Larry Wolff

Those Who Live in the Dark

A recent production of The Threepenny Opera recovered the work’s emphasis on subversive anarchism and destructive sexuality. 

Rebel Without a Cause

The Met’s new production of Carmen strips away most of the opera’s Spanish flavor, transferring it to an American world of popcorn and cotton candy.

From A Duel to A Duet

In Jake Heggie’s opera Dead Man Walking, newly staged at the Metropolitan Opera, a conflicted nun ministers to an inmate on death row. 

The Ambivalences of ‘Don Giovanni’

Opera’s most famous libertine, who embodies freedom not only from social and political constraints but from sexuality, religion, and morality itself, has always been a disturbing figure.

The Struggle Over Verdi

The mood of urgency and unease in La Forza del Destino—the opening performance of this year’s Parma Verdi Festival—also hangs over Italy ahead of Sunday’s national elections.

A Halo of Nostalgia

The frivolous charms of Viennese operetta helped preserve a sense of Habsburg identity after the breakup of the empire.

Remember the Designers!

Phantasms of the Opera

The invention of gas illumination offered operagoers in the mid-nineteenth century “a completely new experience of light” that reshaped operatic composition and performance.

What China Sounded Like

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.

I Feel Pretty

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.

‘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.

End Notes

All the World’s a Stage

Signor Tambourossini

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.