Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Do you listen to opera?

I'm with Bruce. I love opera. My tastes range from Mozart through some Wagner. I have trouble embracing the Ring, as I often feel like the singers are getting in the way of some terrific orchestral writing.

I did come to opera rather late, when I was around 16 or so. I knew the Barber of Seville, but I didn't really know any of the "big" operas. I found a set of LPs mispriced at a record store and they sold them to me for $7.00. A bargain. It was the Sutherland/Pavarotti/Milnes recording of Rigoletto. Well, I was hooked.

I've accompanied many singers over the years, and I've played for operatic rehearsals. It's a lot of fun.

I wonder though, did Rossini ever listen to anything newer than Lohengrin? Most of all, I wonder whether he ever listened to Tristan und Isolde. While I personally don't enjoy listening to whole acts, Donald Francis Tovey said the third act of Tristan was, as a whole, of "overwhelming tragic power".

Also, he said the prelude to Parsifal (~15 minutes) was "one of the clearest examples of the sublime in music since Beethoven".

That is very true. A lot of operatic librettos have ridiculously melodramatic plots. It takes great music and performances to make it come all together into something that is watchable.

I saw this performance live at Covent Garden. It was pretty stunning. But it was so well acted and so powerful that I found it very hard to bear. I don't think I would want to put myself through that again in the near future.

My difficulty with Puccini stems perhaps from the undeserved tragic fates that befall his heroines; while this of course applies to heroines of all eras, Puccini's verismo style, and the "real life" nature of the plots, give these tragedies an unrelieved bleakness. It's undoubtedly powerful, but I don't enjoy misery where there seems nothing positive one can take from it.

The only Puccini opera that I really love is La Fanciulla del West. It has a sense of community that is very touching, and an optimism that seems unique in Puccini.

There is a Tosca story I cannot resist telling. It seems that in one production, the prima donna was terribly abusive to the stagehands. So, for the final performance, instead of a huge pile of featherbeds on which to throw herself, she was met with a trampoline. Perhaps apocryphal, but amusing.