Elizabeth Forbes

Who is Elizabeth Forbes?

Elizabeth Forbes is an English author, music critic, and musicologist who specializes in writing about opera. Her main areas of interest are 19th- and 20th-century opera and singers, both historical and present-day. She has contributed a large amount of reviews and articles to several notable periodicals and newspapers internationally including the Financial Times, The Independent, The Musical Times, Opera, Opera Canada, and Opera News among several others.

She is the author of numerous books on various subjects related to opera, including her 1985 work, Mario and Grisi, which details the lives of opera singers Giulia Grisi and Giovanni Matteo Mario. She wrote a significant number of singing translations of many operas, from French, German and Swedish, including works by Gaspare Spontini, Giacomo Meyerbeer and Franz Berwald, and has also extensively contributed to reference works on singers and other operatic topics, including several hundred articles in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.