Stefania Dovhan curled up on a bench inside New York City Opera. She leaned her head against the railing of the lobby balcony and gazed out over the Lincoln Center plaza toward the Metropolitan Opera House. She had been there a few days before to see the famous Zeffirelli production of La Bohème, and she'd started crying when the snow began to fall over the despairing lovers in Act... MORE >
These days, when James Levine conducts, it makes a statement. And in the midst of a series of health-related cancellations over the past month, he left three opera performances conspicuously untouched. They weren't the performances with the biggest stars, or even those with the most immediate implications for his career. In fact, they weren't even at the Metropolitan Opera, where Mr. Levine is the music director, and they featured student... MORE >
The first opera production I ever saw was a Franco Zeffirelli production. As was the one after that. And the one after that. If you started going to the Metropolitan Opera in the '80s or '90s, chances are that Mr. Zeffirelli's work was the first thing you saw. After all, he directed the classic introductory operas: La Bohème, Tosca, La Traviata, Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci, Turandot, Don Giovanni... MORE >
"The American people may not like my face, but they're going to listen to what I have to say," Richard Nixon said during the 1968 presidential campaign. Nixon's embarrassments up to that point, after all, had been primarily visual ones: the disastrously five-o'clock-shadowed 1960 debate, the shine of sweat at his "final" press conference in... MORE >
Susan Graham doesn't want to be your friend. "Everyone asks me, 'Are you on Facebook? Do you have a thousand friends?'" the eminent mezzo-soprano said recently in her apartment near Lincoln Center. "I do not. I'm not interested in being friends with people I don't know in real life. I've gotten criticism for it. I got a comment on my Web site, someone saying, 'You're so ungrateful.' But I'm not your friend; I'm an artist.... MORE >
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"A Cosi fan tutte that will haunt me for the rest of my life," Peter G. Davis wrote in his 1984 New York review of Peter Sellars' landmark production of Mozart's opera. The performance took place at the Castle Hill Festival in Ipswich, Mass.; critics noted that the opera's roadside diner set resembled the places that dotted local Route 1A. Mr. Sellars was then just 26, but Mr. Davis was already looking ahead to... MORE >
For the kind of wrenching, blatantly ironic flourish that opera is known for--"You should know that was your brother you just killed"--there's really nothing that can beat the end of Giacomo Puccini's Tosca. The audience watches as dawn breaks over a prison in Rome. The year is 1800. Just a few minutes ago, we heard Scarpia, the corrupt, lecherous police chief, promise the title character, an opera diva, that Mario Cavaradossi, her condemned lover and... MORE >
Sometime in the fall of 1852, the composer Giuseppe Verdi decided that his next opera would be based on Alexandre Dumas' play The Lady of the Camellias. The play, which had been a hit in Paris earlier that year, was a semi-autobiographical story about a high-end prostitute, her love for a young bourgeois gentleman and her eventual death from... MORE >
People tell Mia Bongiovanni that she has the best office at the Metropolitan Opera, and it is indeed impressive. It's not large, but it's high up, and on a corner, and with great views: down over Lincoln Center Theater and the new elevated lawn, on one side; on the other, across the main plaza and out to Broadway. To top it off, a few steps from her office door is an interior balcony overlooking... MORE >
The composer Lee Hoiby lives deep in the Catskills, up a series of curving two-lane highways and a 20-minute drive past the end of cell-phone reception. A small, utilitarian metal bridge over a stream leads into his gravel driveway, which winds a hundred feet or so up a hill, branching left toward the big red house and right toward the garage. Atop that structure are the rooms where Mr. Hoiby works and sleeps. He... MORE >
Don Carlo is Verdi's longest opera, and perhaps his greatest. Sweeping and ambitious, a story of romantic, religious and political clashes at the 16th-century Spanish court, it is the most nuanced of the composer's explorations of the interaction of private obsessions and public, even national, responsibilities. Aida, which followed it and which it resembles, may have a tighter plot, but Don Carlo is unique in both its scale and its humaneness, its classically Verdian... MORE >
When critics and fans debate the Metropolitan Opera's Live in HD broadcasts, the question is always: "Is it good for opera?" Whatever that means. The question has its artistic corollaries: What are the broadcasts' implications for casting, for singing, for acting? Are they changing opera? Is that the goal, or a goal, or are the broadcasts just an elaborate marketing tool? What does "good" for opera mean... MORE >
Anita, the protagonist of Massenet's La Navarraise, is given to emotions that are a little, well, over the top. In this, she's not unique among operatic... MORE >
This is the age of the director and theatrical opera, we're told, and yet we keep getting disappointing, dull productions. There are a few glimmers of light, however, and one of the brightest is Christopher Alden, who's been making himself at home at New York City Opera. With Don Giovanni last year, and a new production of Leonard Bernstein's A Quiet Place, which opened last week, Mr. Alden has been creating the most consistently... MORE >
In 1979, the American composer Evan Ziporyn, inspired by an album of gamelan music called Music from the Morning of the World, which he'd heard while working at a record store in New Haven, went, like many an artist before him, to Bali. At the time, he didn't know that he was following, exactly 50 years later, in the footsteps of Colin McPhee, another Western composer who had gone to the island and, in... MORE >
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