Once or Twice a Fortnight - Page 2

OK, so maybe this is too obscure a reference (do you remember the Sergio Leone classic?)
...

Related Thread: Solicitation of Interest – March Madness, OperaLively-style


A few ...

For the next few OTF’s, I plan on presenting three operas by the Czech-Austrian-American composer Erich ...

My OTF opera today fits within the broad subject matter of the Passion and Lent. Salome, the Daughter ...

This is a great time of year: Valentine’s Day is coming soon, and there are a number of festivals all ...

Related threads: Favorite Opera Conductors

According to Robert Poliqun’s on-line Mozart ...

In this final installment of my series on Il Trittico, I wanted to discuss the discography of the work, ...

This is the third instalment of our look at Puccini’s Trittico. I plan s fourth instalment next week ...

For my next three posts, I will be discussing Puccini’s set of three one-act operas Il Trittico (literally, ...

We continue our look at the three operas of Puccini’s Trittico, and now arrive to probably the most ...

Remembrance Day (also known as Poppy Day or Armistice Day) is a memorial day observed in Europe and ...

Related Links:

Trick or Treat
This Day in Music History - November 14, 1954

Let me squeeze in a third OTF for October, a Hallowe’en salute to Opera, if you will.

Hallowe'en and All Saints Day go together hand in hand – the ghouls and goblins of one feast foreshadowing the other’s remembrance of the departed. Who believes in ghosts and who doesn’t feeds the obsession with contacting the spirits of beyond, and creates a veritable cottage industry of mediums, be they psychic, or charlatans.
...

In one of my earliest OTF’s, I mused about opera as “an escape from the everyday” – somehow our problems always seem so much less important when compared to the tragic circumstances often encountered in Opera.

Another aspect of the escape factor has to do with the larger-than-life locations, situations and stories: from Valhalla to Egypt of the Pharaohs, passing through the regal courts of far away lands.

But what of opera set in the context of everyday life?
...

Idomeneo, re di Creta ossia Ilia e Idamante (Italian for Idomeneo, King of Crete, or, Ilia and Idamante; usually referred to simply as Idomeneo, K. 366) is an Italian language opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The libretto was adapted by Giambattista Varesco from a French text by Antoine Danchet, which had been set to music by André Campra as Idoménée in 1712. Mozart and Varesco were commissioned in 1780 by Karl Theodor, Elector of Bavaria for a court carnival. He probably chose the subject, though it might have been Mozart. ...

Rekated:

Waves of Sound: Debussy's La Mer

Last week, August 22nd, Claude Debussy would have turned 150. This is the third of a serioes of OTF posts dedicated to some of Debussy's works. After art songs, and Pelléas et Mélisande, here is his most famous orchestral piece.
Ah, La mer...
...

This coming August 22^nd, Claude Debussy would have turned 150. I plan to mark the occasion with a trio of OTF posts this month, one featuring a performance of Pelléas et Mélisande, one surveying some of my favourite recordings of Debussy’s seminal triptych La Mer and today’s, a look at some of Debussy’s art songs.
...

Today's OTF post, as teased in my last musing is the grand daddy of French operas, Faust by Charles ...

Related:
La connexion MET-Montréal
This Day in Music History - 21 September 1963

Today’s OTF is about another French opera written after a Goethe novel, and the unlikely story of a Montrealer who in spite of the odds became a world-renowned conductor at one of the most famous opera houses in the world. ...

Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (in English, The Sorrows of Young Werther) is a loosely autobiographical novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, first published in 1774 and later revised in 1787. Werther was an important novel of the Sturm und Drang period in German literature, and influenced the later Romantic literary movement.
...