Mozart called his opera Don Giovanni an opera buffa, and his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte called it a “dramma giocoso” (playful drama), but the work’s ending, with its protagonist being swallowed by the earth after the statue of a man he killed comes to dinner and implores him to repent, has seemed to many stage directors of the past two centuries to define the opera as a piece … [Read more...]
Beautiful new ‘Figaro’ charms at Palm Beach Opera
A good production of Le Nozze di Figaro that doesn’t get in the way of its music can demonstrate to its audience this work’s surprising modernity, even rooted as it is in the late 18th century. It’s Mozart who speaks to us most clearly from his 1786 vantage point, writing a kind of operatic music that lives and breathes with its characters, a music that mirrors their manic … [Read more...]