What with all the interest in the recent Rome performances of Aïda (and in part, at least, in Anja Harteros‘s approach to the high C in the Nile aria), La Cieca thought it would be fun to hear how some divas of the past and present have coped with that very challenging phrase. And, just…
Tell us: What was the best of 2025?
Parterre Box concludes the thrilling first year of Talk of the Town by inviting your lightning rod opinions on several more categories of operatic argumentation.
Here’s a quick last-minute quiz for you Martinu fans out there: answer the question after the jump and win two tickets to Gotham Chamber Opera’s double bill program of Alexandre bis and Comedy on the Bridge this week.
I have banged on and on about doing an “Abscheulicher” quiz for years.
For your racionative pleasure, cher public, here’s an epistolary quiz in honor of the Met’s new production of Werther: 13 artists share Charlotte’s “Ces lettres! Ces lettres!” scena from Massenet’s opera.
Not perhaps as enthusiastic a response as La Cieca might have liked to the recent Posa quiz, and no official winner.
It’s just a teensy bit late for Verdi’s birthday, but La Cieca thinks you’ll enjoy the latest vocal ID challenge, cher public.
La Cieca and DeCaffarrelli unanimously hail Trubadur as winner of the “Ladies in the Dark” vocal ID competition.
Perhaps, you, cher public, will be crying out the above-mentioned phrase when you hear the most recent vocal collage prepared by our dear DeCaffarrelli.
Now the deadline has passed for the Immolation Quiz, La Cieca is happy if a bit puzzled to announce that the result is a tie: two of the cher public were able to identify 23 of the 25 voices in the quiz correctly.
The Immolation Quiz now stands tied between two competitors, each of whom has identified correctly 20 of the 25 singers represented.
The music is “Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene” and it is up to you (and I do mean you) to identify the 25 singers involved.
La Cieca has heard the rumblings (from you, the cher public) that we have not had a singer identification quiz in all too long a while.
Frankly, the response to the Elektra quiz was uneven. La Cieca will explain after the jump.
Here’s a quiz compiled by Our Own DeCaffarrelli to help fill out the tedious month before the season opens, cher public.
Much guesswork, most of it terribly astute, went into our most recent vocal ID quiz, and La Cieca is now ready to reveal the most accurate of a very accurate bunch.
“I have learned by the perfectest report they have more in them than mortal knowledge.”
“The Greek drama affords us one character which, had Shakespeare studied it in the three great tragedians of that people, and then, preserving Greek manners as ably as he did Roman, written it from his own heart and mind, might have been worthy to succeed the greatest achievement of the stage.”
After a brilliantly collaborative start, the cher public fell just short of deciphering the complete Beim Schlafengehen quiz, though several of you did very well indeed.
Don’t let the headline worry you, cher public, what’s coming up after the jump is meant to be good clean fun, with a prize even.
A mysterious lady in the shadows of Castellor! Who might she be?
A faithful reader has just informed La Cieca that, two weeks ago at the Met, during an intermission of La bohème, he saw Henry Kissinger, “flanked by two bodyguards twice his height and twelve times his weight.” Which led this reader to pose to you, cher public, the following trivia question: “What makes Henry Kissinger…
