From the moment months ago that Juilliard Opera announced it would be staging the first US production in nearly 20 years of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s monumental Hippolyte et Aricie my heart has been filled with admiration and gratitude. But just before the generally admirable first performance concluded Tuesday evening at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater the assembled forces committed such a catastrophic misstep that I had my head in my hands groaning in disbelief instead of joining in the general applause around me. Read more »
Luckless Otto Nicolai belongs to the large company of opera composers who never reached forty. Barely out of his twenties, he went south to Milan and scored a palpable hit, Il Templario, based on Ivanhoe. On the strength of this, he was offered a confused but epic libretto, a Biblical farrago entitled Nabucodonosor. He turned it down, and the impresario gave it to an even younger composer named Verdi. When this came to the stage, Nicolai said, “I told you no one could write music to that libretto,” and returned to Prussia. 
Cher Public