Beethoven famously regarded his only opera, Fidelio, as a problem child that cost him dearly, and certainly it took about a decade from 1804-1814 and three distinct tries for him to get to the version that holds the stage today and that opened the Canadian Opera...
The Canadian Opera Company mounted its John Caird staging of Puccini’s La bohème for the third time in a decade October 6 with a performance that was endearing if not on opening night as emotionally affective as it might have been. A co-production with Houston Grand...
Wayne Gooding provides an overview of the existing gender inequalities on the podium, and shines a spotlight on Tapestry Opera’s Women in Musical Leadership program – a three-year conducting program designed to nurture the next generation of women and non-binary conductors. This text was originally published in the Spring 2023 print version of Opera Canada magazine.
On paper, the Canadian Opera Company’s Pomegranate, the opera about lesbian love and loss was intriguing and appealing; it had its world premiere on June 2 at the COC Theatre on Front Street. A plot line that shifts between ancient Pompeii as Vesuvius erupts and a...
The Orpheus myth has played a prominent role in opera history, from Monteverdi’s Orfeo of 1607, the oldest opera still in the repertoire, right up to American composer Matthew Aucoin’s reworking of the myth in Eurydice, first staged in Los Angeles in 2020, then seen...
The late American musicologist Joseph Kerman famously dubbed Puccini’s Tosca “that shabby little shocker,” though his pithy characterization is actually the opening salvo of a critical assault on the composer’s final opera, Turandot. Kerman had already had his way...
Verdi’s Macbeth, which opened the Canadian Opera Company’s spring season April 28, is a challenging piece. It premiered in Florence in 1847 but was then revised for Paris in 1865 with significant cuts and additions. It’s mainly the later version we see today, which...
Luigi Cherubini’s Médée is the only opera from the Paris of the French Revolution to retain a place in the modern repertoire. It premiered in March 1797 in a transitional political environment as royalists started to regain traction in France while Napoleon was...
“Oscar Wilde’s Salome was not worthy of you…it has a nauseous and sickly atmosphere about it…Wilde’s Salome, and all those who surround her, except that poor creature [John the Baptist], are unwholesome, unclean, hysterical, or alcoholic beings, stinking of...
It’s a shame Marcelo Buscaino wasn’t on hand for the opening-night curtain call of the Canadian Opera Company’s revival of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro January 27 because he surely deserves some credit for the success of a performance that had a cheering audience on...
Toronto Operetta Theatre’s December 28 opening of Die Fledermaus was officially sold-out, the capacity audience enthusiastic about its hugely entertaining take on Johann Strauss II’s enduring farce. Gustav Mahler, an early admirer who gave the work considerable kudos...
In his 1888 polemic, The Case Against Wagner: A Musician’s Problem, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche cites Bizet’s Carmen as the perfect opera: “With it” he writes, “one bids farewell to the damp north and to all the fog of the Wagnerian ideal.” Beyond its...