Was he listening to a lot of Meyerbeer?

Once again, your alte Jungfer is pleased to offer a performance by a polarizing diva: it seems that parterriani either love her or loathe her.

As the world knows, Anja Harteros dropped out of this series of Don Carlo for a stab at Aïda in Rome. Illness sidelined Ramón Vargas from the title roles in both Don Carlo and Werther. While Wiener Staatsoper has been plagued with cancellations all season (even substituting L’elisir d’amore for La Juive at the last…

“Go while the going is good.  Knowing when to leave may be the smartest thing anyone can learn,” sings Fran in Promises, Promises, the 1968 Hal David/Burt Bacharach musical which apparently Edita Gruberová has never seen.

Renée Fleming is one of the most polarizing figures to be discussed here on an ongoing basis.

Defying a computer breakdown and an online outage, I fled to a smoky Iranian Internet café to upload this performance of Don Giovanni. It was worth the trouble.

Today’s program documents the only time Joan Sutherland and Luciano Pavarotti performed La traviata together at the Met.-

As a preview of sorts of the Next Big Thing at the Met, here’s a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta featuring Piotr Beczala from 2002.

It’s Corelli two ways and across nearly two decades in this dream double bill of Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci.

This week, we return to the 1970s with a very special performance of Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda featuring the duelling queens of Beverly Sills and Pauline Tinsley.