It is to composer and librettist Arrigo Boito and his constant pestering of the octogenarian Verdi that there remained within him one last great comedy fighting to get out that we owe this absolute miracle of an opera. Produced in 1893 as Verdi turned 80 there is much in this masterpiece that can be identified as a modernist neoclassical work. The use of short motifs instead of long arioso melodic lines, the spry and reduced orchestral textures and the lack of a single 'stand and deliver' dramatic declamatory aria all serve to make this more of a 20th century work than an example of 19th century late-Romanticism.

A 2002 live performance of Mikel Rouse's Dennis Cleveland, a multimedia opera set entirely on a tele...

Götterdämmerung, the final instalment of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, is a story of human passions...

The deformed Phantom who haunts the Paris Opera House causes murder and mayhem in an attempt to make...

This May 2010 production of Massenet's 1910 opera "Don Quichotte" marked the opera's centenary and a...

This set has Edita Gruberova singing in top form, all her scooping cast aside, which one finds in ab...

The 2021 production by the Dutch National Opera of the work by German composer Rudi Stephan (1887–19...

I Vespri Siciliani must me Verdi's most underrated masterpiece. Most people are put off by the fact ...

Gustav Von Aschenbach, a passionate composer, arrives in Venice as a result of wanderlust and there ...

Jules Massanet's lyrical opera is transformed into a superb film production by Petr Weigl, shot on l...

Frantisek Filip film version of the Smetana opera.

This tragic story revolves around the licentious Duke of Mantua, his hunch-backed court jester Rigol...

The tale of a quick-witted fox and her escape from confinement for a life in the forest.

At first glance, the title of Shostakovich’s opera seems to speak for itself: Katherina, neglected a...

2014 marks a year of celebration recognizing the 150th birthday year of the German late-Romantic orc...

Rarely has a production of Verdi’s Otello been staged in such a prestigious location: the courtyard ...

Take a perfect cast, a great conductor and a groundbreaking staging in-out makes a 'Tristan' for ete...

Richard Wagner called Die Walküre the “first evening” of the Ring of the Nibelung; he called Das Rhe...

Johann Strauss, Jr., a would-be composer of waltzes in mid-19th Century Vienna, attempts to thwart h...

On a June night in 2017, opera lovers thronged to the Royal Opera House in London to hear tenor Jona...