanly, and works for every reader regardless of browser or connection speed.
Where multiple historical sources disagree on a date, a librettist's contribution, or the order of revisions, we follow the consensus established by the structured reference layer of Wikidata, supplemented by the corresponding English Wikipedia articles. Editorial commentary added by our staff is signposted as such; raw factual material from the underlying sources is preserved as faithfully as the encyclopaedia format permits.
Editorial Sources
The factual backbone of every opera entry is drawn from two openly licensed reference layers: Wikidata (specifically, the structured items typed as opera, Q1344) and the corresponding article from the English-language Wikipedia. We query Wikidata's SPARQL endpoint for the canonical metadata · composer, librettist, premiere date, premiere venue, language, genre, number of acts · and supplement that data with the prose summaries, extracts, and lead images served by Wikipedia's REST API. Every entry on this site can therefore be traced back to its underlying open-data source.
Where the structured data is silent or contested, we add editorial bridging text in the manner familiar to readers of any reference encyclopedia: a synthesis that frames the work for someone encountering it for the first time, without pretending to offer original scholarship.
Editorial Standards
OperaPedia entries are reviewed for factual accuracy, internal consistency, and clarity of expression. We do not publish reviews of individual productions, recording recommendations, or ticket information. Our remit is the work itself: the score, the libretto, the historical context, and the tradition of performance that has grown up around each opera.
We welcome correction. If you spot a factual error, a misattributed librettist, an incorrect premiere date, or a synopsis that misrepresents the dramatic action, please write to us at the address below.
Contact
Editorial correspondence: editors@operapedia.example
Press & partnerships: press@operapedia.example
Sitemap
A machine-readable sitemap is available at /sitemap.xml. The index pages of the site are listed below for convenience: