Dissertation Digest: Portraying the Anti-Heroine in Contemporary Opera
By Nicholas StevensIn September 2017, I pasted a link to an interview into an email, and sent it to my former doctoral… Read More
Essays About opera
Book Preview: Chinatown Opera Theater in North America by Nancy Rao
by Nancy Rao In my book Chinatown Opera Theater in North America (University of Illinois Press, 2017), I reconstruct the lost history of a vibrant “Golden Age” of Chinese opera theaters in the United States and Canada in the 1920s,… Read More
Quick Takes on Rogue One: Putting the Opera Back in “Space Opera”
By Naomi Graber It is a truth universally acknowledged that the Star Wars saga is inherently Wagnerian (Kalinak, 1992; Schroeder, 2002). Just how Wagnerian is up for debate (Paulin, 2000), but the musical parallels between… Read More
Those EuroStagings: Opera at Will
by Laurenz Lütteken This post originally appeared, in German, in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung of 24 September 2014, in print and digital formats, under the title “Oper der Beliebigkeiten.” We are grateful to Professor Lütteken and the NZZ for permission to publish this adaptation in English, by DKH after… Read More
The Klinghoffer Controversy
by Charles T. Downey The Metropolitan Opera and its General Manager, Peter Gelb, took a considerable risk by planning to mount John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer this coming fall. The furor generated by the work’s U.S. premiere in 1991 convinced its librettist, Alice Goodman, that it was… Read More
Jeremy Denk responds:
NOTE: The librettist of The Classical Style—an Opera of Sorts here responds to Kristi Brown-Montesano’s post just below, adding “I felt it was necessary to respond, even if only to allay the sense that I was attacking musicology as a discipline—seeing as I count a good number of musicologists as… Read More
The Classical Style, of sorts
by Kristi Brown-Montesano One year, during the opening Dean’s Welcome at the conservatory where I teach, the head of the violin studio addressed the students, faculty, and staff, extolling the school’s focus on performance training. Pointing offstage, he announced dramatically, “So, if you want to be a musicologist, there’s the… Read More
Benjamin Britten: Centenary Reflections (1)
by Paul Banks NOTE: Byron Adams’s “For Benjamin Britten, Upon the Centenary of His Birth,” will appear next in this series. Ben and Peter. And Aaron. As we celebrate the centenary of the birth of Benjamin Britten (22 November 1913),… Read More
Verdi at 200 (2)
by Philip Gossett Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of posts commemorating Verdi’s bicentennial. Roger Parker’s piece is available here. And so, we celebrate this year the 200th anniversary of Giuseppe Verdi’s birth. Read More
Bellini alla Malibran
by Hilary Poriss In the autumn of 1832, when Maria Malibran (1808–36) was at the height of her fame—recognized widely as one of the most accomplished and exciting prima donnas touring the international operatic circuit—she arrived at Bologna’s Teatro Comunale where she took on… Read More