The San Francisco Opera's third offering of the fall season, Donizetti's melodic bit of fluff Don Pasquale opened last week at the War Memorial in an amusing staging that also showed a rather cynical ...

Ah, Rossini! He never wrote a melody that he didn’t use over and over again. A bit of a thieving magpie, he borrowed freely from his own work and anyone else whom he admired. The overture to “The ...

On January 15, 1787, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote proudly from Prague to his friend Baron Gottfried von Jacquin: “Here nothing is talked about except Figaro; nothing is played, blown, sung, and ...

It may be that, at least for opera buffa, all you need to put on a great show is a first-rate lead, a good conductor and orchestra, and, above all, a terrific director. The Virginia Opera’s new ...

On the east face of Monte Colodri in Arco (Sarca Valley, Italy) Alessandro Beber and Matteo Pavana have established the multi-pitch rock climb Opera Buffa (270m, 7c+). Beber reports. The east face of ...

With a new opera season starting, at least via streaming or tourism, it might be a good time to ask what opera is. Opera is like the movies. There’s the broad term of movies but within that are dozens ...