Books about classical music, including biographies of composers, composer correspondence, libretti of operas and operettas, and lyrics of lieder/songs

Copyright © 2002 Richard Seltzer

Skip the explanation and go straight to the table of contents

This Web page shows the table of contents of our Music Book CD. Internal links will take you to the various sections, but you cannot get to the books themselves here on the Web. For that you need the CD, which sells for $29 at our online store.

This CD was compiled by Richard Seltzer. The books themselves are in the public domain. You can copy them onto your hard drive for convenience, or make an archival copy of the CD, as backup in case of damage to the original. But the collection and its indexes, created for your convenience, are under copyright. Please contact us first if you are interested in making copies of this CD for commercial purposes. seltzer@samizdat.com

On the CD, you can open the books by clicking on the titles in the index page with your Web browser or a recent Windows-based word processor.

We also include some .mus files that require the use of free "Finale Notepad" software, which you can download at http://www.finalemusic.com/notepad/ It shows the musical score and plays the music (synthesized, not recorded), with the cursor automatically moving ahead across the score to show you what notes are being played.

Click on a category to go to one of the major sections of this index page:

If you would like to have your PC (with speakers) read these texts aloud to you, while they are displayed in text on the screen, see below about the free ReadPlease software that we have included on this CD.

For details about this publishing service, check the readme document. Please visit our online store at http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat

User's Guide: Suggestions on how to get the most out of your books on CD ROM

These books are in plain text format. You can copy them onto your hard drive for convenience, or make an archival copy of the CD, as backup in case of damage to the original.

Thanks very much to Karadar Classical Music http://www.karadar.it for permission to include on this CD numerous libretti and lieder from their site.

Click on a category to go to one of the major sections of this index page:

Table of Contents of our Music Book CD

This Classical Music Book CD, 164 libretti and lyrics of hundreds of lieder/songs in their original languages, plus 118 books about music, biographies of composers, and composer correspondence, is available for $29 at our online store.

Books about music, musicians, composition, performance, singing, and dance; and fiction about music

Composer biographies

Composer correspondence

Operas and Operettas

Daniel Francois Auber 1782-1871, libretto of opera in French

Ludwig van Beethoven 1770 - 1827, libretto of opera in German

Hector Berlioz 1803 - 1869, libretti of operas

George Bizet 1838 - 1875, libretti of operas, in French

Claude Debussy 1862 - 1918

Gilbert and Sullivan, libretti of operettas in one file, in English

George Frideric Händel 1685 - 1759

Nicola Francesco Haym 1678-1729

Modest Moussorgsky 1839 -1881, libretto of opera, in Russian (transliterated)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 1756 - 1791, libretti of the complete operas in the original language, as noted

Jacques Offenbach 1819 - 1880, libretto of opera, in French

Giacomo Puccini 1858 - 1924, libretti of operas, in Italian

Henry Purcell  1659 - 1695, libretti of operas, in English

Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov 1844 – 1908, libretti of operas

Gioacchino Rossini 1792 - 1868, libretti of complete operas

Johann II Strauss 1825 - 1899, libretto of opera, in German

Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky 1840 - 1893, libretti of operas, in Russian (transliterated)

Giuseppe Verdi 1813 - 1901, libretti of the complete operas, in Italian

Antonio Vivaldi 1678 - 1741, libretto of opera, in Italian

Richard Wagner 1813-1883, libretti of the complete operas,  in German

Lyrics to Songs and Leider and Oratorios

Scores in .mus format

These .mus files that require the use of free "Finale Notepad" software, which you can download at http://www.finalemusic.com/notepad/ It shows the musical score and plays the music (synthesized, not recorded), with the cursor automatically moving ahead across the score to show you what notes are being played.

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

Ludwig von Beethoven (1770-1827)

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Frederic Chopin (1810-1849)

Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

Camille Saint-Saens (1835-1921)

Robert Schumann (1810-1856)


This Classical Music Book CD, 164 libretti and lyrics of hundreds of lieder/songs in their original languages, plus 116 books about music, biographies of composers, and composer correspondence, is available for $29 at our online store.

How to install and use the free ReadPlease software included on this CD

Text-to-voice conversion software can allow you to hear as well as read these books. So you can test this capability and decide if it might be valuable to you, we include the include the installation file for ReadPlease 2003 on this CD. You can use that file to install a trial copy of ReadPlease Plus, which is a commercial-quality product and can read files of any size. This trial copy is good for 30 days, after which, if you wish, you could buy a license from ReadPlease for $49.95. As an alternative, you can use that same file to install their free version, which doesn't expire, but which can only handle 16K of text at a time; which means that to read a book, you would have to copy and paste one peice of text after another.

Click here if you would like to install this software. When you click on that link, you will be asked wheter you want to save it on your computer or just run it. Choose Save -- it will only take about 10 Mbytes; so choose Save. Then select which version you want to install and the directory that you'd like to put it in. When the rapid, automatic installation is done, you will be able to open ReadPlease by clicking on an icon on your desktop.

When running ReadPlease, click on File, then Open, and browse to the texts you are interested on the CD (or any other text file you have). Click on Play and it will start "reading" the book aloud to you. Highlight a chunk of text (of any size) with your browser and then click on Selection, and it will read the text you selected. Controls in the right column allow you to change the speed of the voice (with a sliding bar), change the font size (with a sliding bar), and switch among four different voices (with the right and left arrows).

When you run ReadPlease, you see the text, with yellow highlighting moving from one word to the next, while you hear that same text. And you can at any time edit the text in the video window. Just position your cursor, click you mouse, and type whatever you like -- for instance, annotation or marks to show where you last stopped reading. Then save the edited file on your hard drive.

Please keep in mind that ReadPlease is their software not ours. They are the experts on it. They have even better versions with even clearer, more natural voices, which they sell. You can listen to samples at their Web site www.readplease.com, where you can also see detailed help files.  And you can contact them at: ReadPlease Corporation, 121 Cherry Ridge Road, Thunder Bay, ON, Canada P7G 1A7. Phone: 807-474-7702


Tips for using/enjoying the texts on this CD:

The easiest way to get started is to click on My Computer, then on your CD drive, then on index.html. (That should bring you to here, in Word or your Web browser, or WordPad or Notepad, depending on your computer's setup.)

From the index, click on an individual work to see the full text in your browser or in Word. Click "Back" in your browser to return here.  Use the "find" function in your browser (under Edit/Find in both Netscape and IE) to find any word or phrase within a document.

When you stop reading, jot down the last phrase (a unique set of words) so you can search for that the next time you want to read and easily find the spot where you left off.

If you just want to read and if you have a large screen, use your browser and under View increase the type size to meet your taste.

If you just want to read and you have a small screen, try using WordPad or Word.

If you want to take notes while you read, first save the file on your hard drive, then open it in WordPad or Word, enter your notes with the text (making them distinctive with bold or italic or by enclosing them in brackets] as you go along, and save the entire file, with those changes, when you are done.

If you use Word, you can Select All [under Edit], and modify the font and type size (to make the letters larger and easier to read) [under Format and Font], and save the files on your hard drive [under File, Save As] with whatever changes you have made (including notes you made while reading).


Note regarding copyright:  We include works published in the US before 1923, works from Australia and Canada when the author died 50 years or more ago, and works from the European Union (including the United Kingdom and Ireland) when the author died 70 years or more ago. NB -- Due to The European Union's extension of copyright by 20 years to 70 years after the death of the author, many works which had been in the public domain under the previous law are now once again under copyright. Hence we are unable to include on our CDs some popular writers whose works are still readily available over the Internet.

This site is published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132-002. 617-469-2269 seltzer@samizdat.com

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