The playwright George Bernard Shaw cited Il Trovatore's “tragic power, poignant melancholy, impetuous vigor, and…sweet and intense pathos that never loses its dignity ,” but about the plot he said, “if it allowed you to think for a moment, it would crumble into absurdity.”
But the music is powerful, and this week we feature for Act Two a cast from one of opera's golden ages, the 1950's, Zinka Milanov, Fedora Barbieri, Jussi Bjoerling and Leonard Warren. Then Milanov and Bjoerling sing the love duet from Act One of Tosca, and Bjoerling sings a Swedish folk song, Trollsjon, The Enchanted Lake.
