Italian Opera

We’re off to the Paris Opera for this week’s Sunday Opera (7/5 3:00 p.m.) and a production of one of Handel’s Italian operas “Ariodante” from September of 2025. The source material for “Ariodante” has been used in well over 70 different projects. In the past, we heard one treatment by Giovanni Simone Mayr on the Sunday Opera in his opera “Ginevra di Scozia.” “Ariodante” is a tale of love, betrayal, and redemption, and it explores themes of jealousy, deception, and the triumph of good over evil.

Jakob Beer is the featured composer on this week’s Sunday Opera (6/7 3:00 p.m.) and his forgotten 1824 work entitled “Il crociato in Egitto” (“The Crusader in Egypt”). Of course, the composer is Giacomo Meyerbeer who penned some 16 operas, and “Egitto” is his twelfth opera, the last of what is labeled his “Italian operas.”

We have a bit of a medieval fantasy on this week’s Sunday Opera (4/5 3:00 p.m.) in Giacomo Meyerbeer’s 1817 work “Romilda e Costanza” which deals with the bumpy road to love for the Prince of Provence. This is Meyerbeer’s fourth opera and the first to be composed for an Italian theatre, the Teatro Nuovo in Padua.

One of the most “edited” operas is featured on this week’s Sunday Opera (1/11 3:00 p.m.) in a recording featuring a dream cast featured in a 1966 recording performing the five-act version that’s missing only the ballet – or is it? It’s a tale of lost love, jealousy, and the Spanish Inquisition with Giuseppe Verdi’s 1867 opera “Don Carlo.”

The tragic tale of a headstrong child and an overprotective father who angers the wrong people is the subject of this week’s Sunday Opera (10/12 3:00 p.m.) in the LA Opera’s production of Verdi’s “Rigoletto" starring Quinn Kelsey in the title role.

We’re back at Covent Garden for this week’s Sunday Opera (8/24 3:00 p.m.) and the Royal Opera House production of Puccini’s “Turandot” featuring Sondra Raadvanovsky in the titular role and Seokjong Baek as Calaf.

Victor Hugo’s novel “Angelo, the Tyrant of Padua” has been used for several operatic adaptations with Amilcare Ponchielli’s “La Gioconda” probably being the best known, but on this week’s Sunday Opera (6/8 3:00 p.m.), we’re looking at a different treatment by librettist Angelo Zanardini in Alfredo Catalani’s “Dejanice” which had its premiere in 1883.

Giachino Rossini wrote 39 operas, and unfortunately, only a handful are regularly performed. However, we’re going to look at one of those lesser-known works (number 18 of the 39) on this week’s Sunday Opera (5/11 3:00 p.m.). it’s “Ricciardo e Zoraida” which premiered in Naples in 1818 and is considered by many to be a perfect example of bel canto singing.

We’re turning to another often-overlooked composer on this week’s Sunday Opera (2/2 3:00 p.m.). It’s Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, and the only verismo opera he wrote in his catalogue of approximately fifteen: “I gioielli della Madonna” (“The Jewels of the Madonna”). It caused quite a stir after it premiered in 1911 (in Berlin as “Der Schmuck der Madonna”) because of its themes implying criticism of the Catholic Church and love between a brother and his adopted sister.

We’re showcasing another forgotten composer on this week’s Sunday Opera (1/26 3:00 p.m.) with the first opera in Italian to be performed in Portugal, Francisco Antonio de Almeida’s “La Spinalba, ovvero il Vecchio matto” (“Spinalba, or the Mad Old Man").