The holiday season has always been popular for introducing new works, including many perennial favorites. In Italy, the day after Christmas became especially meaningful to composers and impresarios.Read More
Opera Philadelphia has, of course, spent the last year unable to stage live works in theaters. In response, they started creating original works written for the camera, to be shared and viewed online as part of an ongoing effort to bring a wider range of voices into the repertory.Read More
The celebrated soprano died suddenly a year ago, leaving her fans, including one NPR producer, in grief, but with many fond memories. Read More
Opera fans will have to wait another whole year for live performances at the famed New York house. In a press release Wednesday, the Metropolitan Opera says it plans to reopen on Sept. 27, 2021.Read More
They point to a real estate deal that could drain two-thirds of the American Guild of Musical Artists' financial reserves and a secretive, failed deal with disgraced opera star Plácido Domingo.Read More
While a valiant endeavor, the Metropolitan Opera's new series of steaming concerts can't seem to shake off opera's fusty, aristocratic traditions. Read More
As Spain lifts its national state of emergency, the Liceu opera house in Barcelona finds alternative living things to fill nearly 2,300 seats.Read More
The Central Park Five is an operatic narrative retelling the true story about the five African-American and Latino teenagers wrongly convicted of raping and assaulting a white woman in 1989.Read More
"I never behaved aggressively" towards women, the opera star says, while the performers' union that investigated his alleged behavior attempts to ferret out who provided information to the press.Read More
A listener's guide for the opera-curious includes a little history, a little trash-talk and some gorgeous singing. Read More
When it comes to the Underground Railroad, everyone knows Harriet Tubman. But a new oratorio sheds light on a different, key figure named William Still. Read More
Watch the celebrated opera star deconstruct old Italian love songs with her signature flair, backed by a crack jazz ensemble.Read More
NPR Music staffers Marissa Lorusso and Tom Huizenga give out superlatives for the best moments in music this past year, including a single breath of operatic singing and an epic guitar solo.Read More
A woman had become barely verbal, an effect of dementia. Her daughter, an opera singer, decided to try singing Christmas songs with her, and they reconnected.Read More
His simultaneous dismissal from two of the world's leading opera houses comes after an investigation into allegations of misconduct during a Royal Opera performance in Tokyo.Read More
On her new album, the restless Italian opera star sings virtuoso music composed for Farinelli, the greatest of the baroque castratos.Read More
Despite some very public bumps in his tenure, the head of the largest performing arts organization in the U.S. received a five-year extension to his contract.Read More
Before any opera purists start wringing their hands, let's remember that the 400-year-old art form has proven itself terrifically adaptable and resilient.Read More
The past 10 years in classical music, which this episode of All Songs Considered explores, has been a roller coaster ride of high points and derailments. Hence the dramatic title, "A Decade of Reckoning."Read More
Ten years ago, Costanzo had surgery that threatened to destroy his singing voice. Now the countertenor is starring as a gender-fluid Egyptian pharaoh in a new production by the Metropolitan Opera.Read More
Norman was one of the leading African American opera figures in a time when there were fewer than now. The soprano won four Grammys and the National Medal of Arts.Read More
One of opera's most popular and bankable stars is scheduled to sing at New York's famed opera house next week. But a number of Met employees say that they find the situation untenable.Read More
On her new album, Fire in My Mouth, the Pulitzer-winning composer documents the tragedy behind New York City's 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.Read More
The women — eight singers and a dancer — told The Associated Press that the opera titan tried to pressure them into sexual relationships by offering them jobs.Read More
The Metropolitan Opera suspended, and then fired, Levine after several men came forward with accusations that the conductor had sexually abused them.Read More
Daniels and his husband, Scott Walters, are both accused of drugging and raping a man in Houston in May 2010. Daniels is also being accused of drugging and raping another man in Michigan in 2017.Read More
Based on former federal prosecutor Mark Godsey's book of the same title, the new opera Blind Injustice draws on detailed interviews with exonerees to put America's criminal justice system on trial.Read More
The new opera by Tazewell Thompson and Jeanine Tesori tells the story of a couple in Harlem who are forced to confront their teenage son's sudden death by police violence. Read More
A recent Pop Culture Happy Hour trip to New York took the team to see Rigoletto at the Metropolitan Opera. A jester in a rat pack? We saw it.Read More
The Italian director staged sumptuously visualized operas, which often resembled Renaissance paintings brought to life. On film, he brought Shakespearean and biblical tales to the big screen.Read More
Ron Howard's new Pavarotti film fails to make us feel much for its subject, and does little to bolster the magical, complicated art called opera. Read More
In her U.S. debut as Don Giovanni, Lucia Lucas became the first known trans person to sing a principal role on an American opera stage.Read More
The young composer's opera, which debuted at the Los Angeles Opera, was inspired by her own experience as a survivor of sexual assault.Read More
The warm-voiced, and much admired, singer eschewed the glitzy life of an opera star to concentrate on the art of vocal communication. Read More
The two were arrested Tuesday night in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and are awaiting extradition to Texas. A young singer has accused the pair of drugging and raping him in 2010.Read More
Founded by composer Giuseppe Verdi and funded by royalties from his popular operas, Casa Verdi in Milan opened a century ago as a home for opera musicians in their golden years.Read More
The revered Spanish soprano, who died Saturday, spins out silvery threads of tone in her recordings, the likes of which no one has ever matched.Read More
The resourceful singer is unafraid to bring opera — and his high-flying top notes — to unlikely places, from sixth-grade classrooms to the offices of NPR.Read More
Angela Meade: From the Northwest to Opera Stardom This month, the Northwest native Angela Meade will grace the stage of the Metropolitan Opera in New York in Verdi’s Ernani. […]Read More
Deborah Voigt performing “Annie Get Your Gun” in 2011. Credit CSUF Photos / Flickr You know that old saying, “The show isn’t over til the fat lady sings”? Like […]Read More
