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 Read More
Last November, things weren't looking too good for Peter Gelb's Met. The season-opening new production of Tosca had been booed and widely panned, and music director James Levine had made the first of what would turn out to be many health-related cancellations. Doing damage control, Mr. Gelb urged critics and fans to defer judgment. "I Read More
San Franciscans are pleased with their bold taste in opera, suggests a piece in today's San Francisco Chronicle.
Reviewing a telecast of the Met's controversial restaging of Tosca—the one greeted with loud booing in September—Joshua Kosman deems New Yorkers "a big bunch of weenies":
Seriously, this is what passes for a Read More
“Questo giorno di tormenti!” the characters exclaim at the end of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro: “What a day of troubles!”
At this point, Peter Gelb would probably gladly settle for just one day. Instead, his problems, which began opening night, are stretching into the third week of the Metropolitan Opera’s 2009-10 season, the first Read More
On a September evening of the late aughts, Karita Mattila was singing in Tosca at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.
Fifty years from now, the next Edith Wharton, if she could have seen the crowd that gathered to see Ms. Mattila on the evening of Sept. 21, 2009, could easily begin her great novel Read More
“We lost Meryl Streep,” a PR girl told The Observer when we arrived to the opening night of the Metropolitan Opera on Monday, Sept. 21, for a staging of Tosca, which Ms. Streep was expected to attend, but, alas, did not.
Perhaps it had something to do with how the opera has evolved Read More
