Lucca, Italy, was the birthplace of Giacomo Puccini in 1858 in an apartment that is now a museum to the last and most famous of generations of Puccini maestros, restored to its Second Empire glory, down to a bed, surrounded by columns, that replicates the one in which Puccini was born.
Tolstoy’s great, complex, genre-busting sprawl “War and Peace” is about many things, including Russian nationalism to the extent that when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, Stalin reached for the work to promote a patriotic defence of the Motherland.
La Forza del Destino was first performed in 1862. Not satisfied, Verdi carried on revising it for years, adding in 1869 the famous sinfonia overture that announces so many of the work’s overwhelming musical themes.
Human relationships boil down to trust and betrayal; power and powerlessness. It’s the story of Hollywood and Harvey Weinstein and it’s the gruelling plot of Tosca.
Tchaikovsky said his aim in creating an opera from Pushkin’s supremely Russian yet universal drama of ill-fated love was to relay “ordinary, simple human feelings” as opposed to lavishly theatrical action.
Hansel and Gretel was originally written by The Brothers’ Grimm in 1912. It is a folk tale, showing how a brother and sister avoid being eaten alive by a witch in the gingerbread house. It is a tale that seems to foreshadow the Third Reich.
Romeo Castellucci at Brussels’ La Monnaie (De Munt in Dutch) opera house takes a real-life sufferer of locked-in syndrome and turns her into the protagonist of Ophee et Eurydice (adapted by Hector Berlioz from Gluck).
The Merry Widow, ENO. Review by Julia Pascal.
This was the first time I had seen this operetta and the idea of Viennese kitsch did not excite me. Director Max Webster clearly shares my antipathy for schlock. His production is a wonderful reframing of the story from a post #MeToo perspective.