Thomas McGeary has written extensively about the reception of Italian opera in eighteenth-century Britain and his editions and translations of Arnold Schoenberg and Harry Partch received ASCAP-Deems Taylor awards. His research has been supported by fellowships from institutions including the Newberry Library/British Academy, the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art and the American Handel Society, and his articles on art, music and literature in eighteenth-century Britain have appeared in, among others, Music and Letters, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, the Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, Early Music, Burlington Magazine and Philological Quarterly.

• 1. Introduction; 2. Opera and political allegory: when is it an allegory? When is it political?; 3. Politics in the Royal Academy of Music; 4. The opera house, allegory, and the political opposition; 5. Handel's Second Academy; 6. Rival opera companies and Farinelli at the Court of Madrid; 7. Politics, theatre, and opera in the 1730s; 8. The opera stage as political history; Epilogue; Appendices: 1. Directors of the Royal Academy of Music; 2. Operas of the Royal Academy of Music; 3. Directors of the Opera of the Nobility; 4. Operas of the Opera of the Nobility; 5. Hanoverian celebratory pieces.

'McGeary's argument is convincing throughout not only because he argues his points with great consistency, but because he documents them meticulously with evidence from an unusually large number of both primary and secondary sources.' The Newsletter of the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music