Larry Wolff

Larry Wolff is the Silver Professor of History at NYU, the Executive Director of the Remarque Institute at NYU, the Codirector of NYU Florence, and the author of The Singing Turk: Ottoman Power and Operatic Emotions on the European Stage from the Siege of Vienna to the Age of Napoleon. (September 2020)

Fragments of a silk painting from the Astana Tombs, Xinjiang, China, circa 200–800

What China Sounded Like

Listening to China: Sound and the Sino-Western Encounter, 1770–1839

by Thomas Irvine

September 24, 2020 issue

Evelyn Herlitzius as the Nurse and Camilla Nylund as the Empress in Die Frau ohne Schatten, Wiener Staatsoper, Austria, 2019

A Resonant Centenary for Strauss in Vienna

Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s lavish operatic fairy tale of political and social renewal opened exactly a century ago—just as an unprecedented political crisis threatened to subvert the legitimacy of the hundred-year-old Austrian republic. Today, it has a somewhat different resonance for an Austrian republic shaken by scheming politicians.

June 13, 2019

Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall, 1960; photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson

I Feel Pretty

Mass

by Leonard Bernstein, performed by the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, conducted by Louis Langrée, Lincoln Center, New York City, July 17–18, 2018

Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein

by Jamie Bernstein

Leonard Bernstein

by Paul R. Laird

September 27, 2018 issue

Camilla Nylund and Jonas Kaufmann performing Tristan and Isolde, with conductor Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Carnegie Hall, New York City, April 12, 2018

A Longed-For Tristan

The wonder of Tristan in Wagner’s opera is that treacherous though he is, indifferent to friendship and dangerous to everyone, especially the woman he loves, we identify with him and respond to him.

May 5, 2018

Ben Bliss as Ferrando, Amanda Majeski as Fiordiligi, Serena Malfi as Dorabella, and Adam Plachetka as Guglielmo in Mozart's Così fan tutte, 2018

‘Così’ in Coney

The dark engine that drives the opera into such sexually disturbing corners of the psyche is the wager undertaken in daylight and consummated by night, the men betting on the women’s sexual susceptibility.

March 27, 2018

The Mozart family; painting by Johann Nepomuk della Croce, circa 1780–1781

End Notes

Mozart in Vienna: The Final Decade

by Simon P. Keefe

April 5, 2018 issue

A scene from the Handspring Puppet Company’s production of Monteverdi’s The Return of Ulysses, directed by William Kentridge

All the World’s a Stage

The Politics of Opera: A History from Monteverdi to Mozart

by Mitchell Cohen

December 7, 2017 issue

Luca Pisaroni as the Ottoman Sultan Mahomet II and Nino Machaidze as the Greek Christian woman Pamyra in Gioachino Rossini’s The Siege of Corinth at the Rossini Opera Festival, Pesaro, Italy, August 2017

Signor Tambourossini

The Siege of Corinth

an opera by Gioachino Rossini, produced by La Fura dels Baus, at the Rossini Opera Festival, Pesaro, Italy, August 10–19, 2017

October 12, 2017 issue

Wagner on Trial

In Barrie Kosky’s new production of Die Meistersinger, which opened the 2017 Bayreuth Festival, the musical cobbler Hans Sachs has been restyled as his creator Richard Wagner, isolated in the witness box at the Nuremberg Trials, and we the audience have now become the tribunal, passing judgment on him.

August 8, 2017