The purpose of this bi-lingual catalogue, written in French and English, is to facilitate research, performance, and general appreciation of Massenet's music. The Massenet General Catalogue is a complete inventory of the known works of the composer. For each work, it provides the vocal and/or instrumental requirements (including the tessituras of the operatic roles), the author(s) of associated texts, the location of manuscripts, and other pertinent details. The authors, established specialists in nineteenth-century French music, have created an inventory of works according to specific genres, including opera, sacred music, cantatas and scenes, choruses, incidental music, symphonic music, piano music, and songs. For the songs, numbering some 300 titles, the authors list information for each song as well as the components of cycles and collections. The Catalogue includes explanatory paragraphs and annotations, a select bibliography, and a biographical chronology. There are also appendices with explanations of versions of certain works, the operas Thaïs (the original version and a major revision), Manon (the original opera-comique version and the entirely sung version), and the ballet L'Histoire de Manon, a retelling of the Manon story using music from Massenet's other works, selected and orchestraed by Leighton Lucas. Finally, the catalogue's authors have created a system of DO numbers (Dibbern-Oléon) which serve to define the scope of Massenet's music. These cataloguing numbers are meant to be used as the definitive reference numbers for Massenet's oeuvre.

This bibliography is a subject bibliography and hence contains bibliographic descriptions of documents published about one subject, viz Fernando Sor (1778-1839). The entries have been classified systematically. Within the systematic classification, the documents have been arranged chronologically by year of appearance. This system gives an insight into the historical development of musicological research concerning Fernando Sor. The book is a practical guide, which enables the reader to find his way through the published literature, the descriptions of which are widely dispersed and often very brief. The descriptions conform to the International Standard Bibliographic Description for Monographic Publications and (id.) for Printed Music (ISBD-M and ISBD-PM). Six indexes refine access to the contents, representing entries from 532 authors, 105 periodicals and 154 publishers. Colleagues, publishing houses, librarians and friends, twenty-seven in all, from twelve countries around the world, recognized the importance of the project and spontaneously offered their invaluable collaboration. The bibliography is up-to-date as of March 2013, and is the fruit of many years of musicological research. Fernando Sor: A Bibliography of Published Literature and Music contains detailed descriptions of worldwide historical and contemporary publications brought together for the first time.