Human heritage: a thousand years of opera, by Ibrahim Al-Arees

The greatest productions of this millennium have always been works that move from the individual creator, who bears on his shoulders the history of civilizations, eras, and places combined, to humanity as a whole. Divine Comedy is not only Italian-Latin; when Ferdowsi chronicles the kings of Persia, he is recording humanity. The works of Ibn Rushd were not owned solely by Arabs, and Shakespeare, Van Gogh, Visconti, and others expressed themselves and their societies in a way that reflected all of humanity, and their output was directed toward the entire human race. This is what the researcher in this book seeks to depict and to portray through simple words, brief texts, and expressive images a history of the human mind and culture, as it has manifested over a thousand years. The reader will find in this a mixture of ideas, arts, and cultures, and a blend of nations and individuals. This does not mean that the author will take the reader on a specialized academic journey, providing lengthy and boring or school-like analyses... but he will, as much as possible, address timeless and fundamental works that have formed landmarks and important building blocks in the history of humanity across all intellectual, political, philosophical, and literary fields, as well as in the arts, including theatrical arts, cinema, painting, and sculpture. In an attempt to present a new perspective, giving the primary place to glorify the role played by the individual in the civilization of the collective, regardless of the individual's affiliation or nationality—be they strange or foreign, African or European, American or Asian. What matters is the model itself... There are no borders between Shakespeare, Naguib Mahfouz, Bach, Maugham, the first Japanese novels, or the latest African poetry, because all of this represents the history of humanity... It is presented through models that make the matter appear as a crossword puzzle, which the reader reconstructs. It is worth noting that the author has compiled these articles, which he wrote daily for the newspaper Al-Hayat over more than twelve years, into themes that came in the following form: a thousand years of political thought, a thousand years of music, the history of cinema in 100 films, a thousand years of opera, a thousand years of visual art. Number of pages: 381.