opera

We’re back at La Scala for this week’s Sunday Opera (8/16 3:00 p.m.) and their production of Claude Debussy’s “Pelleas et Melisande” which is based on a play by Maurice Maeterlinck with a symbolic story focusing on the doomed love of the title characters.

Join us at the Glyndebourne Festival this week on the Sunday Opera (8/2 3:00 p.m.) for a perennial favorite, Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” which is subtitled “the Mad Day” or “the Day of Follies.”

We’re back at the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden for this week’s Sunday Opera (7/26 3:00 p.m.) and Modest Mussorgsky’s only completed opera “Boris Godunov” which had its world premiere in 1871 after being rejected in 1870 because it had no female roles. Mussorgsky rewrote the opera, and when it was staged, it used the recycled sets and costumes from Pushkin’s play (written in blank verse) which had premiered in 1870.

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.”

Tchaikovsky is best known in operatic circles mostly for three of his eleven operas: “Eugene Onegin,” “Mazeppa,” and “The Queen of Spades.” You’ve heard “Cherevichki,” “Vakula the Smith,” and “The Enchantress” on the Sunday Opera, but on this week’s program (3/24 3:00 p.m.), we’re turning to his second existing opera, “The Oprichnik” from 1874, and it’s hopefully another work with which you aren’t that familiar.

We’re turning to two of Richard Strauss’ lesser-known one-act operas on this week’s Sunday Opera (5/10 3:00 p.m.): “Daphne” and “Feuersnot” (“The Need for Fire” or “Lack of Fire”).

We’re going for Baroque again on this week’s Sunday Opera (5/3 3:00 p.m.) with a forgotten opera that is finally getting some much deserved recognition: Leonard Vinci’s “Artaserse,” an opera that premiered in Rome in 1730.

Beethoven is probably the best known composer of one-and-done when it comes to operas. However, there were others, and on this week’s Sunday Opera (4/26 3:00 p.m.), we’re focusing on one of those: Robert Schumann’s 1850 work “Genoveva" based loosely on an event in the life of Genevieve de Brabant.

Franz Schreker was another composer whose work was censured because of the rise in anti-Semitism in Germany in the early 1930’s, and he went from being hailed as the future of German opera to obscurity. We’ll celebrate the music of Schreker which is said to be a lush mixture of Romanticism, Naturalism, Symbolism, Impressionism, and Expressionism on this week’s Sunday Opera (4/19 3:00 p.m.).

This week’s Sunday Opera (4/12 3:00 p.m.) is turning to the work of a mostly forgotten Czech composer, Pavel Haas through his only opera, written in 1936, “Sarlatan,” “The Charlatan.”