In Wordsworth’s great ode Intimations of Immortality there is an imaginative reference to “the clouds that gather round the ...

Let me tell you about an intergalactic oratorio. What on earth is that, you might conceivably ask. And in order to initiate a dialogue I might suggest that you speculate about its constituent parts. A ...

His celebrity-sibling, the soprano Nancy Storace, a favourite with Emperor Joseph II and prima buffa in the Italian opera troupe that he had established at the Burgtheater two years earlier, sang the ...

Michael Maniaci (Photo: Lake, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) The Rise of the Male Soprano? Michael Maniaci has a fight on his hands. In the world of baroque opera he’s a young singer who seems to have it ...

Composed originally for a Vienna premiere in 1864 the present version of Les FÈes du Rhin, or Die Rheinnixen, was published in the last few years as part of the critical edition of the complete works ...

Music composed by Otto Nicolai (1810-1849). Libretto by Salomon Hermann von Mosenthal after the play of the same name by William Shakespeare. First performance: 9 March 1849 at Kˆnigliches Opernhaus, ...

become the most popular opera in the world’. He was right: 150 years on Carmen is probably the best-known, most oft-performed opera, ...

much of it fruitful, some of it perhaps less so, between Brecht and Weill, came ...

a little-known opera; it was insurance for the house to have a cover available, ...

The political situation made the legendary opera house’s new production of Paul Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler (Matthew the Painter) all the more urgent. This intellectually stimulating, musically ...

both Rinaldo and Armida in his epic Gerusalemme Liberata.

Perhaps the operaís unflattering depiction of the Austrians as invaders and repressors of the Swiss people had something to do with the operaís long absence from the Viennese repertoire. More likely, ...