Opera on Stages & Screens

Don't Say Accessible: Opera Wars and the Fight Over What Opera Can Be

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Nine pages before the end of the new book Opera Wars: Inside the World of Opera and the Battles for its Future, author Caitlin Vincent quotes a more than 40-time contemporary opera librettist about the stigma against accessibility in modern opera.

“Librettist Mark Campbell recalled being confronted by a composer collaborator after Campbell described his music as ‘accessible’ in a public forum. ‘He took me aside and said, Don’t ever use that word again. Critics will use that against me. And I said, I didn’t mean it was dumbed down. I meant the audience will connect with it.’”

Ranking All 13 Andrea Chénier Videos

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Some operas reward repeat listens, but relatively few reward back-to-back repeat watches. Many librettos boil their stories down to the essentials, with a love triangle at the center and little historical or imaginative detail going on around it in the words. And they can be long, with the longest operas running six hours. (Hi, Wagner.)

Umberto Giordano’s Andrea Chénier, however, is a rare counterexample. With a libretto by Luigi Illica (Tosca, La Bohème), the opera runs just two hours but gives a sweeping account of the cultural and political life during both the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. The experience is often more like watching a play than an opera, with an emphasis on dialogue that does not interrupt the sweep of the melodies but explores many details outside of the standard love triangle (which can be found here as well for those who love that). This packing of detail into a tight package might help explain why, in the last two years alone, at least three web sites have attempted to rank the many, many recordings of this opera: It’s fun to revisit, and one almost always catches something new in revisiting it. This is the third of those web posts. Unlike the other two, which focused on records, I am focusing on video versions as I find the opera immensely rewatchable.

The New York Times Misses Its Moment at the Met's Kavalier and Clay

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When the Metropolitan Opera chose to open its 2025-26 season with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, they must have felt it was a risky move. The brand-new, sweeping, three-hour adaptation of Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about two Jewish comic book makers who invent a superhero to fight the Nazis in World War Two had only played at Indiana University, as the co-producing LA Opera had canceled what was to be its debut run due to financial constraints. The top brass decided not even to give it a slot in the “Met in HD” series, which broadcasts the operas in movie theaters around the world. So when The New York Times responded to its grand opening with the headline “A ‘Kavalier & Clay’ Opera Doesn’t Meet Its Moment,” it seemed like a potentially serious hit to the Met’s recent ambitious, financially perilous effort to introduce as many as six new operas each season. However, after that review the full multi-week run of the opera nearly sold out every night in the Met’s cavernous 3,800-seat auditorium, and now, after I was finally able to see the opera last night in my local movie theater, I can say it seems quite clear it’s the New York Times that missed its moment.

Radvanovsky's Medea at the Lyric Opera Rehabilitates a True Anti-Hero

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In Madeline Miller’s novel Circe, the famous title witch has occasion to speak to her niece, Medea. Circe, who turns many of Odysseus’ men into pigs before he persuades her to change them back and she gets in bed with him, warns Medea that her husband Jason is waning in his feelings for her. Medea will not listen. “They will never take Jason from me,” Medea says in the novel. “I have my powers, and I will use them.” Circe, whom Miller turns from a villain to a feminist anti-hero by empathizing with her where males have not over centuries of representations, fears the worst will happen in Medea’s case. Miller can rehabilitate Circe, but she can’t quite rehabilitate Medea. The bloody conclusion of Medea’s story is well known to most people with a passing knowledge of Greek myth. She kills both of her children to get back at her ex-husband as he marries a new bride, kills that new bride and sets fire to the temple. A hard character to rehabilitate.

Welcome to the 100th Opera Season After the Art Form's Alleged Death

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A new opera season is upon us, one that in April will see the celebration of the 100th anniversary of what has been called “the death of opera.” On April 26, 1926, the great conductor Arturo Toscanini burst into tears upon completing the first performance of Puccini’s last opera Turandot. Since then, though many excellent new operas have been performed, it’s been argued that popular opera has died. The New York Times opera critic Zachary Woolfe in 2024 went so far as to say “A century on, it can be said confidently: With Puccini died the great opera tradition. There have been extraordinary works created since his death, but next to none have penetrated the public consciousness, or the core repertoire.” The century of music past “Nessun Dorma” (Turnadot’s greatest aria, which itself has been played almost to death) has been diverse and exciting, and there are more new operas than ever to get excited about in the last few years, with many different styles of classical music. However, if audiences feel something is missing in the listenability of the new operas compared with the old ones they are not entirely mistaken.

Opera Theatre of St. Louis Deserves More National Attention in Its 50th Year

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Opera Theatre of St. Louis, an underrated gem that gets – but deserves more – national attention, celebrated its 50th anniversary this month with four solid operas that outshine the offerings of larger opera companies in many ways. The Opera Theatre received advance features from The New York Times and the Associated Press for its world premiere this summer of This House, a Harlem-set tale of ghosts and gentrification from composer Ricky Ian Gordon and librettists Lynn Nottage, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, and her daughter Ruby Aiyo Gerber. But the reviews this summer were mostly local, and I always end up wondering whether St. Louisans realize quite how special an asset this annual festival of four operas really is.

An Aside on Cosi: The WSJ Quite Agrees With Me

Tue, 20 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I just found a review of the production from the Wall Street Journal that ran just after I wrote my review. It totally agrees with me, and with a poster who read my review on another web site and wrote to say she “loved” it. The Journal’s critic says the concept “is clever and apt-at first,” but that in act two Sharon “doesn’t come up with a satisfying resolution within the opera’s rich, if tricky, original framework. Instead, he jettisons a sizable chunk of the score and tacks on an abrupt new ending. It may be the logical conclusion of Mr. Sharon’s ideas about the intersection of technology and human mutability, but it isn’t ‘Cosi.’

Sharon’s Concept Cosi Brilliant and Then Disastrous

Mon, 19 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

When the Detroit Free Press excoriated Yuval Sharon’s new AI-themed Cosi Fan Tutte at Detroit Opera, in which the women are robots designed by the men, it had it half-right. I was sold on the audacious concept in the first act, but the show went both south and overboard in the second.

What sold me on it were these lines in the opening scene of Lorenzo Da Ponte’s original libretto, which melded so well with the girls-are-robots concept that I forgave it all its excesses until midway into the second act:

Opera on Stages & Screens

Don't Say Accessible: *Opera Wars* and the Fight Over What Opera Can Be

Ranking All 13 *Andrea Chénier* Videos

The New York Times Misses Its Moment at the Met's *Kavalier and Clay*

Radvanovsky's *Medea* at the Lyric Opera Rehabilitates a True Anti-Hero