Fossilised Figaro
Is there a more extraordinary, more heart-stilling moment in all opera than the finale of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro?…
Fossilised Figaro
Is there a more extraordinary, more heart-stilling moment in all opera than the finale of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro?…
Salieri’s revenge
Magical transformations are a commonplace of opera. We see our heroes turned into animals, trees, statues; witness wild beasts turned…
Shaw hand
When is a rape not a rape? It’s an unsettling question — far more so than anything offered up by…
Show and Tell
There’s no such thing as a tasteful rape scene — or there certainly shouldn’t be. It’s an act of grossest…
Celebrations of song and humanity
‘All my life, always and in every way, I shall have one objective: the good of Hungary and the Hungarian…
Polite pillage
Forget the pollsters and political pundits — English National Opera called it first and called it Right when it programmed…
Falling down
This week, some 200 years since Goya’s ‘The Disasters of War’, almost 80 years after Picasso’s ‘Guernica’, and over 50…
Hit parade
Before the jukebox musical, back when Mamma Mia!, Jersey Boys and Viva Forever! were still dollar-shaped glints in an as-yet-unborn…
From one extreme to another
When is an opera not an opera? How much can you strip and peel away, or extend and graft on…
To hell and back
What a week to stage an opera about art’s power to challenge institutional authority, oppression — even death itself. Orfeo’s…
A cold coming
You can tell a lot about a book from its bibliography. It’s the non-fiction equivalent of skipping to the final…
From the sacred to the secular
Terrorism; East-West diplomacy; nuclear war: John Adams’s operas have poured music into the faultlines of 21st-century global politics, and the…
Screwed up
We all know that ‘They fuck you up your mum and dad’, but nowhere is this more reliably (and violently)…
