Month: July 2012

The Santa Fe Opera will premiere Theodore Morrison's new opera 'Oscar' next summer. It won't be witty and light-hearted in the style of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest though. The libretto by John Cox is based on Wilde's poem from prison, The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Oscar Wilde died here in 1900, a [...]

Zachary Woolfe covers the latest controversy at Bayreuth - the cancellation of Evgeny Nikitin- in this weekend's edition of the International Herald Tribune. Today I visited the apartment at 14 rue Jacob where Wagner composed 'Flying Dutchman' in the winter of 1841-1842. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/27/arts/music/evgeny-nikitin-and-wagners-flying-dutchman.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Taken from the Cafe de la Paix. Napoleon III ordered this new opera house as part of the great Parisian Reconstruction project. It was completed in 1875.

The entrance to the Sun King's Royal Opera at Versailles. Unfortunately admission to the opera house was interdit this day.

Don GiovanniATLANTAAtlanta Opera4/28/12Atlanta Opera rounded out its current season, after taking a chance on Peter Ash's The Golden Ticket in March, with Mozart's Don Giovanni (seen April 28). While the staging was rather bland and involved only basic traffic patterns, the most stellar aspect of the production was conductor Arthur Fagen's presence on the podium. [...]