Mary Garden, not unlike Frank Sinatra, has a cold
“Miss Mary Garden, the prima donna, has some definite ideas about American customs laws which would make her an ardent tariff reformer if she were in politics.”
Recent Stories
Yule, never walk alone
Just in time for the holidays, La Cieca has flung open the doors of her Shoppe of Holiday Delights!
I’ll take the fall
The days are getting shorter, but you can keep the prattle going this fall’s Talk of the Town! You will, you can, you must join in the discussion about: Great mezzo soprano performances (October),
Gained in translation (November), Teleport me back to… (December).
Blonde, bombshell
So we may all be on the same page as we discuss, following the jump is the video of the December 7 Traviata from La Scala.
Montag mit Marianne
Our Very Own Marianne Leitmetzerin (pictured) has graciously shared a jewel from her vast coffer of recorded performances, a boon La Cieca hopes will become a regular Monday event here at parterre.
Life of the party
Our dear friends at Operavore (to whence Our Own JJ will be returning for another season early in 2014) have called for nominations for favorite operatic “party records.”
Fan club
During what German audiences at Eugene Onegin like to call a “Briefpause,” the cher public (pictured) are invited to discuss, oh, this, that and the other thing.
Don’t be defeatist, dear
“After attending the dress rehearsal in London I wrote the following to Mr Carsen to give him the opportunity to make changes.”
He is big
Falstaff, Verdi’s final opera, is exuberantly inventive, bubbling and roiling with ideas the 79-year-old composer was too impatient to develop.
Something unseen
Which resurgent maestro’s instructions to the musical staff have rung out clear as a bell: “Can’t stand those operas you’ve programmed in my absence, so get them off the future schedule?”
Chat roulette
It’s the opening of the Met’s Saturday afternoon broadcast season, cher public, and the first opera in the series is Rigoletto.
Tom Krause 1934-2013
Finnish bass-baritone Tom Krause died Thursday. He was 79.
Freeze frame
Our Own JJ takes on an old frame (Der Rosenkavalier) and a new (Eugene Onegin) in his latest review for the New York Observer.
Marriage in München
Our weekly find from the Mike Richter collection: Le nozze di Figaro from the Bayerische Staatsoper with a geniunely A-list cast.
Wayback Wednesday
As the celebrations for the 20th anniversary of parterre box continue, La Cieca (left) introduces a new feature: each week, a vintage issue of parterre box, the queer opera zine, scanned into PDF format for handy download!
Making it that way again
Twenty years ago, a sad and lonely gay man sat down with a pair of scissors and a glue stick and said, “I think I’ll make a magazine.”
Happy Birthday Maria Meneghini Callas
Today would have been the 90th birthday of the quintessential prima donna.
Broadcast snooze
“There’s no hiding it. I find some passages of Wagner insufferably tedious.”
The shade of it all
There’s life in the old gala yet
As we wait for Tuesday’s festivities, cher public, let’s pass the time with conversation about off-topic and general interest subjects.
Pick your poison
I think we’re all aware by now of the wicked libel that the French dramatist Victor Hugo concocted about the fair Lucrezia Borgia with his depiction of her as a murderous virago.
Just another prick and the wall
Why Rufus Wainwright is turning a Roman emperor into a cock…
The canards begin at Calais
“Nicholas Hytner‘s ENO production of Xerxes, unveiled on the 300th anniversary of Handel’s birth and packed with visual conceits, might be seen as marking the beginning of the modern Handel renaissance on stage.”
Maid in Manhattan
Jane Archibald will sing the role of Adele in all 14 performances of the new production of Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus at the Met this season.