HANDEL’S GIULIO CESARE

Giulio Cesare in Egitto was the fifth of the full-length operas composed by Handel for Londonís Royal Academy of Music, the opera company founded in 1719 by a group of noblemen with the objective of staging Italian opera seria.

A Fresh Look at Giulia Grisi

Giulia Grisi must be, by whatever standard is applied, regarded as one of the greatest and most important soprano singers who ever graced the operatic stage,

Symphony and Opera take different paths to getting new behinds into those velvet seats

Classical performing organizations are feeling a little antsy nowadays, all except for the ones that are flat-out running scared.

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vilaine fille: Turandot

Puccini’s Turandot is an opera to whose sinister charms I was long immune. I’m not sure what happened in recent years to make me love it.

The Paris Opera Scene

The city-funded ThÈ‚tre du Ch‚telet, an operatic David to Paris Operaís Goliath, managed to make the biggest artistic splash of the new season. Richard Wagnerís Die Walk¸re, which opened October 21, following Das Rheingold by two days, was generally well cast, surely conducted and, as staged by Robert Wilson, brimming with theatrical interest. The two final operas will follow in November/December with two complete cycles offered in April.

ìLa Muette de Porticiî : a small revolt in Ghent

No opera history is complete without mentioning that Auberís La Muette de Portici caused Belgiumís revolution against Holland in 1830. As a historian I know there are three falsehoods in that one small sentence.

The twists and trysts of Tosca

A few years ago, I had the rare experience of attending a performance of Tosca in a small farm community where opera was a fairly new commodity. After the second act ended, with Scarpia’s corpse lying center stage, I happened to overhear a young, wide-eyed woman say to her companion, “I knew she was upset, but I didn’t think she’d KILL him!”

Alex Ross on City Operaís fall season

New York City Opera opened in February, 1944, at the height of the battles of Anzio and Truk. If skeptics thought it frivolous to start an opera company in the middle of a world war, Fiorello LaGuardia straightened them out: the music-loving Mayor believed that opera was essential to city life, and he wanted lower- and middle-class New Yorkers to have it at affordable prices, without pretension.

The Operatic Pushkin

Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin (1799-1837) is generally considered Russiaís greatest poet. According to Andrew Kahn, his contemporaries held him ìabove all the master of the lyric poem, verse that is famous for its formal perfection and its reticent lyric persona, and infamous for its resistance to translation.î [Alexander Pushkin, The Queen of Spades and Other Stories, trans. Alan Myers, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997]