Dame Joan Sutherland, nicknamed "La Stupenda" by the Italians to whom she gave back their own operas, has died.

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I am too lazy to search the archives to find out if I've posted before about Ut queant laxis, the vesper hymn for the Nativity of St. John the Baptist (today), which happens to also be the source of the solfege syllables (do re mi). Rather than rehash the whole story, here's an excerpt from my as-yet-unpublished hymnal, with Latin and English ( Read more... )

Strauss's opera Die Frau ohne Schatten is one of the true oddities of the repertoire, an earnest and abstruse fairy tale about conjugal love flowering into children. (One wag dubbed it "Humanae Vitae: The Opera.") Fortunately, we need not unravel the plot here, for our subject is the very first scene. The Emperor, who is setting out on a hunt, bids ( Read more... )

Greater than Nilsson/Windgassen, greater than Nilsson/Vickers, I bring you Flagstad/Melchior ( Read more... )

Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld ( Read more... )

Googling for "Wotan's Farewell" yields an article from the March 15, 1943 issue of Time, which begins with a sentence Wagner aficionados quote at their peril: "The only really likable characters in Wagnerian opera are old men."

( The Wagnerian Hero in His Natural Habitat )

I was feeling Germanic today, so I decided to translate the Süddeutsche Zeitung's review of this year's Ring at Bayreuth for myself. I would post the translation for you, but 1) I don't know if there's a copyright problem and 2) the review was almost wholly content-free anyway. :)

Beethoven left us only one opera, Fidelio. The plot is simple: Florestan has been captured and imprisoned by his enemy Pizarro, and a report of his death has been circulated. Florestan's wife Leonore doesn't believe it, though, and disguises herself as a boy and enters the sevice of the jail entrusted to Pizarro. During the course of the opera, she ( Read more... )

In my last entry, I promised a fuller review of Les Troyens.

( Well, here it is. )

Today I received a copy of the 1983 Met production of Les Troyens. As I type, I'm watching Act 1, the duet between Chorebus and Cassandra, and I'm already impressed. Most of the recordings I have are either old, or have primarily European singers, or both, so I have not kept up with the career of Jessye Norman. I like her already. During Cassandra' ( Read more... )