Opera Today

“What a difference a sound makes” goes the song (or something like that).

By sheer coincidence I attended a concert performance of this opera at the Vlaamse Opera in Antwerp at the same moment I received these CDís.

When asked whether he believed Rossini had composed Il Barbiere di Siviglia in thirteen days, nineteen-year-old Donizetti is supposed to have replied,

Klaus-Edgar Wichmann, in the booklet essay to this Capriccio recording from 2002 of Otto Nicolai’s Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor, describes the work as having “asserted itself in the opera repertoire for more than a hundred years.”