This week's opera comes from London's Royal Opera House and features the first opera in Wagner's "Ring Cycle," "Das Rheingold" featuring Christopher Purves as Alberich and Christopher Maltman as Wotan. The opera, performed in one 150 minute act, will be followed by more music featuring "northern" heroes (and an anti-hero) from Uumo Kalmi, Jean Sibelius, and Edvard Grieg,.

The Sunday Opera heads off to France for the Lille Opera production of Mozart's "Don Giovanni" featuring Timothy Murray in the title role. After the opera, we'll sample three more treatments of the Don Juan legend.

This week's Sunday Opera begins with Purcell's setting of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" as "The Fairy Queen" and is followed by three (and a bit) treatments of Shakespeare's "The Tempest finishing with Paul Moravec's Pulitzer Prize winning Tempest Fantasy.

This week's opera comes from Vienna once again and features Strauss' metaphysical opera about the otherworldly Empress who must achieve a shadow (a child) or she will die and her husband will turn to stone.

This week we're heading to the Vienna State Opera's production of "Guillaume Tell" featuring Roberto Frontali in the title role. The opera will be followed by more music of Rossini.

This week's opera is Busoni's "Doktor Faust," a seldomly done work featuring Dietrich Fischer-Deskau as the narrator and Dietrich Henschel in the title role.

It took 80 years for Zemlinsky's fairy tale opera to be performed after it was suppressed by an unscrupulous conductor. Gorge is a dreamer who dreams of a better life that comes true for a happy ending.

This week's opera is a 1971 performance of Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor" featuring a cast that includes Joan Sutherland, Luciano Pavarotti, Sherill Milnes, Nicolai Ghiaurov, and Heugette Turangeau.

This week's opera is Humperdinck's 1875 "fairytale" opera about a Goose-Girl who is in the control of a witch, but when that spell is broken, she doesn't live happily ever after even though she has found the love of a prince.

Most people associate Dvorak with his opera "Rusalka," but he wrote nine other operas, and on this week's program, we'll be listening to the third opera he wrote about the 8th century Polish princess named Vanda who saved Poland from a German invasion.