Mainly Opera and Ballet
After Wagner’s death in 1883, an Englishman named Houston Stewart Chamberlain promoted a Wagner cult, inveigling himself with the great composer’s widow Cosima. Chamberlain was the sort of man who needed a cause, and his antisemitism helped propel an unhealthy attitude towards Wagner’s music. This German opera by an Israeli composer tackles these issues in …
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 …
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), …
