The "belle dame sans merci" as personified in the poem by Keats, the seductress who drives men insane and slowly but surely to their ruin, is one of the myths of modern culture, pervading literature, drama, figurative arts, cinema. In opera the "femme fatale" is an archetype encompassing the magicians of antique phantasmagorias like Alcina and Armida, as well as Carmen, Salome and the most representative of all, Lulu, who wraps in her lethal coils all the men she meets, finally succumbing to Jack the Ripper's blade. A painstaking study of the figures of the great singers, carried out at the most famous opera theatres in the world, assembled in this book with the most stunning pictures of the enchantresses in music, who forever will outpour charm and poison, beauty and perdition, over all those who are fated to love them.
