No other work reflects Puccini's search for new forms of musical theatre like his three-act trilogy IL TRITTICO, which premiered in 1918. In three pieces with different colours and temperatures, he once again brought to the stage what Italian opera could be in those years. In a condensed version, the second and third parts of the triptych now return to the stage of the Deutsche Oper in Karabulut's colourful production: SUOR ANGELICA, a piece with an all-female cast, is unique in opera history and revolves around questions of life and death and the possibilities in between. In her feminist interpretation, Karabulut explores the possibilities of (female) self-determination within a closed system. GIANNI SCHICCHI, on the other hand, follows the tradition of commedia dell'arte, placing humans at the centre as players and greedy deceivers. With her keen sense of timing and a captivating ensemble, Karabulut reveals the bizarre depths of a hypocritical family gathering once again around the deathbed of their patriarch.

Suor Angelica / Gianni Schicchi

Deutsche Oper Berlin

In the 19th century, Penzance was one of the most idyllic and peaceful little towns on the British isle. Pirates... here?! The kings of English operetta, the writing duo Gilbert & Sullivan, had a knack for humorously subverting their audience’s expectations. With this satirical and subversive “recipe,” they created one hit after another.

The rather absurd plot of The Pirates of Penzance would have done proud even to the British humor of Monty Python back in the 19th century: A young man is not trained as a pilot, but instead apprenticed to the Pirates of Penzance because his hard-of-hearing governess confuses the words “pilot” and “pirate.” Upon turning 21, Frederic should have completed his apprenticeship—if only he hadn’t been born in a leap year! According to pirate logic, that makes him just five years old… From this existential dilemma unfolds a love story between the young pirate apprentice and Mabel, a young lady from the British military aristocracy..

The Pirates of Penzance

Volksoper Wien

There are few operas, which from the very first bar endure such intense pressure, few in which the temperature swings from ice-cold calculation to overheating in mere seconds. And scarcely any in which private entanglement and personal tragedy are so interwoven with political attitudes in historical accuracy. Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca has electrified audiences since its world premiere. The shock wave emitted by the opera was so strong that decades later many reactions still tend to point to the bewilderment and overpowering of those affected rather than the qualities of the piece itself and its love triangle surrounding the singer Floria Tosca, the painter Mario Cavaradossi and the chief of police Baron Scarpia. The artistic world of the protagonist couple, Tosca and Cavaradossi, is no colouristic ingredient here, but rather defines the profile of its characters – it justifies Tosca’s eccentricity, just as it does Cavaradossi’s liberality and also explains the singer’s pronounced self-confidence: The heroine of the stage becomes a heroine in real life. Scarpia’s appearance must also be understood as the emergence of his unleashed totalitarian power, and his sexual sadism still today as one of the truly scandalous moments of opera literature. The historical detail is certainly no staffage, but rather forms the, “precondition of the conflict between the representatives of two opposing social systems” (Norbert Christen) in a time of crisis. With his mish-mash of musical recognition motifs, which, with the exception of the rigid Scarpia chords, sensitively adjust to the situations, Puccini achieves a new dimension of through-composed operatic structure – in the intensive cohesion of the score, he nevertheless creates islands in which reflection compacts itself into moments of the highest possible arioso intensity.

TOSCA

Max-Joseph-Platz

Meet Cio-Cio-San — known as Madama Butterfly — a faithful but doomed geisha in love with B.F. Pinkerton. Everyone but Butterfly knows the Navy lieutenant will break her heart and ruin her life.

Opera newcomers will be swept away by the familiar melodies, gorgeous costuming, and colorful sets — and seasoned opera fans will thrill at this beautiful, thoughtful production from Lyric Opera’s own Matthew Ozawa that brings new dimension to an age-old story.

EPSG:4326

Madama Butterfly

Lyric Opera House

Podcast link: https://youtu.be/4hagYvrYbuM

The Artelize Podcast and Kasper Holten - Pedefining Opera for the modern world

Podcast link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d36M5Hi6O80

The Artelize Podcast - A legacy of innovation in Opera: Celebrating Marc A. Scorca

Podcast link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59E40S_EQSY

The Artelize Podcast: A love letter that was never sent

Podcast link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THv6htilWtI

The Artelize Podcast and Adolfo Corrado: Mediterranean flavors, opera and social media

La Traviata is set in the world of Parisian high society. This popular opera tells the story of the courtesan, Violetta Valéry: her loves and her sad fate. It is based on the dramatic adaptation of the romantic novel, "La Dame aux Camélias" by Alexandre Dumas fils, modeled by the author on the high-class mistress, Marie Duplessis. Giuseppe Verdi then took the story, making its heroine a contemporary woman, and writing an innovative opera in which he raised the role of the music itself to that of expressing the story's emotions. Starting with "Libiamo ne' lieti calici", which has become a well-known, staple tune of gala concerts, the work features numerous other famous songs, such as Violetta's most technically demanding aria, "Ah, fors'è lui-sempre libera", in the prelude foretelling tragedy, and Germont's "Di Provenza il mar, il suol".

La Traviata

New National Theatre

Considered too realistic at its premiere in 1853, La Traviata remains one of the essential operas in the lyric repertoire. At the end of the first act, Violetta proclaims sempre libera (always free): is this a feminist plea ahead of its time or a tragic illusion? From the ballroom to the confines of the sanatorium, Verdi infuses his masterpiece with ardent music, sometimes breathless, but constantly seeking to free itself from conventions to achieve authentic beauty. Silvia Paoli, one of the great directors of our time, dares a powerful and virtuoso dramaturgical gesture, in total osmosis with the direction of Roderick Cox who brings this iconic score to incandescence, ideally served by the solar soprano of Ruzan Mantashyan and the very remarkable tenor Omer Kobiljak.

Opéra Comédie

Storm and thunder, unbridled passion, incest and divine wrath - all of this is already brewing in the first bars of the orchestral prelude to DIE WALKÜRE and gives a hint of what is to follow. In DIE WALKÜRE, the first day of the stage festival play DER RING DES NIBELUNGEN, Wagner focuses on the generation of Wotan's descendants: On the sibling pair Siegmund and Sieglinde, who, after many years of separation, meet fatefully and fall in love with each other. And on the Valkyries, Brünnhilde and her eight sisters, whose task it is to bring the heroes fallen in battle to Valhalla. When Wotan's wife Fricka learns of the incestuous relationship between Siegmund and Sieglinde, she demands that Wotan put an end to it. So Wotan orders his favourite daughter Brünnhilde to overthrow Siegmund in his battle against his rival Hunding. But Brünnhilde protects Siegmund against Wotan’s command. As punishment, Wotan puts Brünnhilde into a deep sleep and ignites a circle of fire around her, which only one without fear can pass through...

Die Walküre

Cologne Opera

A trail of violence runs through the cursed dynasty of the Atrides long before this opera begins: Elektra's grandfather fed his own sons to his brother, her father Agamemnon sacrificed Elektra's sister Iphigenia, the desperate mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisth slaughtered Agamemnon with an axe in the bath. The children cannot find peace either: Elektra cannot mourn, desperate and raw, she dwells on her hatred. Like must be repaid in kind, the murderous mother and her lover must die. While her sister Chrysotemis refuses to join her, her brother Orest is to take vengeance for their beloved father: The next generation picks up the axe...

Elektra

German Oper am Rhein

Opera Bohemia, Scotland’s professional touring company, returns with Strauss’s sparkling comic masterpiece, Die Fledermaus — a riotous evening of mischief, mistaken identities, and irresistible melodies. Director John Wilkie and designer Alisa Kalyanova transport this hilarious tale of revenge at a lavish party from Austria to Scotland! A star-studded cast includes Scottish favourite Catriona Clark, former Scottish Opera Emerging Artists Laura Margaret Smith and Ross Cumming, and American baritone Whitaker Mills, who recently made his debut at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Featuring the Opera Bohemia Ensemble conducted by Alistair Digges for some performances and accompanied by piano and violin for others, this is operetta at its most entertaining — fast-paced, funny, and full of charm. Sung in English.

Die Fledermaus

Dumfries Campus - University of the West of Scotland (UWS)

Eastgate Theatre

Lossiemouth Town Hall

National Trust for Scotland

Rothesay Academy Joint Campus

The Old Kirk

The Gaiety Theatre

St John's Renfield Church

Perth Concert Hall

Artistic Director Elisabeth Linton and Principal Conductor Marie Jacquot lead a new production of Richard Strauss’s lavish opera.

In Der Rosenkavalier, satire, comedy, melancholy, and romance merge with dazzling music. The Royal Danish Opera’s Artistic Director, Elisabeth Linton, stages the production, with Principal Conductor Marie Jacquot leading the orchestra.

Der Rosenkavalier

Royal Danish Opera

In honeyed tones, Lord and Lady Macbeth reveal their passionate and bizarre emotions to us. But behind this beauty there lurks an abyss, which Verdi unveils with one of the cruelest dramas in the history of world literature. In their struggle to seize power and retain it once it has been usurped, Macbeth and his lady commit one murder after another. The unwavering nature of their desire imbues their love with a radicality that would have been unthinkable on the operatic stage before this work. “The subject matter of this opera is neither political nor religious: it is fantastic,” wrote Verdi and brought Shakespeare’s play closer to a more “romantic” reading. In actual fact, the witches, ghosts and apparitions, the eerie elements, which dominate the musical and dramatic flow, in short the whole world of this opera can be regarded as an outward image of its protagonists’ inner state.

Macbeth

Mozart's opera favorite with music you recognize or quickly become seduced by. Join the search for love and freedom with Tamino and Pamina, Papageno and Papagena and, of course, the Queen of the Night. The Magic Flute, directed by Ole Anders Tandberg, is an imaginative and fast-paced performance that features the greatest hits in opera history – and everyone sings in Swedish!

The Magic Flute

Kungliga Operan

La bohème

San Carlo Theatre

A thriller-like opera set in a time of political unrest and war. At the center are the opera singer Floria Tosca, her lover, the artist and freedom fighter Mario Cavaradossi, and the cruel, all-powerful police chief Scarpia. A triangle drama created for Stubø's minimalist and deeply personal direction.

On the intimate stage of the Folkoperan, Tosca becomes a gripping, intimate study of passion, abuse of power, rebellion and terror. A deadly drama with the opera singer Tosca and Puccini's incomparably beautiful music at its center.

Tosca

The Folk Opera

“No human dies for himself alone. One dies for others. Maybe some die instead of others. Who knows?“ (Sœur Constance in Dialogues des Carmélites). Few operas focus on the confrontation with one’s own mortality as much as Francis Poulenc’s opera about an order of Carmelite nuns in the turmoil of the French Revolution, which premiered in 1957. The story revolves around the young Blanche, who – plagued by severe anxiety since birth – finds shelter in a convent. But the time of security ends abruptly when the Revolutionary Committee breaks up the convent and forbids the community from practicing its rites. The sisters swear themselves to martyrdom, but Blanche’s fear of death drives her to flee. Eventually she manages to overcome herself: As she follows her sisters to the scaffold, her fear is extinguished in the face of death. In her production of this hybrid of thriller, discourse opera and holy mass, director Ewelina Marciniak, known for her feminist readings, focuses on the dynamics of a community of women struggling for communication and humanity in the midst of terror. And even if the supernatural “Salve Regina“ of the Carmelite nuns on the scaffold leaves no doubt that this opera is a fervent profession of faith by the Catholic Poulenc, the nuns’ willingness to make sacrifices raises questions: where are the boundaries between solidarity, faith and fundamentalism? How lonely is it to die in our secularized contemporary world? Under the musical direction of Cornelius Meister, Poulenc’s powerful music becomes a unique event.

Dialogues des Carmélites

Stuttgart Opera

A festive and delightful opera in a critically acclaimed and vividly staged production from Glyndebourne Festival Opera.

The old should not meddle in the affairs of the young—this is the moral of Don Pasquale, Donizetti’s witty and exuberant comedy, which satirises arranged marriages and celebrates youthful, genuine love.

Don Pasquale

"Not a pretty sight. Modernity begins."
Christa Wolf on Kleist's Penthesilea
A woman and a man, united by a politically senseless war, obsessed with defeating the other: the Amazon Penthesilea and the Greek Achilles. When Heinrich von Kleist transformed this ancient myth into a play in 1808, he reversed the story's gruesome ending: It wasn't Achilles who slays Penthesilea and then falls in love with the dead woman's body, but Penthesilea who falls in love with Achilles, kills him, and mauls his corpse.
Kleist's tragedy irritated his contemporaries: eroticism and aggression appear interchangeable, women fight like men, hunters become prey, and Penthesilea becomes an animal. This was not how Kleist's contemporaries imagined either antiquity or the theater. It didn't help that the most gruesome scenes weren't shown on stage, but merely reported: Penthesilea was never performed during the author's lifetime. It wasn't until the second half of the 20th century that this idiosyncratic work garnered interest and understanding.

Penthesilea

Staatstheater Hannover

Julies Massenet’s much loved opera Werther moves between ecstasy and resignation, dream and reality, sensual desire and the longing for death. Central to this feverish drama, based on Goethe‘s 1774 epistolary novel, are Werther and his impossible love for Charlotte, who promised her dying mother to marry dependable Albert. Charlotte repeatedly turns Werther down, although she shares his feelings. It ends with Werther taking his life on Christmas Eve.

Werther

Oper Frankfurt

Figaro, the Count’s servant, has become engaged to Susanna, the Countess’s maid. The Count is stalking Susanna. Figaro hatches a plan to put the count in his place. After a “mad day” of disguises, misunderstandings and other comical complications, Figaro gets his Susanna and the Count has no choice but to apologize to the Countess.

The Marriage of Figaro

La traviata –directly translated as »the one who has lost her way«–is, of course, the Parisian courtesan Violetta Valéry. Already dying from an incurable lung disease, she falls in love with Alfredo Germont. Yet her feelings are in conflict with her way of life and all sense of reason; ultimately, her quest for freedom and happiness is defeated by the moral strictures of bourgeois society. When first performed in Venice in 1853, this story was considered scandalous: an opera about a courtesan who dies of tuberculosis and is also modelled on a real-life woman in Parisian society was an outrageous inno-vation for the time. Focusing on the complex relationship between Violetta, her lover Alfredo and his father Giorgio, Giuseppe Verdi created a captivating and fully-rounded character, expressed through music that shifts between lyrical bel canto passages and powerful musico-dramatic outbursts. Director Barbora Horáková Joly places »La traviata« in the dazzling world of 19th-century vaudeville.

Opera events in Ashland next week

Suor Angelica / Gianni Sc...

Deutsche Oper Berlin

The Pirates of Penzance

Volksoper Wien

TOSCA

Bayerische Staatsoper

Madama Butterfly

Lyric Opera of Chicago

The Artelize Podcast and ...

Artelize

The Artelize Podcast - A ...

Artelize

The Artelize Podcast: A l...

Artelize

The Artelize Podcast and ...

Artelize

La Traviata

Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra

La Traviata

Opéra Orchestre National Montpellier

Die Walküre

Oper Köln

Elektra

Deutsche Oper am Rhein

Die Fledermaus

Opera Bohemia

Der Rosenkavalier

Royal Danish Opera

Macbeth

Bayerische Staatsoper

The Magic Flute

Kungliga Operan

La bohème

Teatro di San Carlo

Tosca

Dialogues des Carmélites

Staatsoper Stuttgart

Don Pasquale

Royal Danish Opera

Penthesilea

Staatstheater Hannover

Werther

Oper Frankfurt

The Marriage of Figaro

Volksoper Wien

La traviata

Semperoper Dresden