The first performance of Anton Rubinstein’s opera “The Demon” at London’s Covent Garden was memorable — to say the least. A spurt of flame, a New York Times reporter reminisced in 1893, “burst out from the Demon’s den, and set the adjoining scenery on fire.” Rubinstein was conducting and helped put out the fire, an…
The composer Richard Strauss has a complicated legacy. Beginning in 1933, Strauss served as the President of the Reichsmusikkammer, the Nazi Reich’s Chamber of Music, a damning collaboration with the regime. But in 2014, prompted by celebrations of Strauss’s 150th birthday, many music scholars took to editorial pages, to reconsider the extent of the artist’s…
Jews have always had a complicated relationship with opera. Ostracized in European society, Jewish composers and librettists had few chances to make professional headway; perhaps the most successful of them, Mozart collaborator Lorenzo da Ponte, converted to Christianity. The most influential late-Romantic opera composer, Richard Wagner, was a notorious anti-Semite. And prior to the mid-19th…
New York’s Metropolitan Opera said on Monday that it had fired its longtime conductor and musical director James Levine after an inquiry found “credible evidence” to support accusations against him of sexual misconduct. The Met suspended Levine, 74, in December after several accusations of sexual misconduct stretching from the 1960s to 1980s. At the time,…
If you’ve ever watched “Jerry Springer” and thought the talk show, infamous for presenting familial confrontations over lurid secrets, expressed some ineffable (if grim) truths about humanity, you’re in luck: “Jerry Springer — The Opera” will arrive in New York in the 2017-2018 season. The stage production, which premiered in London over a decade ago,…
Countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen, at 23 years old, might be one of opera’s most promising stars. He’s lined up engagements for the next few years, appearing next with Virginia’s Wolf Trap Opera and the Houston Grand Opera Studio. His subsequent commitments are currently under wraps. He was just named one of the winners of the…
RIO DE JANEIRO (JTA) — A new opera based on an 86-year-old Yiddish poem about a Taino indigenous chief who resisted the Spanish invaders will have its premiere in Havana next month. “Hatuey: Memory of Fire,” will first be performed in Havana on March 3, reported the New York Times. Composed by Frank London of the Klezmatics, the…
In January, 2018 a new opera with an unusual angle on the Holocaust will make its world premiere at Opera Colorado. The Denver-based opera company, which recently announced its 2017-2018 season, will perform composer Gerald Cohen and librettist Deborah Brevoort’s “Steal a Pencil For Me,” which tells the story of Jaap and Ina Polak, who…
100% of profits support our journalism
