Inspired by Wagner’s own tortured affair with the wife of his patron, this searing masterwork is based on Arthurian legend and tells of an illicit romance between a Breton nobleman and the Irish princess betrothed to his uncle and king. The composer’s larger-than-life sensibilities are on full display throughout the score: Along with intoxicating orchestral music that surges in tandem with the couple’s burgeoning passion and a chord left symbolically unresolved until the last moments of the opera, the opera also features one of the repertory’s most soaring and ecstatic final climaxes, as Isolde surrenders to a love so powerful that she transcends life itself.
When this sumptuous production by Giancarlo del Monaco opened in 1995, legendary tenor Plácido Domin...
Opera lies at the heart of Rimsky-Korsakov's colourful idiom, but performances are few and far betwe...
Prince Abesalom runs into an orphaned Eteri while hunting, falls for her and brings the woman to his...
Like Handel’s Orlando (1732) and Ariodante (1734), Alcina derives from the narrative material in Ari...
The grand scale and magnificent acoustics of the Roman arena in Verona are ideally suited to the pag...
Axel Kohler, the internationally renowned countertenor has brought Admeto into the modern era in tim...
In Rigoletto, the deformed figure of the hunchbacked jester at the Mantuan court acts as a foil to h...
It took Anna 10 years to recover from the death of her husband, Sean, but now she's on the verge of ...
Robert Lepage’s dreamlike production, with its thousands of twinkling LED lights stretching across t...
This filmed version of Strauss' shocker features Teresa Stratas as opera's most depraved teenager, a...
Opera in one act, libretto by G. Forzano based on Dante's Divine Comedy. Third part of his opera Tri...
Without question, this is an incredibly bizarre production. The revised storyline makes little sense...
Arabella, Op. 79, is a lyric comedy or opera in three acts by Richard Strauss to a German libretto b...
Dvořák's "Rusalka" in a production by David Pountney at the English National Opera in 1986. Mark Eld...
The life and career of Italian opera singer Farinelli, considered one of the greatest castrato singe...
This was Domingo's last set of performances as Otello in La Scala. In spite of his relatively advanc...
Le convenienze ed inconvenienze teatrali (Conventions and Inconveniences of the Stage) is a two-act ...
37-year-old Italian-American widow Loretta Castorini believes she is unlucky in love, and so accepts...