Ten years ago, the first time I saw Vincenzo Bellini’s 1831 opera, Norma, at the Met, I noticed one quirky bit of stage business. In the opera, the Roman proconsul Pollione has come to 50 B.C.E. Gaul to pacify the locals. He’s also pursuing a …
On civility, risk, and the demonization of dissent.I’m using this fifth installment of my opera column to offer a primer on theater, protest, and safety, by people who actually know about theater.As you’ve likely heard, at the November 18 evening…
“Nessun dorma,” Donald Trump, and the best and worst of fans.Ever since Jacopo Peri wrote Euridice (1600, the earliest extant European opera) to celebrate the marriage of Henri IV of France and Maria de’ Medici, opera has been ripe for political in…
Florence Foster Jenkins is remembered as a failed opera singer. What can we learn by listening to her today?When Florence Foster Jenkins made her self-financed public debut as a singer—in October 1944, when she was seventy-six—she sang “Claveli…
La bohème, live at Attica State Correctional Facility.Opera audiences are all the same. There are always two bald guys seated in the third row, whispering a phrase-by-phrase critique. Someone cups his ear, frustrated by the hall’s faulty acoustics.…
On the Voyager Mission.This summer, we’re introducing a series of new columnists. Up this week is Alison Kinney, whose column, Songs to the Moon, is a series on fandom and how the music, art, and artifacts of opera transform cultures and desires. …
We’re away until January 4, but we’re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2015. Please enjoy, and have a happy New Year!Reciting sagas in the Westfjords of Iceland.Haymaking time had come, warm, dry, and cloudless, on a late summer’s mornin…
Christmas trees have served as political lightning rods for nearly as long as Americans have been decorating them.In 1937, the Federal Writers’ Project interviewed Junius Quattlebaum, who’d grown up enslaved in South Carolina, about his Christmas…
Reciting sagas in the Westfjords of Iceland.Haymaking time had come, warm, dry, and cloudless, on a late summer’s morning roughly a millennium ago. All the men had gone out to mow, except for Thorkel, who lingered in bed, eavesdropping on the women…