Elizabeth Forbes (3 August 1924 – 22 October 2014) was an English author, journalist, music critic, and musicologist who specialised in writing about opera.
Actively working as a professional writer and journalist from the early 1970s through 2013, her main areas of interest were 19th and 20th-century opera (French and Scandinavian in particular) and singers, both historical and present-day.
[1] After the war she spent two years living in Stockholm where she learned to speak Swedish fluently and worked in a book shop.
Upon returning to England in 1949 she joined the staff at the well known Curzon Street bookshop, Heywood Hill where she worked for many years.
She wrote a significant number of singing translations of the libretti of many operas, from French, German and Swedish, including works by Gaspare Spontini, Giacomo Meyerbeer and Franz Berwald, and also extensively contributed to reference works on singers and other operatic topics, including several hundred articles in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and the related The Grove Book of Opera Singers.