Elopement, Neapolitan style Elopement, Neapolitan style

Niccolò Jommelli, forgotten now, was quite well known in Italy and southern Germany in his day.

Joy cometh in the mourning Joy cometh in the mourning

Is the threnody, the lament over a beloved corpse, the oldest form of song? Surely it is among the oldest; one of the most widespread and stylistically various, millennia before opera was devised.

An unweeded garden that grows to seed

When Mojca Erdmann’s new debut CD for Deutsche Grammophon was reviewed in the September issue of Opera News, the disc’s cover art showed the lissome German soprano in a thin, revealing white dress, lying on a bed of roses.  The album was then called Mostly Mozart.  When that review questioned the titling, DG must have…