They’ve been celebrating the centennial of Gian-Carlo Menotti lately, spouting wild claims for the immortality of his music. He did have an impressive run of successes in the 1940s, but he lived till 2007 with many more premieres and nary another hit. 

Trying to suggest erstwhile world-renown of Guillaume Tell to a 23-year-old who had never heard of it, a friend of mine mentioned The Lone Ranger. “What’s The Lone Ranger?” replied the youth. And the sun rises and the sun sets and all things must pass. But surely he knew Bambi Meets Godzilla, which also uses…

It is a thousand pities Francesco Cavalli never saw Some Like It Hot. A tale of convoluted romances, cross-dressing, immoral moralizing and a divine diva would have been right up his alley, or rather, Venetian canal. As staged by Vertical Players Repertory in a back alley around the corner from the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn’s…

Sir Arthur Sullivan, the son of an Irish father and an Italian mother, studied Mendelssohn’s composition style in Leipzig. He was therefore, inevitably, the supreme English theater composer of his day, and his often Mozartean style of melody is not out of place in a bel canto festival. After all, in the fourteen operettas he…

Not everything a genius creates is … a work of genius. Y’know? Mozart, for example: Sure, he was a prodigy at four, and at ten, and even at fourteen, but did he actually compose anything spectacular before he turned, say, seventeen? I’m thinking of “Exultate, Jubilate,” if you want to know. 

We’re going to be hearing a lot about pasticcios in the next seven months, as we run up to The Enchanted Island at the Met. We’d better get used to the idea, and what better way to do so than to go hear a home-made pasticcio at far lower prices? 

Pornography being the seminal [sic] art form of our time, through which every other art is interpreted (I lament this, but what can you do?), and opera being in one of its periodic up-cycles, new ones being composed and premiered, old ones being dusted off for re-use, and stage directors feeling impelled, as they do,…

The moral of Lohengrin is clearly set out: Don’t talk on your wedding night. Even more important, don’t sing. Happily, at Lyric Opera of Chicago, Johan Botha in the title role and Amber Wagner as Elsa of Brabant ignored this advice. 

What do opera composers do on vacation? If the researches behind this performance at the Rossini in Wildbad Festival are correct, they gather their nearest and dearest and dash them off a quickie opera for performance en famille. That, in any case, is what Giovanni Pacini did during down-time between presenting seventy-odd operas to the…

Some composers write as if the dividing line between instruments that play notes and the voice, which usually sings a text and takes some of its attitude towards the music from that text, were not an all-important factor.