Tag Archives: Justin Brown

Die Tote Stadt, Longborough, June 2022

In 1920, two years after the First World War, Europe was dealing with loss, and an ex-child prodigy, now 23, wrote an opera dealing with devastating loss. Unlike the novel Bruges-la-Morte on which it was based Die Tote Stadt has an ending that allows the protagonist the chance of recovery. This widower Paul lives in Bruges among the relics …

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Figaro’s Divorce, Welsh National Opera, WNO, Cardiff, February 2016

Beaumarchais wrote a sequel to his two plays underlying the Barber of Seville and Marriage of Figaro. In La Mère coupable a brief affair between the Countess and Cherubino results in a child, brought up as the Count’s son, and this opera, to David Pountney’s libretto based on a play by Ödön von Horváth (1901–1938), …

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