Opera For Everyone

All hands on deck! This episode of Opera for Everyone dives headlong into a leviathan of 21st-century opera: Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick (2010). Adapted from Melville’s classic American novel, this seafaring drama is a gripping operatic meditation on obsession, authority, and the pow ...  Show more

When an entrenched oligarchy and a cynical revolution go to war with one another, what happens to all the people in the middle? Some may be victimized, others silenced, and yet others swept up in the churn of events. In Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète, Jean of Leiden finds himsel ...  Show more

Richard Wagner’s first truly successful opera, set in medieval Rome, sees a young nobleman in love with a young plebeian woman. While this might sound like it’s going to be an operatic love story, it’s quite a different thing entirely: Grand Opera, Wagner-style. Based on a contro ...  Show more

Mac the Knife, terror of the London criminal underworld, is a character paradoxically best known to many as the subject of the upbeat, bubbly eponymous 1955, 1959, and 1960 hit single. However, his fictional roots go much deeper, to a nearly 300-year old opera called The Beggar’s ...  Show more

Can an opera, that most complex of art forms, take you back to childhood?  Unlikely though it might seem, L’Enfant et les Sortilèges (“The Child and the Enchantments”) does just that through the talents of composer Maurice Ravel and writer Colette.  This one-act opera, fantast ...